This new civil war chapter offers a window of opportunity for a really serious power player -- as Erdogan, foolishly, now fights on two fronts, internal (Kurds) and external (Moscow). Sooner or later Moscow's support for the YPG Syrian Kurds may translate into decisive support for the PKK inside Turkey. Erdogan's civil war strategy leads to a dead end.
Back in September, we noted that the US was set to send 20 new nuclear bombs to Germany each of which has four times the destructive power of the explosive dropped on Hiroshima.
“[These] new attack options against Russia” constitute “a conscious provocation of [Germany’s] Russian neighbors,” one member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats warned. Sergei Lavrov’s de facto number-two, Maria Zakharova said the move represented an “infringement of Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”
The fight to check the spread of Islamic State in Afghanistan is making for some strange bedfellows.
From the time Russia began airstrikes in Syria on September 30, the Ministry of Defense has been a serial producer of videos depicting Moscow’s air campaign against anti-Assad elements.
Whether or not the footage shows what The Kremlin says it does is probably debatable. That is, there’s no way for the public to distinguish between an ISIS training camp and an FSA position in the often grainy clips the MoD posts on YouTube, but one thing is for sure: Russia is conducting a lot of airstrikes in the skies above Syria.
Russia’s vaunted S-300 and S-400 missile systems have been in the news quite a bit of late.
Last month, Moscow and Tehran officially revived a long stalled contract worth some $800 million that will see a handful of S-300s delivered to Tehran over the next several months. The deal was initially reached in 2007 but was put on hold in 2010 amid the international sanctions on Iran. Putin lifted the ban earlier this year, citing progress on the Iran nuclear deal.