Tag: Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022)

Your Friday Briefing: Russia’s Growing Isolation

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering Russia’s departure from the U.N. human rights council, a political blow to Pakistan’s Imran Khan and Shanghai’s growing frustration with Covid restrictions. Diplomacy: Prospects for successful peace talks have dimmed: Russia’s foreign minister said Ukraine had proposed a new draft deal that deviated from previous versions, and President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus demanded that his country be included in the negotiations. State of the war: Khan in jeopardy after court ruling Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned Prime Minister Imran Khan’s move to dissolve Parliament on Thursday, setting…

Your Tuesday Briefing: The Fallout from Bucha

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering the fallout from Russian atrocities in Bucha, the end of Carrie Lam’s tenure as Hong Kong’s leader and Pakistan’s political crisis. Rising calls to punish Russia President Biden called the indiscriminate civilian deaths in Bucha a “war crime” and said the U.S. would impose additional sanctions on Russia. Some European leaders also demanded tougher sanctions, including a total ban on Russian fuel imports. Here are the latest updates. Moscow has denied that its soldiers had anything to do with the atrocities, which have come to light…

Bristling Against the West, China Rallies Domestic Sympathy for Russia

Chin@Strategy

While Russian troops have battered Ukraine, officials in China have been meeting behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary that extols President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a hero. The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result of efforts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With swelling music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr. Putin for restoring Stalin’s standing as a great wartime leader and for renewing patriotic pride in Russia’s past. To the world, China…

Your Friday Briefing: Biden Releases Oil Reserves

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering global energy challenges, missile deception in North Korea and the wild world of Wikipedia. War roils global energy access On Thursday, the White House announced a plan to release up to 180 million barrels of oil from U.S. strategic reserves, the largest release since it was created, hoping to push gas prices down. Oil prices, which had been surging since the fighting in Ukraine began, fell modestly on expectations of the announcement. But diesel prices are still soaring. At the same time, OPEC and its allies,…

Covid, Russia and Economy Put the ‘China Model’ to the Test

Chin@Strategy

A year ago, while many countries were still reeling from Covid-19, China seemed to be one of few places prospering through the pandemic. It was also the only major economy that reported growth in 2020. Global investors were bullish on Chinese stocks even as Beijing’s regulatory crackdown on its private sector became more like a political campaign. That led some people in China to argue that its one-party authoritarian rule offered a compelling alternative to traditional liberal democracy. The United States was declining politically and economically, they said, and the…

OPEC and Russia to Meet as War in Ukraine Roils Oil Market

Chin@Strategy

In the last month, oil markets have been shaken by a war that has sparked a jump in prices and threatened a critical shortfall in crude and other petroleum products. But when most of the world’s largest oil producers meet by teleconference on Thursday to discuss supplies, analysts don’t expect much action. Officials from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia are likely to do little more than announce their usual modest monthly production increases, leading to questions about how much oil the group really does have in…

China’s Push to Isolate Taiwan Demands U.S. Action, Report Says

Chin@Strategy

The report from the German Marshall Fund, a research group that promotes democracy, laid out similar examples of coercive diplomacy by China in the constellation of United Nations agencies and associated groups. (The authors, Jessica Drun and Bonnie Glaser, both Taiwan experts, said they had received funding from the Taiwanese government for the research but that the views in the report were their own. Separately, Laura Rosenberger, senior director for China and Taiwan at the White House National Security Council, was a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.) In…

How Will the Ukraine War End?

Chin@Strategy

U.S. officials have said that Russia appealed to China for military and economic support. Biden warned China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that granting that request would incur “consequences,” though the administration has not specified what those consequences might be. “The administration’s dilemma is that China is the world’s second-largest economy and the origin point of countless global supply chains,” wrote Phelim Kine of Politico. “Unlike Russia, whose relative unimportance to the function of Western economies made it relatively easier to sanction, China is a dominant player in everything from electrical appliances…

Is Taiwan Next?

Chin@Strategy

A fragile peace Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amplified fears that the world is teetering back to a Cold War-like era in which the most powerful countries compete for dominance. That could mean not only Russia exerting control over Eastern Europe but also China imposing itself over East and Southeast Asia — particularly Taiwan. China has laid claim to Taiwan since the island split off from the mainland in 1949 and has threatened to forcibly reunite the two. It views the issue as a top priority: Days after Russia’s invasion,…

In Rare Rebuke, Chinese Denounce Russia’s War in Ukraine

Chin@Strategy

When Hu Wei, a politically well-connected scholar in Shanghai, warned that China risked becoming a pariah if it didn’t denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he ignited a war of words on China’s internet. Some readers praised Mr. Hu’s article, which spread online last week, seeing its gloomy prognosis about China becoming isolated behind a new Iron Curtain of hostility from Western countries as a welcome challenge to official Chinese soft-pedaling of President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression. Many others denounced him as a stooge of Washington, unduly critical of Russia’s war…