DRAGO BOSNIC—the Russian military already provided Belarus with the necessary upgrades to be able to deliver tactical nuclear warheads. At least 10 Belarussian Air Force jets have been assigned and equipped to carry such weapons, although neither side specified what type of aircraft received the said upgrades. Minsk operates several types of nuclear-capable fighter jets, including the recently acquired Su-30SM and the Soviet-era MiG-29, in addition to the ground-based assets such as the aforementioned “Iskander” systems capable of launching nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles.
AFRICA
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—And then the case of Primo Levi, the famous survivor of the camps and author of, among other things, If This Be a Man, his account of his time at Auschwitz. A couple of years into the regime of Menachem Begin, who was not Israel’s first terrorist prime minister and not the last, Levi dismissed the Zionist project altogether. “The center of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back,” he wrote, “must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.” He later told an American audience, “Israel was a mistake in historical terms.”
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The stunning audacity of Yemen’s drone strike on Tel Aviv
17 minutes readEDITORS—Suicide drones, as they are known, are a relatively modern weapon, posing significant challenges even for technologically advanced states like the US and Israel. These drones vary in range, warhead size, speed, and guidance methods.
Analysis of the wreckage revealed that the “Yaffa” drone, an enhanced version of Yemen’s Sammad drones, was employed in the operation. The name is deeply symbolic as it references the ancient port city of Jaffa, also known as Yaffa in Arabic, which now forms part of modern-day Tel Aviv.
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OLIVER BOYD BARRETT—In terms of manpower I frankly find it inconceivable that NATO would be able to persuade the citizens of member powers to tolerate any attempt to force them onto the battlefield in defense either of Ukraine or of NATO itself. They are far too smart. Stolternburg recently talked of 100,000 troops in readiness being available in one week, 200,000 in a month and, ultimately 500,000. Without reference to the sheer cost of such an operation, I again find these figures not only unlikely in themselves but also wildly insufficient against a likely response of towards a million Russian troops. The size of Russia’s armed forces and the pace of its monthly recruitment of contracted volunteers is such as to allow Russia just today to announce plans to allow up to 300,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine to take vacations and otherwise to be rotated into this summer and fall.
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ALEKS—Much of what we will discuss in this article will deal with the number of Russian casualties, as alluded to in the introduction. Russia suffered a horrendous number of dead soldiers within the first few weeks of the conflict, maybe up to 10,000. That’s the price of big arrows on modern battlefields with full intelligence/information/reconnaissance/artillery/drone coverage of the battlefields.
However, (up to) 10,000 dead is still a price that would have been worth paying to achieve the goals in Ukraine without going into a full-scale war. Had there been an agreement in Istanbul that would have terminated the conflict, ensured the rights of Russians in Ukraine, and kept Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine, one could remotely argue that “it was worth it.”
We all know what happened instead. As with all agreements that are not guaranteed with a gun on the West’s head, the West will ignore or scrap it at will. As happened with the Istanbul agreement.