Moscow is bewildered by Washington’s warmongering rhetoric, which accompanied President Petro Poroshenko’s visit to the US. Russia has also noted all the Russia-unfriendly opinions voiced recently by hawkish American politicians.
“We’ll keep in mind all signals, including those unfriendly towards Russia, that were heard during the visit of the Ukrainian president to Washington,” commented Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. “We do regret that there are quite influential circles [within the American establishment] that are unambiguously working against the emerging stabilization [in Ukraine],”Ryabkov said.
The Russian politician pointed out that peaceful initiatives agreed upon in Minsk by the Contact Group on Ukraine are at odds with statements made during President Poroshenko’s visit to the US.
“It strengthens us in the opinion that the so-called party of war is strong not only in Kiev,” Ryabkov said, adding that some high-ranking American officials and politicians are willfully ignoring any positive outlook for resolving the crisis in Ukraine.
“They are hypocritically advocating normalization of the situation, while actually impeding this process,”Ryabkov said.
Poroshenko said that the non-lethal supplies promised by the US and other states are sufficient and would help to restore the Ukrainian army to battle-ready status.
“We will receive and have already received everything we need: surveillance, radar, and supervisory and other defensive equipment that will increase the effectiveness of our weapons and help modernize them,”Poroshenko said, adding that non-lethal equipment will come “not only from the US.”
Earlier this year Ukraine received, from various sources, body armor, helmets, army rations, radio sets, uniforms, barbed wire and other supplies.
Also, the US Senate introduced a bill authorizing the Obama administration to supply $350 million worth of sophisticated weapons technology to Kiev in the fiscal year of 2015.
The Ukrainian president was bullish when he returned home, maintaining to the nation that his visit overseas had been a complete success.
Poroshenko stated he had reached a deal with President Obama whereby Washington would more actively participate in the contact between Ukraine and Russia, particularly with President Vladimir Putin. Without this contact with the Russian authorities “there wouldn’t be the ceasefire we currently have,” he said.
Since China fired its first 'official' shot across the Petrodollar bow a year ago, there has been an increasing groundswell of de-dollarization across the world's energy trade (despite Washington's exclamations of 'isolated' non-dollar transactors). The rise of the PetroYuan has not been far from our headlines in the last year, with China increasingly leveraging its rise as an economic power and as the most important incremental market for hydrocarbon exporters, in the Persian Gulf and the former Soviet Union, to circumscribe dollar dominance in global energy - with potentially profound ramifications for America’s strategic position. And now, as AP reports,for the first time in history, China has docked a Navy Destroyer in the Southern Iranian port of Bandar-Abbas - right across the Straits of Hormuz from 'US stronghold-for-now' Bahrain and UAE.
The rise of the PetroYuan has not been far from our headlines in the last year:
China Fires Shot Across Petrodollar Bow: Shanghai Futures Exchange May Price Crude Oil Futures In Yuan
Guest Post: From PetroDollar To PetroYuan – The Coming Proxy Wars
The Rise Of The Petroyuan And The Slow Erosion Of Dollar Hegemony
And now, as AP reports, for the first time in history, China has docked a Navy Destroyer in a Southern Iranian port of Bandar-Abbas - right across the Straits of Hormuz from 'US stronghold-for-now' Bahrain and UAE.
US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin will face an icy reception at the G20 leaders meeting in Brisbane in November if hostilities with neighbouring Ukraine do not ease.
Mr Putin has earned international condemnation in recent months for his country's annexation of the Crimea and its support for separatist Ukrainian rebels in that country's east.
Treasurer Joe Hockey said on Saturday he still expected Mr Putin to attend the November summit and that the door should remain open to dialogue with Russia.
On Sunday, Mr Lew said the question of who attended the summit was a matter to be resolved by the group as a whole, adding that there was "quite a ways between now and November" and that hopefully the situation would improve in the coming months.
But in the event that the situation was not resolved by the time the meeting took place in Brisbane, Mr Lew predicted "President Putin will hear very directly what he is hearing through economic sanctions...which is that Russia's actions are unacceptable".
World leaders gather in New York this week to tackle a host of crises: the violence Islamic State militants are wreaking in Iraq and Syria, the exponential spread of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa and deadlocked negotiations on Iran's nuclear program.
There is little hope the 193-nation U.N. General Assembly will achieve much in the annual five-day marathon of speeches. But on the sidelines, U.S. officials plan to lobby allies for pledges of concrete military assistance to help defeat Islamic State, whose hardline Sunni Islamist fighters have taken over swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said more than 140 heads of state or government will attend the assembly's annual "general debate", which begins on Wednesday and ends Sept. 30. He noted an unusually large number of serious conflicts: in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine.
"The world is facing multiple crises," Ban told reporters.
"All have featured atrocious attacks on civilians, including children," he said. "All have dangerous sectarian, ethnic or tribal dimensions. And many have seen sharp divisions within the international community itself over the response."
U.N. officials and delegates say the top issue for Western and Arab leaders is the rampage of Islamic State militants, who are blamed for a wave of sectarian violence, beheadings and massacres of civilians.
"Together, we will address the horrendous violence in Syria and Iraq, where conflict and governance failures have provided a breeding ground for extremist groups," Ban said.
A second detachment of US forces set to battle the deadly Ebola virus have arrived in Liberia. They land as a weekend lockdown in Sierra Leone to confine the outbreak resulted in finding at least 200 people infected or dead.
The second deployment of 3,000 troops is set to train local employees and establish institutions to help Liberia and other African nations deal with the epidemic that has already left 2,600 people dead in West Africa alone.
"Some American troops came soon [sic] this morning. They arrived with tactical jeeps," a source at Roberts International Airport, near Monrovia, told AFP, without giving more precise data on the number of soldiers.
However, the US announced on Friday that it was scheduling 45 troops to arrive over the weekend.
The operation is being carried out in several stages: first, on Thursday, a plane with equipment and seven soldiers landed in Liberia. Two more cargo planes are to follow. The teams are to set up a center for Major General Darryl Williams, who will oversee the US mission, training locals and establishing new medical facilities.
The newly-arrived US service members won’t have any contact with patients, according to the Pentagon.
Last week, US President Obama revealed the plan to deploy troops in West Africa, with Liberian leader Ellen Johnson Sirleaf greeting the move, hoping that other countries would follow suit.
It comes on the backdrop of the Sierra Leone government ending the weekend lockdown after finding at least 200 people infected or dead in their homes by Monday, according to AFP.
The UN Security Council called the fatal epidemic a threat to world peace.
The symptoms of the deadly disease are severe muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhea. In many cases, the virus continues by shutting down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.
A three-day lockdown in Sierra Leone aimed at stemming the worst Ebola epidemic on record has identified dozens of new infections will not to be extended despite not reaching everyone in the country.
In one of the most extreme strategies employed since the epidemic began, Sierra Leone ordered its six million residents to stay indoors until Sunday evening as volunteers circulated to educate households as well as isolate the sick and remove the dead.
"Even though the exercise has been a huge success so far, it has not been concluded in some metropolitan cities like Freetown and Kenema," Stephen Gaojia, head of the Emergency Operations Centre that leads the national Ebola response, told Reuters after meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma.
Sierra Leone's government was hoping the lockdown — the most aggressive containment effort yet attempted — would turn the tide against the disease.
Health care workers took advantage of the lockdown to bury 71 dead bodies by Sunday morning, Health Ministry official Dr. Sarian Kamara said on a radio program. The bodies of dead Ebola victims are highly contagious, making safe burials essential to stopping the spread of the disease.
Sundays are usually quiet for residents in Sierra Leone, who go to church or stay at home with many businesses and restaurants closed.
In the city centre, despite police efforts to encourage people to stay inside their homes, most families sat on their verandas chatting as radios blared through the streets. People have been urged to stay tuned to their radios and televisions for public information on the lockdown.
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Whew boy! U.S. has started airstrikes in Syria...
ReplyDeleteMrs C my wife just told me the same thing minutes ago! This could get interesting very quickly!
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