Comment by Riaz Haq on March 1, 2022 at 7:55am

Foreign students of color fleeing #Ukraine say they face segregation, #racism at border. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/28/europe/students-allege-racism-ukrain...

They allow 30 Indians only after 500 Ukrainians get in. To get to this border you need to walk 4 to 5 kilometers from the first checkpoint to the second one. Ukrainians are given taxis and buses to travel, all other nationalities have to walk. They were very racist to Indians and other nationalities,'" the 22-year-old from Mumbai told CNN.
She added that she witnessed violence from the guards to the students waiting at the Ukrainian side of the Shehyni-Medyka border.
Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 are no longer allowed to leave the country, but that decree does not extend to men who are foreign nationals.
Ijantkar says she saw Indian men were left in queues for long hours along with other non-Ukrainian nationalities.
"They were very cruel. The second checkpoint was the worst. When they opened the gate for you to cross to the Ukrainian border, you stay between the Ukraine and Poland, the Ukrainian army don't allow Indian men and boys to cross when you get there. They only allowed the Indian girls to get in. We had to literally cry and beg at their feet. After the Indian girls got in, the boys were beaten up. There was no reason for them to beat us with this cruelty," Ijantkar said.
"I saw an Egyptian man standing at the front with his hands on the rails, and because of that one guard pushed him with so much force and the man hit the fence, which is covered in spikes, and he lost consciousness," she said.
"We took him outside to give him CPR. They just didn't care and they were beating the students, they didn't give two hoots about us, only the Ukrainians," she added.
CNN contacted the Ukrainian army in light of the allegations of violence, but did not immediately hear back.

-------------

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, foreign students attempting to leave the country say they are experiencing racist treatment by Ukrainian security forces and border officials.

One African medical student told CNN that she and other foreigners were ordered off the public transit bus at a checkpoint between Ukraine and Poland border.
They were told to stand aside as the bus drove off with only Ukrainian nationals on board, she says.
Rachel Onyegbule, a Nigerian first-year medical student in Lviv was left stranded at the border town of Shehyni, some 400 miles from Ukraine's capital, Kyiv.

She told CNN: "More than 10 buses came and we were watching everyone leave. We thought after they took all the Ukrainians they would take us, but they told us we had to walk, that there were no more buses and told us to walk."
"My body was numb from the cold and we haven't slept in about 4 days now. Ukrainians have been prioritized over Africans -- men and women -- at every point. There's no need for us to ask why. We know why. I just want to get home," Onyegbule told CNN in a telephone call Sunday as she waited in line at the border to cross into Poland.

Onyegbule says she eventually got her exit document stamped on Monday morning around 4.30 a.m. local time.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 3, 2022 at 9:59pm

Opinion | Ukraine news coverage exposes racist biases in Western media - The Washington Post


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/28/ukraine-coverage...


By H.A. Hellyer
February 28, 2022 at 12:42 p.m. EST

H.A. Hellyer, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar, is a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and Cambridge University.


“This double standard is so evident in how we as Westerners engage in intl relations…we dehumanize non-White populations, diminishing their importance, and that leads to one thing: the degrading of their right to live in dignity.”

------------------


“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades,” Charlie D’Agata, a CBS correspondent in Kyiv, told his colleagues back in the studio. “You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine has generated an inspiring wave of solidarity around the world, but for many — especially non-White observers — it has been impossible to tune out the racist biases in Western media and politics.

D’Agata’s comments generated a swift backlash — and he was quick to apologize — but he was hardly the only one. A commentator on a French news program said, “We’re not talking about Syrians fleeing bombs of the Syrian regime backed by Putin; we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” On the BBC, a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine declared, “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair ... being killed every day.” Even an Al Jazeera anchor said, “These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East,” while an ITV News reporter said, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, Third World nation; this is Europe.”

British pundit Daniel Hannan joined the chorus in the Telegraph. “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone,” he wrote.

The implication for anyone reading or watching — particularly anyone with ties to a nation that has also seen foreign intervention, conflict, sanctions and mass migration — is clear: It’s much worse when White Europeans suffer than when it’s Arabs or other non-White people. Yemenis, Iraqis, Nigerians, Libyans, Afghans, Palestinians, Syrians, Hondurans — well, they are used to it.

The insults went beyond media coverage. A French politician said Ukrainian refugees represent “high-quality immigration.” The Bulgarian prime minister said Ukrainian refugees are “intelligent, they are educated. ... This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

It’s as if, in our anger and horror at the scenes of Russia’s aggression, we are incapable of recognizing a simple fact: We’ve seen this before.

A Vanity Fair special correspondent denied precisely that in a tweet: “This is arguably the first war we’ve seen (actually seen in real-time) take place in the age of social media, and all of these heart-wrenching images make Russia look utterly terrible.”

The tweet was erased — like the experiences of many who have documented the horrors of war in recent decades on social media and beyond.

Putin’s military also intervened ferociously in Syria, backing a murderous regime. That war unleashed a level of mass death, suffering, destruction and displacement not yet seen in Ukraine — but the West’s response was far less empathetic. The same can be said of the U.S. invasions and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the catastrophic Saudi-led war in Yemen; the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 7, 2022 at 8:20am

How the #US Raced to Arm #Ukraine Against #Russia. The United States has walked to the edge of direct conflict with Russia in an operation that is reminiscent of the #Berlin airlift of 1948-49, but far more complex. #NATO - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/us/politics/us-ukraine-weapons.html


On a snowy tarmac at Amari Air Base in northern Estonia on Sunday morning, pallets of rifles, ammunition and other weapons were being loaded onto one of the largest cargo planes in the world, an Antonov AN-124, belonging to the Ukrainian air force. It is an artifact of the Cold War, built and purchased when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.

Now it is being turned back against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, part of a vast airlift that American and European officials describe as a desperate race against time, to get tons of arms into the hands of Ukrainian forces while their supply routes are still open. Scenes like this, reminiscent of the Berlin airlift — the famed race by the Western allies to keep West Berlin supplied with essentials in 1948 and 1949 as the Soviet Union sought to choke it off — are playing out across Europe.

In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military cargo planes so they can make the trip by land to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities. So far, Russian forces have been so preoccupied in other parts of the country that they have not targeted the arms supply lines, but few think that can last.

But those are only the most visible contributions. Hidden away on bases around Eastern Europe, forces from United States Cyber Command known as “cybermission teams” are in place to interfere with Russia’s digital attacks and communications — but measuring their success rate is difficult, officials say.


In Washington and Germany, intelligence officials race to merge satellite photographs with electronic intercepts of Russian military units, strip them of hints of how they were gathered, and beam them to Ukrainian military units within an hour or two. As he tries to stay out of the hands of Russian forces in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine travels with encrypted communications equipment, provided by the Americans, that can put him into a secure call with President Biden. Mr. Zelensky used it Saturday night for a 35-minute call with his American counterpart on what more the U.S. can do in its effort to keep Ukraine alive without entering into direct combat on the ground, in the air or in cyberspace with Russian forces.

Mr. Zelensky welcomed the help so far, but repeated the criticism that he has made in public — that the aid was wildly insufficient to the task ahead. He asked for a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a shutdown of all Russian energy exports and a fresh supply of fighter jets.

It is a delicate balance. On Saturday, while Mr. Biden was in Wilmington, Del., his National Security Council staff spent much of the day trying to find a way for Poland to transfer to Ukraine a fleet of well-used, Soviet-made MIG-29 fighter jets that Ukrainian pilots know how to fly. But the deal is contingent on giving Poland, in return, far more capable, American-made F-16s, an operation made more complicated by the fact that many of those fighters are promised to Taiwan — where the United States has greater strategic interests.

Polish leaders have said there is no deal, and are clearly concerned about how they would provide the fighters to Ukraine and whether doing so would make them a new target of the Russians. The United States says it is open to the idea of the plane swap.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 8, 2022 at 11:32am

Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team | Salon.com


https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-ba...


Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden's pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.

Nor do they know that from 2003 to 2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.

You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying "Fuck the EU" during a February 2014 phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.


During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be plotting to replace or undermine elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for favoring former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko to take over as prime minister, instead of the U.S. first choice, Artseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed took power after Yanukovych was ousted about three weeks later.

The "Fuck the EU" call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call's authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies.

Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine's elected government — and America's responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorestcountry in Europe.



In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan — co-founder of The Project for a New American Century — and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.

Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. How much more trouble could she stir up as the No. 3 official at Biden's State Department? We'll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her nomination.


Joe Biden should have learned from Barack Obama's mistakes that appointments like this matter. In his first term, Obama allowed his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and military and CIA leaders held over from the Bush administration to ensure that endless war trumped his message of hope and change.



Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, ended up presiding over indefinite detentions without charges or trials at Guantánamo Bay, an escalation of drone strikes that killed innocent civilians, a deepening of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, a self-reinforcing cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism, and disastrous new wars in Libya and Syria.


With Clinton out and new personnel in top spots in his second term, Obama began to take charge of his own foreign policy. He started working directly with Russia's President Vladimir Putin to resolve crises in Syria and other hotspots. Putin helped avert an escalation of the war in Syria in September 2013 by negotiating the removal and destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped Obama negotiate an interim agreement with Iran that led to the JCPOA nuclear deal.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 8, 2022 at 11:33am

Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team | Salon.com


https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-ba...




But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping, the neocons launched a campaign to brand Obama as "weak" on foreign policy and remind him of their power.

With editorial help from Nuland, Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic article entitled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire," proclaiming that "there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters." Kagan called for an even more aggressive foreign policy to exorcise American fears of a multipolar world it can no longer dominate.



Obama invited Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons' muscle-flexing pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.

The neocons' coup de grace against Obama's better angels came with Nuland's 2014 coup in debt-ridden Ukraine, a strategic candidate for NATO membership right on Russia's border.

When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a tantrum.

Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.


The EU trade agreement was to open Ukraine's economy to European imports, but without a reciprocal opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine's economic woes.



The muscle for Nuland's $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok's neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the "big three"opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and "other scum" during World War II.


After protests in Kyiv's Maidan Square turned into battles with police in February 2014, Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity government and hold new elections by the end of the year.



But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sector militia marched on and invaded the parliament building, a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and his members of parliament fled for their lives.

Facing the loss of its most vital strategic naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia accepted the overwhelming result (a 97% majority, with an 83% turnout) of a referendum in which Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, of which it had been a part from 1783 to 1954.


The majority Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine, triggering a bloody civil war between U.S.-backed and Russian-backed forces that still rages in 2021.



U.S.-Russian relations have never recovered, even as the two nations' nuclear arsenals still pose the greatest single threat to our existence. Whatever Americans believe about the civil war in Ukraine and allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we must not allow the neocons and the military-industrial complex they serve to deter Biden from conducting vital diplomacy with Russia to steer us off a suicidal path toward nuclear war.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 8, 2022 at 11:35am

Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team | Salon.com


https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-ba...




Nuland and the neocons, however, remain committed to an ever-more debilitating and dangerous Cold War with Russia and China to justify a militarist foreign policy and record Pentagon budgets. In a July 2020 Foreign Affairs article entitled "Pinning Down Putin," Nuland absurdly claimed that Russia presents a greater threat to "the liberal world" than the Soviet Union posed during the old Cold War.



Nuland's narrative rests on an utterly mythical and ahistorical narrative of Russian aggression and U.S. good intentions. She pretends that Russia's military budget, which is one-tenth of America's, is evidence of "Russian confrontation and militarization" and calls on the U.S. and its allies to counter Russia by "maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses to protect against Russia's new weapons systems."


Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days as U.S. ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush's second term, she has been a supporter of NATO's expansion all the way up to Russia's border. She calls for"permanent bases along NATO's eastern border." We have pored over a map of Europe, but we can't find a country called NATO with any borders at all. Nuland sees Russia's commitment to defending itself after successive 20th-century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to NATO's expansionist ambitions.



Nuland's militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and "liberal interventionists," which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.

As Obama learned too late, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time can, with a shove in the wrong direction, unleash years of intractable violence, chaos and international discord. Victoria Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden's State Department, waiting to sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama's second-term diplomacy.



MEDEA BENJAMIN
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran" and "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection."

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 8, 2022 at 8:53pm

OPINION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders.
Feb. 21, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nato.html

On May 2, 1998, immediately after the Senate ratified NATO expansion, I called George Kennan, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union. Having joined the State Department in 1926 and served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, Kennan was arguably America’s greatest expert on Russia. Though 94 at the time and frail of voice, he was sharp of mind when I asked for his opinion of NATO expansion.

I am going to share Kennan’s whole answer:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

“We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.

“Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 9, 2022 at 10:07am

Pakistani billionaire from Kyiv urges world to support Ukraine

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2038856/world

Mohammad Zahoor owns real estate and steel businesses in conflict-ridden nation

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani billionaire, who before the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a major figure in the Ukrainian media and steel industries, has called on the international community to support Kyiv, as Russian forces step up attacks on cities and nuclear facilities.

Born in the Pakistani megapolis Karachi in 1955, Mohammad Zahoor was 19 when he traveled to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union, to study metallurgy on a Pakistan steel mills scholarship. After completing his master’s degree, he returned to his home country to work in the steel sector.

Years later, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart, and Ukraine became an independent state in 1991, Zahoor went back to participate in the country’s transition into a capitalist economy. He invested in the steel sector and established ISTIL Group, a conglomerate operating in real estate, manufacturing, and coal enrichment.

He also became involved in Ukraine’s media and entertainment scene, and in 2009 bought Kyiv Post, the oldest English-language newspaper in Ukraine, which he owned for nearly a decade, gaining the title of “Pakistani press prince of Kyiv.”

Fluent in the region’s languages and familiar with its politics, the billionaire told Arab News in an exclusive interview why he was calling on the world to support Ukrainians in the war that began on Feb. 24, and which has forced an estimated 2 million people to flee the country in under two weeks.

“This is time, actually, for us not to keep quiet. We have to take sides,” Zahoor said.

“I am openly taking the side of Ukraine because after seeing (reports from) Western, Ukrainian and Russian media, I can see and decide who is telling the truth. This is the time actually for everyone to speak up for Ukraine otherwise every big country is going to swallow its next-door neighbor.”

Married to Kamaliya, the Ukrainian pop star and former Mrs. World beauty pageant titleholder, Zahoor has left Kyiv with their two daughters. His wife had joined them a few days after their departure because she initially wanted to stay in her country, but the situation had become increasingly dangerous.

“It’s more than 10 days that civilians (have been) bombarded; the nuclear plant has been targeted. I think we are in the worst crisis in the world since the Second World War,” Zahoor said.

He said the shelling of nuclear facilities by Russian forces posed a considerable danger to the world.

The Russians have reportedly captured Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after attacking it overnight Friday, which started at least one fire, raising widespread concerns that a meltdown happened and that the consequences would likely be much worse than Chernobyl.

“We are in the middle of Europe, in fact. If something happens to those nuclear power plants, and Ukraine has got 15 of those ...  The nuclear power plant which was shelled is six times more powerful than the Chernobyl plant. The Russian equipment, I must say, they are not very precise. So, they’re sending 10 rockets in order to get one to the destination.”

As international sanctions followed Russia’s invasion, aiming to cut Moscow off from the world’s financial arteries, Zahoor said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called for the world’s intervention before the violence broke out.

“I think Europe has done much (less) than they should have done. Not only EU, but America and UK as well. They have supported all the way, first by words, then by sending those stinger or javelin missiles and that’s it,” he added.

Now, as sanctions are underway, the damage has reportedly already been done to the whole region. 

Zahoor said the war may have consequences for Russia similar to the fallout from the Soviet-Afghan war from 1979 to 1989, which drastically weakened the Russian military and economy. That defeat in Afghanistan was one of the major reasons for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Ukraine is going to be the next Afghanistan for Russia,” he said. “I don’t know how many years they are going to be in Ukraine, but once they are out, they will be broken into pieces.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 11, 2022 at 7:47am

Opinion: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a post-American era

By Fareed Zakaria


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/10/why-the-west-can...

One of the defining features of the new era is that it is post-American. By that I mean that the Pax Americana of the past three decades is over. You can see signs of this everywhere. Consider the fact that the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia — two countries that have depended on Washington for their security for decades — refused to even take phone calls from the U.S. president, according to the Wall Street Journal. Consider as well that Israel (initially) and India have refused to describe Putin’s actions as an invasion, and that all four countries have made it clear they will continue to do business with Russia.

At first glance, it might seem that this is a new global order that is stacked against America. But that’s not necessarily so. The United States remains the world’s leading power, still stronger than all the rest by far. It also benefits from some of the features of this new age. The United States is the world’s leading producer of hydrocarbons. High energy prices, while terrible for countries such as China and Germany, actually stimulate growth in large parts of the United States. Geopolitically, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put Washington’s chief competitor, China, in an awkward position, forcing Beijing to defend Russia’s actions and putting it at odds with the European Union, with which it has tried hard to have close ties.

The greatest strategic opportunity lies with Europe, which could use this challenge to stop being the passive international actor it has been for decades. We now see signs that the Europeans are ready to end the era of free security by raising defense spending and securing NATO’s eastern border. Germany’s remarkable turnaround is a start. If Europe becomes a strategic player on the world stage, that could be the biggest geopolitical shift to emerge from this war. A United States joined by a focused and unified Europe would be a super-alliance in support of liberal values.

But for the West to become newly united and powerful, there is one essential condition: It must succeed in Ukraine. That is why the urgent necessity of the moment is to do what it takes — bearing costs and risks — to ensure that Putin does not prevail.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 11, 2022 at 7:54am

Saudi, Emirati Leaders Decline Calls With Biden During Ukraine Crisis
Persian Gulf monarchies have signaled they won’t help ease surging oil prices unless Washington supports them in Yemen, elsewhere

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-emirati-leaders-decline-calls-wi...


Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden. They both later spoke with Ukraine’s president, and a Saudi official said the U.S. had requested that Prince Mohammed mediate in the conflict, which he said the kingdom is embarking on.

-----------

The White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the U.S. was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices, said Middle East and U.S. officials.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.

“There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,” said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. “It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].”

Mr. Biden did speak with Prince Mohammed’s 86-year-old father, King Salman, on Feb. 9, when the two men reiterated their countries’ longstanding partnership. The U.A.E.’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the call between Mr. Biden and Sheikh Mohammed would be rescheduled.

The Saudis have signaled that their relationship with Washington has deteriorated under the Biden administration, and they want more support for their intervention in Yemen’s civil war, help with their own civilian nuclear program as Iran’s moves ahead, and legal immunity for Prince Mohammed in the U.S., Saudi officials said. The crown prince faces multiple lawsuits in the U.S., including over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

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