English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For April 22/2022
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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Bible Quotations For today
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace be with you. They were startled and terrified. He said to them: Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 24/36-45: “While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’
Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.”

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on April 21-22/2022
Lebanon children vulnerable to disease as vaccination rates drop
Portuguese man sought over links to Beirut blast arrested in Chile
Lebanon judge orders seizure of properties owned by bank governor’s detained brother
Miqati says capital control needed for recovery, accuses objectors of 'populism'
USD exchange rate surges to 26,500 on black market
LF officially files request for withdrawing confidence from Bou Habib
Fayyad says ball in court of US, World Bank as to energy import deal
Bassil says LF a 'militia' that wants to 'impose conditions on Foreign Ministry'
Lebanon desperately needs a new political system/Khaled Abou Zahr/Arab News/April 21/2022
Everybody in Beirut is a Cinderella/Mohamed Chebaro/Arab News/April 21/2022

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on April 21-22/2022
Al-Azhar’s Sheikh: Congratulating Christians on Holidays Comes from Understanding Islam
US says Iran nuclear deal does not ensure sanctions relief
Iran says remaining issues in nuclear talks are ‘political’
Putin Cancels Russian Plans to Storm Mariupol Steel Plant, Opts for Blockade Instead
More than 7.7 million internally displaced in Ukraine, UN says
Putin claims Mariupol win but won’t storm Ukrainian holdout
Mayor of Ukraine’s Kharkiv says city is under intense bombardment
Biden Hosts Military Chiefs as Ukraine Crisis Intensifies
Israel Criticizes Biden's 'Tolerance' with Iran
Gaza militants, Israel in biggest exchange of fire since 2021 war
Syrian Regime Opponents in Washington Await Disclosure of Assad Family’s Wealth
Pro-Iran Group Targets Israel’s Airports Authority Site in Cyberattack
Abbas, Tebboune Discuss Situation in West Bank, East Jerusalem
Senior Iraqi Intelligence Officer Killed during Tribal Dispute in Dhi Qar
Erdogan Threatens to 'Crush the Heads' of Kurdish Units in Syria
Egypt Upholds Life Sentences Against 3 Muslim Brotherhood Leaders
Aden Launches Development ‘Battle’ in Freed Governorates

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on April 21-22/2022
The Difficulties Hindering a Victory Day Celebration/Hussam Itani/Asharq Al-Awsat/April 21/2022
Dngers of Over-Reach/Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy/Asharq Al-Awsat/April 21/2022
Are We Letting Putin Win?/Guy Millère/Gatestone Institute/April 21/2022
The absence of an off-ramp...A diplomatic end to Putin’s war is becoming unlikely/Clifford D. May/The Washington Times/April 21/2022
Little Ukraine and the solidarity of a diaspora in New York/Janine di Giovanni/April 20, 2022
Iran’s supreme leader in waiting/Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/April 21/2022

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on April 21-22/2022
Lebanon children vulnerable to disease as vaccination rates drop
The Arab Weekly/Thursday 21/04/2022
Child vaccination rates in Lebanon have dropped by more than 30 percent, compounding a health crisis marked by drug shortages and an exodus of trained professionals, the United Nations said Wednesday. "The critical drop in vaccination rates has left children vulnerable to potentially deadly diseases such as measles, diphtheria and pneumonia," the UN children's agency UNICEF said in a new report titled "A worsening health crisis for children". "Routine vaccination of children has dropped by 31 percent when rates already were worryingly low, creating a large pool of unprotected children vulnerable to disease and its impact."Since 2019, Lebanon has been grappling with an unprecedented financial crisis that the World Bank says is of a scale usually associated with wars. The currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value and more than 80 percent of the population now lives below the poverty line. "Many families cannot even afford the cost of transportation to take their children to a health care centre," UNICEF representative Ettie Higgins said in a statement. Between April and October 2021, the number of children who could not access health care rose from 28 percent to 34 percent, according to the UNICEF report. With the government too poor to afford imports of basic commodities such as medicines, many are struggling to source lifesaving drugs, including those used to treat chronic illnesses. According to the UNICEF report, more than 50 percent of families were unable to obtain the medicines they needed and at least 58 percent of hospitals reported drug shortages. Making matters worse, the financial crash has sparked an exodus of healthcare professionals. According to UNICEF, 40 percent of doctors and 30 percent of midwives have left the country.

Portuguese man sought over links to Beirut blast arrested in Chile
Arab News/April 21, 2022
The man was stopped by agents of the Chilean Investigation Police
LONDON: A Portuguese man wanted by Interpol in connection with the 2020 Beirut port blast was arrested in Santiago on Wednesday, Chilean police have confirmed. The man, who was not identified, arrived in the Chilean capital on a flight from Spain and was placed on a return flight to Madrid following his arrest, according to a police statement. Police official Christan Saez said the man is wanted for allegedly smuggling “explosive elements” into Lebanon, which are linked to the August 2020 blast that killed more than 200 people. The Portuguese national was stopped by agents of the Chilean Investigation Police, according to Saez. The Beirut port explosion devastated entire neighborhoods of the Lebanese capital, with authorities determining the cause of the blast to be linked to a shipment of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that caught fire after being stored for years in dangerous conditions.
* With AP

Lebanon judge orders seizure of properties owned by bank governor’s detained brother
Riad Salameh, Raja's older brother, was charged with illicit enrichment on March 25
Reuters/Apr 21, 2022
A Lebanese investigative judge has ordered the seizure of properties belonging to Raja Salameh, the central bank governor's brother, who was arrested last month and charged with complicity in illicit enrichment, a judicial source told Reuters. A lawyer for Raja Salameh, who was detained on March 17, has denied the charges against him. Central bank chief Riad Salameh, Raja's older brother, was charged with illicit enrichment on March 25. He also denies the charges against him.

Miqati says capital control needed for recovery, accuses objectors of 'populism'
Naharnet/April 21/2022
Prime Minister Najib Miqati who has been repeatedly defending a capital control draft law, reiterated on Thursday that the capital control law and the depositors' rights are two separate things. "It would be wrong to mix the capital control law and the depositors' rights," Miqati said at the start of a Cabinet session at the Grand Serail. He added that recovery cannot be reached before the law is approved, accusing the objectors of populism. The draft law had been sent to the joint parliamentary committees for discussion. The latter refused Wednesday to discuss it before taking a look at the recovery plan, considering it to be unfair towards the depositors. Protestors and depositors had also rallied on Wednesday morning outside Parliament to prevent MPs from attending the session. "We are waiting for suggestions and ideas from the ministers and the MPs before issuing a recovery plan," the prime minister went on to say, adding that "the capital control law should have been issued since the very first day of the crisis." Meanwhile, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri has called the Finance and Justice parliamentary committees for a joint session to discuss the capital control draft law on Tuesday morning, as Cabinet has sent to Parliament clarifications that the MPs had requested concerning the law.

USD exchange rate surges to 26,500 on black market
Naharnet/April 21/2022
The Lebanese currency on Thursday declined on the black market, with a rate exceeding 26,000 against the dollar. It dropped to a rate of 26,500 as the country prepares for its parliamentary elections in May. The LBP had been relatively stable until last month after an unprecedented escalation in judicial measures against local banks, as Mount Lebanon Prosecutor Judge Ghada Aoun froze the assets of five of Lebanon’s largest banks. In January, a central bank circular that allowed banks to buy dollar banknotes from the BDL had led to a major recovery of the Lebanese lira value as it strengthened to around 20,000 after it had reached a low of 34,000. Lebanon is in the grip of a devastating economic crisis that has been described as one of the worst in modern history. It imports most of its wheat and has faced shortages over the past weeks as the war in Ukraine leads to increases in prices of oil and food products around the world. The adoption of a capital control law is one of the reforms requested by the International Monetary Fund to financially help crisis-hit Lebanon. The joint parliamentary committees refused Wednesday to discuss the capital control draft law before looking into a clear recovery plan, while Prime Minister Najib Miqati repeatedly defended the law, assuring that the government is keen on protecting the depositors' rights.

LF officially files request for withdrawing confidence from Bou Habib
Naharnet/April 21/2022
The Lebanese Forces-led Strong Republic bloc on Thursday filed a request for holding a parliamentary session aimed at voting on withdrawing confidence from Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib over “violations” related to expat voting. The request accuses the Foreign Ministry of committing “grave violations” related to the preparations for parliamentary elections abroad. “Directly or through its diplomatic missions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants has been repeating the attempts aimed at constraining the right of Lebanese expats to voting, in a manner that has started to jeopardize the integrity of the entire electoral process,” the bloc charged. It said such violations include “distributing voters from the same area, village and family on several polling stations that are very distant from each other, which makes the voting process more difficult.”The “violations” also include “refraining from handing over the electoral rolls to the relevant parties, which prevents them from knowing the number of delegates needed for each polling center.”

Fayyad says ball in court of US, World Bank as to energy import deal
Naharnet/April 21/2022
Energy Minister Walid Fayyad noted Thursday that the World Bank has not refused to finance Lebanon’s U.S.-backed plan for importing gas and electricity from Egypt and Jordan via Syria, adding that the Bank is still studying the plan’s “political feasibility.”“The contract with Jordan has been signed, but it needs to be ratified by Cabinet. The contract was signed and we did our duty, but the delay lies in financing,” Fayyad said. “I don’t know the meaning of the political feasibility they are talking about, which is the excuse behind this delay, and I’m in constant contact with the World Bank’s administration, U.S. Ambassador Dorothy Shea and French Ambassador Anne Grillo,” the minister added. “The ball is now in the court of the U.S. administration and the World Bank,” Fayyad went on to say.Pointing out that he has not been officially informed of the presence of delay by the World Bank, the minister said “a meeting was held on Friday and did not lead to the anticipated positive result.” m“Like you, we are hearing that they are still studying the plan’s political feasibility,” Fayyad went on to say.

Bassil says LF a 'militia' that wants to 'impose conditions on Foreign Ministry'
Naharnet/April 21/2022
Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil on Thursday slammed the rival Lebanese Forces party as a “militia” that wants to “impose its conditions on the Foreign Ministry” in the distribution of polling stations abroad.
“Everyone knows and acknowledges the effort that the Foreign Ministry has exerted to facilitate expat voting, from increasing the number of polling centers from 116 to 205 and polling stations from 232 to 598, in conjunction with putting a unified standard for all countries, which turned every polling center into a megacenter comprising polling stations for all of Lebanon’s electoral districts,” Bassil said in a tweet. “The LF wants to impose its conditions on the ministry, especially in Australia’s Sydney, in a manner that differs from the entire world. It wants to issue threats unless every polling center is turned into one dedicated to a single electoral district,” the FPM chief added. “This is a militia-like approach in imposing and endless lying. The LF has called for withdrawing confidence from the minister and we would file an appeal against any change to the unified standards in favor of the militia,” Bassil went on to say. The LF-led Strong Republic bloc had earlier on Thursday filed a request for holding a parliamentary session aimed at voting on withdrawing confidence from Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib over “violations” related to expat voting. It said such violations include “distributing voters from the same area, village and family on several polling stations that are very distant from each other, which makes the voting process more difficult.”

Lebanon desperately needs a new political system
Khaled Abou Zahr/Arab News/April 21/2022
Thirty years ago today, at 9:01 a.m., a powerful car bomb exploded in front of 33 Rue Marbeuf in Paris targeting the offices of Al-Watan Al-Arabi, the magazine my late father Walid Abou Zahr had founded. The explosion killed Nelly Guillerme, a 30-year-old pregnant woman, and injured 63. The 22-kg bomb in an orange Opel wreaked mayhem in the streets of Paris in what was an unprecedented attack against a media outlet in France.
Al-Watan Al-Arabi was well known for its “insolence” to the established order and its opposition to the Syrian regime. Indeed, a few years before, the offices of my father’s newspaper Al-Moharrer in Beirut were attacked by Syrian-controlled Palestinian militias with heavy weapons. The opposition to the Syrian regime had two reasons: First and foremost, its intervention in and occupation of Lebanon; later, and second, its alignment with Iran against Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War that started in 1980.
Throughout the years, there has been speculation on the reasons behind and the parties responsible for the Rue Marbeuf attack. In 2011, the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal was convicted of planning attack toliberate two members of his group who were incarcerated in France, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Al-Watan Al-Arabi had already been targeted in December 1981. A parcel bomb was placed in front of the door, but it was defused in time. Several other assassination attempts against my father had also failed. But Carlos’s trial focused on the Rue Marbeuf attack, while overlooking his obedience to Syrian Air Force Intelligence. Al-Watan Al-Arabi, one of the largest advertising-generating media outlets at the time with a quarter-million distribution, had become too dangerous and too powerful for the Syrian regime, and thus had to be silenced.
The first call my father received condemning the attack was from Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, then the governor of Riyadh Province and now king of Saudi Arabia. At the time, there was no particular strong bond between Al-Watan Al-Arabi and Saudi Arabia, but the phone call was testimony to the understanding the Kingdom had of the situation and the importance of Lebanon in the region.
Looking back at all the facts and the situation at that time, everything indicates that the attack was about Lebanon and not about the Iraq-Iran War. Despite being framed that way by analysts, it was an early warning of things to come. This attack against a Lebanese independent media outlet should therefore be placed on the same line as the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel later that same year and the potential for an end to the civil war and peace.
After 30 years and so many more attacks against Lebanese free-thinkers, I cannot help but ask what has changed in Lebanon. To this day, every single voice or leader dreaming of sovereignty, freedom and independence — and, most important, capable of unifying the Lebanese people — is condemned and threatened with violence and erasure. Erosion has three forms: Corruption, exile and death. There is no other option. How many free voices have been stamped out in the past 30 years? All of them. How many more will it take to reach a free and independent state?
Today, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which ended after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, has been replaced by Hezbollah. After 30 years, Lebanon is still being punished for its diversity. Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah controls the state and consistently and methodically erodes it, isolating the country from its regional neighbors.
Moreover, the true masterminds behind all these attacks are left unpunished. They walk at our funerals, and we are forced to accept their condolences. The Middle East’s changing geopolitical balances keep them protected, and it keeps rewarding evil, it seems. No need to go through these tectonic changes again; all we need to see is that the civil war that raged in 1982 has been replaced with a new war of starvation in 2022. Yet, we are not only victims but also accomplices in this situation that punishes us. We keep putting confession before state. Loyalty goes to confession, not the state; protection is asked from confession, not the state; and duties go to confession, not the state. Only grievances, complaints and shame go to the state.
We (the Lebanese people) are not only victims but also accomplices in this situation that punishes us.
And this is why I cannot help but think that Lebanon needs a new political system. More important, the Lebanese people should not (despite living under Iranian occupation) seek an outside savior to restore order and stability. If we look back in history, we will easily see that this has been tried, and it never worked. I strongly believe federalism is the best solution, but this should be decided by the Lebanese people. The only certainty I now have is that for Lebanon to survive, it will have to give up its “insolence” and aim for neutrality with regard to Syria, Iran and Israel.
*Khaled Abou Zahr is CEO of Eurabia, a media and tech company. He is also the editor of Al-Watan Al-Arabi.

Everybody in Beirut is a Cinderella
Mohamed Chebaro/Arab News/April 21/2022
A Lebanese nowadays does not need COVID-19 lockdown rules to observe a semi-constrained existence permanently. Over the years, Lebanese people have gotten used to adapting and making do after four decades of civil strife, conflicts, wars and occasional near total collapse of state and society.
As Lebanon gears up for elections to be held on May 15, in the hope that a newly elected legislature can usher in a new government that is able to navigate the internal consensus and its heavy regional patronage to deliver basic services, the Lebanese have to be content with a Cinderella-like lifestyle of struggle. They must organize their daily existence according to the electric power supply schedule from the national grid and the many private local suppliers of energy at exorbitant prices.
Mothers rely on alternative privately owned generators’ schedules to decide when to use the washing machine or when it is possible to take a sick toddler to the doctor. Deliveries are tied to whether the lift is working, not if you were at home to receive the goods, and students rely on power banks to use computers to complete their assignments. Electric appliances in homes are constantly failing due to the irregular supply and freezers are rarely reliable to offer a drop of cooled water and on top of that, they are often empty due to the economic crunch.
A bankrupt government can barely run its power plants; alleged kickbacks to the political elite have permanently starved the national grid that has functioned at a slow pace long before the recent crisis. The alternative generators’ costs per average household are about $200 a month for a between 5 and 10 amp capacity, which is equivalent to more than a month’s salary for most Lebanese. Lifts in apartment blocks are subject to an independent fee factored into households’ monthly service charge. Many inhabitants of tower blocks have decided to opt out and keep fit going up and down the stairs as they have to choose between food on the table and the luxury of using a lift.
This is in a country where average earnings since the collapse of the Lebanese lira have plummeted, after Lebanon defaulted on its debts more than two years ago, thereby reducing the value of the Lebanese people’s earnings dramatically. The political stalemate and the absence of reform or any convincing rescue plan has led to inflation, and people have suffered from the capital controls imposed by the state as a way of preventing a run on banks. This means that creditors have to beg for a monthly $200 withdrawal from their own savings at banks, if they have any.
I can go on and write more about the Lebanese people suffering daily strife, but what has struck me the most while visiting recently is that Beirut, the city that used to never sleep, turns pitch black when the clock strikes midnight — like Cinderella everyone rushes home before the generators fall silent for the night.
Who is to blame and is there a way out?
The traditional political class that has been overseeing Lebanon’s descent into the gutters of history are busy campaigning and debating their elections’ manifesto. The new so-called revolutionary youth class that emerged after the October 2019 revolution is still calling to replace the antiquated political class but it is getting fed up with trying to get some of its candidates to parliament. The challenge, of course, is having a specially tailored electoral law that will surely keep most of their candidates out in favor of the dominant families and warlords.
One also notices that the various calls for reform continue to correspond with each person’s capital biases, which are deeply entrenched in his or her religious or secular values, sectarian priorities (at the expense of their national identity,) and commitment to regional proxies or axes — instead of making national interest supreme to all other discourses.
Everybody in Lebanon is a Cinderella waiting for a knight. Hopefully such knights will come armed with the Internet, a power supply and fresh dollars (a common term for newly transferred funds in dollars to differentiate from the funds and savings locked in the nation’s banking system), presenting the country with some hope of navigating local intransigence and delivering on the aspirations of trying to resuscitate their country.
The core problem remains that the leaders have all acknowledged the rife corruption but deny that they are responsible.
I am pessimistic that these elections — if not postponed due to some last-minute adversity — could deliver any of that. I feel alarmed about how the political forces of Lebanon continue to amuse themselves by insulting each other, trading corruption accusations, when no one in Lebanon is under any illusion that these are mere representatives of foreign interests working to advance some peripheral geostrategic goals at the expense of the people's well-being.
The core problem remains that the leaders have all acknowledged the rife corruption but deny that they are responsible. The once-reliable Gulf countries, who underpinned for decades Lebanon’s reconstruction and economy, have pulled out their constant generous aid in recent years, protesting Iran’s supreme influence in Lebanon through Hezbollah.
Unless these elections result in applying urgent reforms that disregard the interests of the dominant political class and pave the way for foreign aid to trickle back in, they will be meaningless. Currently, 80 percent of Lebanese people are likely to get poorer, some of them skipping meals, while the currency could lose more than 90 percent of its value. Moreover, state debts are also likely to balloon beyond the 500 percent of its GDP. The Cinderella-style existence for the Lebanese is here to stay, until some national sense of cohesion triumphs in the face of an oppressive and heartless establishment clamping down on the Lebanese people’s right to live in peace, freedom and prosperity.
*Mohamed Chebaro is a British-Lebanese journalist, media consultant and trainer with more than 25 years’ experience covering war, terrorism, defense, current affairs and diplomacy.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on April 21-22/2022
Al-Azhar’s Sheikh: Congratulating Christians on Holidays Comes from Understanding Islam
Cairo - Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Al-Azhar Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb announced that congratulating Christians on holidays is not out of courtesy or formalities but rather "comes from our understanding of the teachings of our true religion."The Grand Imam explained that the relationship between Muslims and Christians is a true embodiment of unity and brotherhood and that this brotherhood will always remain the solid bond that strengthens the country against difficulties and challenges. He stated that Islam is the religion of mercy, and Christianity is the religion of love, and they cooperate and embrace a world of tolerance and peace.
In remarks to the "Voice of al-Azhar" magazine, Tayyeb indicated that the legitimacy of war in Islam is not limited to the defense of mosques only, somewhat equally legitimate to defend churches and synagogues. Tayyeb added: "Restricting non-Muslims in their food and drink during the day in Ramadan on the pretext of fasting is an absurdity that does not suit and does not relate to Islam." The Imam stressed that the extremist ideology has nothing to do with Islam, highlighting that those who forbid congratulating Christians on their holidays are not familiar with the philosophy of Islam in dealing with others in general and with Christians in particular. Controversy arose in Egypt after a Christian family accused a restaurant of refusing to serve them during a Ramadan day. Tayyeb said that al-Azhar sees absolutely nothing wrong with building churches as there is nothing in the Quran or the Prophetic Sunnah that forbids this matter, and therefore al-Azhar cannot interfere to prevent the building of a church. On Easter Sunday, the Grand Imam extended greetings to Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria and Patriarch of St. Mark Diocese, and the Christian people. During a phone call with the pope, Tayyeb praised the relations between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, saying they genuinely embody unity and brotherly ties. He added that the brotherly ties between the two components of the national fabric would remain as a firm bond bringing them together to face challenges and difficulties. He also affirmed that his greeting for Christian people is based on a proper understanding of the Islamic religion. Pope Tawadros expressed happiness with Azhar Sheikh's phone call and the permanent renewal of the friendship and love bonds between the solid national fabric that gathers Muslims and Christians in Egypt. The Coptic pope also praised the cooperation and relations between al-Azhar and the Church in all fields.

US says Iran nuclear deal does not ensure sanctions relief
Agencies/April 21, 2022 18:59
WASHINGTON/TEHRAN: The United States said on Thursday if Iran wanted sanctions relief beyond that of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — an apparent reference to removing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards from a US terrorism list — it must address US concerns beyond the pact.
“We are not negotiating in public, but if Iran wants sanctions lifting that goes beyond the JCPOA, they will need to address concerns of ours beyond the JCPOA,” a State Department spokesperson said, referring to the 2015 deal by the acronym for formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“Conversely, if they do not want to use these talks to resolve other bilateral issues beyond the JCPOA, then we are confident that we can very quickly reach an understanding on the JCPOA and begin reimplementing the deal,” the spokesperson added. “Iran needs to make a decision.”
The US spokesperson was responding to a top Iranian official who earlier said Iran will not give up on its plans to avenge the 2020 US assassination of Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, despite “regular offers” from Washington to lift sanctions and provide other concessions in return.
Iran has been engaged for a year in negotiations with France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China directly, and the United States indirectly, to revive the 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
General Qasem Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Revolutionary Guards, was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq’s capital Baghdad in January 2020.
“Enemies have asked us several times to give up avenging the blood of Qasem Soleimani, for the lifting of some sanctions, but this is a fantasy,” Guards navy commander Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri said, quoted by the Guards’ Sepah News website.
The Guards are the ideological arm of Iran’s military. Former US president Donald Trump ordered Soleimani killed, saying he was planning an “imminent” attack on US personnel in the Iraqi capital. Iran responded to his assassination by firing missiles a few days later at Iraqi bases housing US soldiers, causing injuries. In 2018, two years before Soleimani’s killing, the US unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to step back from its commitments. Negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna aim to return Washington to the deal, including through the lifting of sanctions, and to ensure Tehran’s full compliance with its commitments. Among the key remaining sticking points is Tehran’s demand to delist the Revolutionary Guards from a US terror list. That sanction, imposed by Trump after he withdrew from the nuclear agreement, is officially separate from the atomic file.
Right-wing US politicians and Israel, the arch-rival of Iran, have warned Washington against lifting sanctions on the Guards. Iran this week said that “technical issues” in the now-paused negotiations to restore the nuclear agreement have been resolved, but “political” issues persist ahead of concluding any deal.
“We have repeatedly stressed (to Washington) that Iran is not willing to abandon its red lines,” Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian said Thursday, without giving further details. On Monday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said “the perpetrators, officials, accomplices and advisers” in Soleimani’s death “will not go unpunished,” adding that “these people must be brought to justice.”(With Reuters and AFP)

Iran says remaining issues in nuclear talks are ‘political’
Arab News/April 21, 2022
Iran said Wednesday that "technical issues" in the now-paused negotiations to restore its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers have been resolved, but "political" issues persist ahead of concluding any deal. Iran has been engaged for a year in negotiations with France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China directly and the United States indirectly, to revive the 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The US unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to step back from nuclear commitments. Negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna aim to return the US to the deal, including through Washington lifting sanctions and to ensure Tehran's full compliance with its commitments. "Technical issues and discussions in the Vienna talks have been completed," Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA. "Only political issues remain," he added. Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said early this month that Iran will only return to Vienna to finalise an agreement, not to hold new negotiations. The talks have been paused since March 11 after Russia demanded guarantees that Western sanctions imposed against Moscow after its February 24 invasion of Ukraine would not damage its trade with Iran. Days later, Moscow said it had received the necessary guarantees. Among the key remaining sticking points is Tehran's demand to delist the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the aggressive ideological arm of Iran's military, from a US terror list. That sanction, imposed by former US president Donald Trump after he withdrew from the nuclear agreement, is officially separate from the atomic file. "If Iran wants sanctions-lifting that goes beyond the JCPOA, they'll need to address concerns of ours that go beyond the JCPOA," US State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday. The 2015 agreement gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme to guarantee that Tehran could not develop a nuclear weapon, something it has always denied wanting to do.

Putin Cancels Russian Plans to Storm Mariupol Steel Plant, Opts for Blockade Instead
Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered the Russian military to cancel plans to storm the Azovstal plant in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and said he wanted it to continue to be hermetically blockaded instead. Putin gave the order to Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister, who had previously told Putin that more than 2,000 Ukrainian fighters were still holed up in the vast plant, which has a lage underground component to it, Reuters reported. "I consider the proposed storming of the industrial zone unnecessary," Putin told Shoigu in a televised meeting at the Kremlin. "I order you to cancel it."Putin said his decision not to storm the Azovstal plant was motivated by the desire to safeguard the lives of Russian soldiers. "There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground through these industrial facilities," he said. "Block off this industrial area so that a fly cannot not pass through."Putin also called on the remaining Ukrainian fighters in Azovstal who had not yet surrendered, saying Russia would treat them with respect and would provide medical assistance to those injured. Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what it called a special operation to degrade its southern neighbor's military capabilities and root out people it called dangerous nationalists.Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in an effort to force it to withdraw its forces.

More than 7.7 million internally displaced in Ukraine, UN says
AFP/April 21, 2022
GENEVA: More than 7.7 million people are estimated to have been internally displaced by Russia's war in Ukraine, having fled their homes but stayed within the country, the United Nations said Thursday. The figure issued by the UN's International Organization for Migration is up from the 7.1 million estimate that it gave on April 5 of the internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Putin claims Mariupol win but won’t storm Ukrainian holdout
AP/April 21, 2022
KYIV: Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the battle for Mariupol on Thursday, even as he ordered his troops not to risk more losses by storming the giant steel plant containing the last pocket of Ukrainian holdouts in the city. Instead, he directed his forces to seal off the Azovstal plant “so that not even a fly comes through.”Russian troops have bombarded the southeastern port city since the early days of the conflict and largely reduced it to ruins. Top officials have repeatedly claimed it was about to fall, but Ukrainian forces have stubbornly held on. In recent weeks, a few thousand defenders, by Russia’s estimate, holed up along with hundreds of civilians in the sprawling steel plant, as Russian forces pounded the site and repeatedly issued ultimatums ordering their surrender. But on Thursday, as he has done before, Putin seemed to shift the narrative and declared victory without taking the plant, which covers 11 square kilometers (4 square miles) and is threaded with some 24 kilometers (15 miles) of tunnels and bunkers. “The completion of combat work to liberate Mariupol is a success,” he said in an appearance with his defense minister. “Congratulations.”Ukraine scoffed at the idea of a Russian victory. “This situation means the following: They cannot physically capture Azovstal. They have understood this. They suffered huge losses there,” said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The capture of Mariupol would represent the Kremlin’s biggest victory yet of the war in Ukraine. It would help Moscow secure more of the coastline, complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014, and enable Putin to shift more forces to the larger battle now underway for Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland. By painting the mission in Mariupol a success, Putin may be seeking to take the focus off the plant, which has become a global symbol of defiance. Even without the plant, the Russians appear to have control of the rest of the city and its vital port, though that facility seems to have been extensively damaged. “The Russian agenda now is not to capture these really difficult places where the Ukrainians can hold out in the urban centers, but to try and capture territory and also to encircle the Ukrainian forces and declare a huge victory,” retired British Rear Adm. Chris Parry said. Western nations, meanwhile, rushed to pour heavy weapons into Ukraine to help it counter the new offensive in the east.
US President Joe Biden announced an additional $800 million in military assistance for Kyiv, including heavy artillery, 144,000 rounds of ammunition and drones. But he also warned that the $13.6 billion approved last month by the US Congress for military and humanitarian aid is “almost exhausted” and more will be needed. Russia Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu estimated 2,000 Ukrainian troops remained at the steel plant. Ukrainian officials said about 1,000 civilians were also trapped there along with 500 wounded soldiers. Shoigu said the site was blocked off and predicted it could be taken in days.
“I consider the proposed storming of the industrial area pointless. I order to abort it,” Putin responded, saying he was concerned about ”preserving the life and health of our soldiers and officers.”“There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground through these industrial facilities,” the Russian leader added. “Block off this industrial area so that not even a fly comes through.” Putin’s order may mean that Russian forces are hoping they can wait for the defenders to surrender after running out of food or ammunition. The bombardment of the plant could well continue.
All told, more than 100,000 people were believed trapped with little or no food, water, heat or medicine in Mariupol, which had a prewar population of about 430,000.
The city has seized worldwide attention as the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war, including deadly airstrikes on a maternity hospital and a theater.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said her country and others are pressuring Russia to allow civilians out of Mariupol and to stop striking potential evacuation routes. Four buses with civilians managed to escape the city on Wednesday after several unsuccessful attempts, according to Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russia of launching attacks to block civilian evacuations from the city. On Thursday, at least two Russian attacks hit the city of Zaporizhzhia, a way station for people fleeing Mariupol, though no one was wounded, the regional governor said.
Parry called the decision about the steel plant a change in “operational approach” as Russia tries to learn from its failures in the 8-week-old conflict, which began with expectations of a lightning offensive that would crush Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered forces and capture Kyiv. Instead, Moscow’s troops became bogged down by unexpectedly tenacious resistance with ever-mounting casualties and retreated from the capital. For weeks now, Russian officials have said capturing the Donbas, Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east, is the war’s main goal. Moscow’s forces opened the new phase of the war this week — a deadly drive along a 300-mile (480-kilometer) front from the northeastern city of Kharkiv to the Azov Sea — to do just that. “They’ve realized if they get sort of held up in these sort of really sticky areas like Mariupol, they’re not going to cover the rest of the ground,” Parry said. In Luhansk, one of two regions that make up the Donbas, the governor said Russian forces control 80 percent of his region. Before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, the Kyiv government controlled 60 percent of Luhansk. Britain’s Defense Ministry said that Russia probably wants to demonstrate significant successes ahead of Victory Day on May 9, the proudest day on the Russian calendar, marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. “This could affect how quickly and forcefully they attempt to conduct operations in the run-up to this date,” the ministry said.

Mayor of Ukraine’s Kharkiv says city is under intense bombardment
News Agencies/April 21, 2022
Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv was under intense bombardment on Thursday, its mayor Ihor Terekhov said. “Huge blasts, the Russian Federation is furiously bombing the city,” Terekhov said in a televised address. He said that around 1 million people remain in the northeastern city, while about 30 percent of the population have evacuated, mainly women, children and the elderly.

Biden Hosts Military Chiefs as Ukraine Crisis Intensifies
 Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
US President Joe Biden convened US military leaders on Wednesday in an annual White House gathering taking on special significance as the war in Ukraine enters a risky new phase and Washington plans more weapons assistance. "variety of topics" were set to be discussed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior military leaders, a National Security Council spokesperson said. The event includes a formal West Wing meeting as well as a dinner in the president's residence with leaders' spouses afterward. While the annual military policy meeting rarely makes news, weighty issues are on the agenda this year, topped by a conflict in Ukraine that officials fear could imperil European security for years to come. Russia has said it has entered a new stage of its operation and is methodically seeking to "liberate" the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Western allies anticipate Russia's campaign could last many months, grind to a stalemate and test the battlefield capabilities of Ukrainian fighters. Opening the meeting, Biden touted the toughness of the Ukrainian military and said that NATO's unity has shocked Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Reuters. They're tougher and more proud than I thought; I'm amazed what they're doing with your help," Biden said. "I don't think that Putin counted on it being able to hold us together."The United States is expected to announce another military aid package for Ukraine in coming days that could match the $800 million pledged last week. Russia says it launched what it calls a "special military operation" on Feb. 24 to demilitarize and "denazify" Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western allies reject that as a false pretext. S forces are not fighting in Ukraine but are indirectly engaged, arming, training and financing Kyiv's forces. lengthy clash could also test US public support for Washington's backing of Ukraine. Last month, Biden asked Congress for record peacetime spending on the military for the upcoming fiscal year. he meeting comes amid questions about the future of NATO forces in Europe, including whether to install a permanent presence on the defense alliance's eastern border with Russia. uring a brief portion of the meeting open to reporters, Biden also expressed pride that women represented three of the senior officials included in the gathering.

Israel Criticizes Biden's 'Tolerance' with Iran
Tel Aviv - Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Officials in Tel Aviv condemned the US silence over Tehran's procrastination, accusing the administration of President Joe Bide of delaying the deadline on the nuclear talks.
Israeli sources said that the US, through its National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, had set a deadline for the talks last December.
Sullivan said that the United States and its partners would not accept continuing negotiations indefinitely and initially set February as the time to halt the talks, and then the deadline was moved to March, which has also passed. Officials in Israel believe that the Iranians are having difficulty deciding whether to move toward signing the agreement and are also awaiting Biden's announcement on removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its terrorist list. Israel continues to believe that Iran has taken advantage of the time during which it held talks with the world powers to strengthen its nuclear program. According to Haaretz, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said earlier this month that while "treading water" in Vienna, Iran has completed the enrichment of about 50 kilograms of uranium to 60 percent and continues to advance its military nuclear program. The newspaper confirmed conflicting positions within the Israeli government on the agreement. everal officials in Tel Aviv believe the faltered negotiations are promising for Israel and evidence of the difficulty of reaching an understanding. It may lead the talks to a dead end. hey believe the agreement's failure will put the West, led by the US, in a military alliance that threatens clashes with Tehran, forcing it to reverse its policy.Yair Golan, a former Deputy Israeli Chief of Staff and Israel's Deputy Minister of Economics and Industry, believes that reaching an agreement is the best option.He said Washington is not interested in a military solution, as are the allies in Europe. They believe that the 2015 nuclear agreement, despite its many disadvantages, contains monitoring and accountability devices for the Iranians, and its duration is until 2031, which is not very long. However, it is sufficient to limit Iranian nuclear activity and examine other means of pressure. olan says that relying on sanctions isn't right, adding that removing al-Quds Force from the terrorist list is not an issue.Sources in Tel Aviv indicated that the pressure campaign launched recently by the Israeli government against withdrawing the IRGC from the US terrorist list is bearing fruit. iden now supports the Israeli position in this regard, unlike officials in the US State Department, and he will announce his position very soon. Haaretz quoted high-ranking Israeli officials involved in talks with Washington saying that Israel is currently preparing for two scenarios. One is an Iranian decision to retract its demand from the negotiating table, mainly to benefit from the skyrocketing global oil price due to the war in Ukraine. In that event, Israel would have a hard time scuttling the US plan to sign a new agreement with Iran within days. The second scenario is that Iran insists that the Revolutionary Guards be removed from the terrorist organization list, which could delay and complicate signing a new agreement and lead the parties to further confrontation.

Gaza militants, Israel in biggest exchange of fire since 2021 war
Agence France Presse/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets from Gaza into Israel, which responded with air strikes in the early hours of Thursday in the biggest escalation since an 11-day war last year. A rocket from Gaza on Wednesday evening fell harmlessly in a garden in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, police said. Israel struck back in central Gaza after midnight, witnesses and security sources said, prompting further launches of at least four rockets by militants in the besieged territory. Israel said its jets had targeted a military post and a tunnel complex "containing raw chemicals used for the manufacturing of rocket engines". Hamas, the Islamist movement which rules the Gaza Strip, said it had fired surface-to-air rockets at Israeli planes. The exchanges come after nearly a month of deadly violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories, focused on Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount. Israeli police said Thursday that dozens of rioters had thrown stones and petrol bombs from the mosque. "A violent splinter group is stopping Muslim worshippers from entering the mosque and causing damage to the site," the police alleged. Seven Palestinians, all residents of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, had been arrested on suspicion of taking part in "violent incidents" on Wednesday, it added.
'Death to the Arabs' -
Hours earlier, Israeli police had blocked crowds of Jewish ultra-nationalist protesters from approaching the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, aiming to head off an escalation after four weeks of violence that have left at least 36 people dead. Last year, a similar ultra-nationalist march had been scheduled in the Old City when Hamas launched a barrage of rockets towards Israel, sparking the 11-day war. Early Wednesday evening, more than 1,000 ultra-nationalist demonstrators waving Israeli flags had gathered, some shouting "death to the Arabs", but police blocked them from reaching Damascus Gate and the Old City's Muslim quarter. Far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben Gvir, a controversial opposition politician, led the protest after being barred from the Damascus Gate area earlier in the day by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. "I'll say it clearly, I'm not going to blink, not going to fold," Ben Gvir told AFP, as his supporters chanted "Bennett go home!"
"I'm not allowed to enter Damascus Gate," the former lawyer said. "Based on what law?"Bennett said earlier that he had blocked the rally for security reasons."I have no intention of allowing petty politics to endanger human lives," he said. "I will not allow a political provocation by Ben Gvir to endanger IDF (Israeli army) soldiers and Israeli police officers, and render their already heavy task even heavier." Ben Gvir retorted Thursday that "some Jews don't surrender to Hamas".
- 'Deeply concerned' -
Tensions are high as the Jewish Passover festival coincides with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Palestinians and Israeli Arabs carried out four deadly attacks in Israel in late March and early April that claimed 14 lives, mostly civilians.A total of 23 Palestinians have been killed since March 22, including assailants who targeted Israelis, according to an AFP tally.On Tuesday, Israel carried out its first strike on Gaza in months, in response to the first rocket since January from the Palestinian enclave. UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem".
He added that he was in contact with the parties to press them "to do all they can to lower tensions, avoid inflammatory actions and rhetoric".Bennett, himself a right-winger and a key figure in Israel's settlement movement, leads an ideologically divided coalition government. His coalition this month lost its majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel's parliament, after a member left in a dispute over the use of leavened bread products in hospitals during Passover. Then on Sunday, the Raam party, drawn from the country's Arab-Israeli minority, suspended its support for the coalition over the Al-Aqsa violence.
Right-wing lawmakers are under pressure to quit Israel's government, which is seen by some on the right as being too favourable to Palestinians and Israel's Arab minority.

Syrian Regime Opponents in Washington Await Disclosure of Assad Family’s Wealth
Washington - Muath al-Amri/Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
US political circles are awaiting the implementation by US President Joe Biden’s administration of a law on disclosing the sources of the wealth of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, his family, and his inner circle. The bill, which was approved by Congress at the end of 2021, is considered by Syrian regime opponents in Washington a “legal victory for the revolution and the interests of the people.”Claudia Tenny, a Republican Representative from New York who is active in Syrian issues, was the godmother of this law, which she initially presented as a draft before the House of Representatives.
The law was attached to the budget of the Department of Defense for the fiscal year 2022, and was endorsed by an “overwhelming majority”, in the US House and the Senate. The bill passed by Congress requires the disclosure of the sources of the wealth of President al-Assad, his family, as well as his inner circle, and requests the US federal agencies to submit a relevant detailed report to the House of Representatives. According to the law, the period for implementing such request is 90 days from the date of its issuance. Thus, Syrian regime opponents considered that the US administration “has now become legally bound to publish this report next week.” They described the development as an “American legislative victory against the Assad regime, and in the interest of the Syrian revolution and the popular opposition, which has long pushed the US legislative and executive institutions to adopt more severe measures against the Syrian regime.”The law requires the US administration to work on an interagency strategy to determine the priorities of US policy in Syria. The approved amendment No. 6507 stipulated the disclosure of “income from corrupt or illegal activities practiced by the Syrian regime.”
The legal amendment stressed interagency coordination to implement US sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and to monitor endemic corruption in order to ensure that funds are not directed to terrorist groups and malign activities.
Moreover, the legal amendment set out the elements to be included in the report and the US diplomatic strategy, including a description of the desired diplomatic goals to advance US national interests in Syria, and the desired objectives, as well as a presentation of intended US diplomacy there.
Over the past decade, the US political arena has witnessed a state of “tug-of-war” between the legislative and executive institutions, which started during the tenure of former President Barack Obama and ended with the overwhelming approval of Congress on the Caesar Act, which charted US policy in dealing with the Syrian file. Legislators in Congress are strongly opposed to Biden’s administration leniency towards the Syrian regime, calling for not easing or bypassing the Caesar Act under the pretext of humanitarian aid. Bassam Barabandi, a political researcher on Syrian affairs, and a former diplomat who defected from the Syrian embassy in Washington, said that the Syrians in the United States were “waiting to see whether the US government respects and implements the law that requires it to disclose al-Assad’s wealth next week.”He emphasized in this regard that law enforcement was among the most important features of the United States, and a leading foundation, “which Washington demands all countries respect and implement.”In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Barabandi expressed his fear that the law would not be implemented for political reasons pertaining to Iran.
He added that if the Biden administration disregarded the law, some Arab countries would distance themselves from the US. He explained that Washington would not be applying the simplest demands pertaining to Syria, perhaps for regional reasons, despite spending large sums to help civil societies that demand respect for local laws without any discrimination.

Pro-Iran Group Targets Israel’s Airports Authority Site in Cyberattack
Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
An Iran-backed group in Iraq, known as al-Tahera, claimed on Wednesday that it targeted the website of the Israel Airports Authority in a cyberattack. The IAA confirmed that it was experiencing a DDoS attack, but stressed that there was no damage caused or infiltration into operational systems, The Jerusalem Post reported. On Tuesday, the pro-Iran Telegram channel Sabareen claimed that al-Tahera had conducted DDoS attacks against the websites of the Israeli Russian-language Channel 9 and KAN news. Both sites were inaccessible shortly after the claims were made, although both were working as of Wednesday morning. Channel 9 reported on Wednesday morning that it had been targeted by a DDoS attack overnight. Sabareen had reported in a message in broken Hebrew on Monday that the "Iraqi special forces threaten to carry out the first quality operations from Iraqi ground into the Zionist entity, which will quiet the enemy.”

Abbas, Tebboune Discuss Situation in West Bank, East Jerusalem
Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held a phone call with his Algerian counterpart Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Wednesday to discuss the situation in Palestine, especially latest events in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Abbas thanked Tebboune for Algeria's support of the Palestinian people and their just cause at all levels, and for efforts exerted to mobilize international support to end the Israeli aggression, especially in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Mosque. According to the Palestinian news agency, Wafa, the Palestinian President also valued the distinguished efforts made by Algeria, under the direct guidance of Tebboune, to achieve Palestinian reconciliation by hosting Palestinian delegations from all factions. Abbas briefed Tebboune on Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people in the Palestinian territories, which lead to the killing of dozens and the injury of hundreds of others since the begging of the holy month of Ramadan. The two leaders discussed the ongoing Israeli attacks and the extremist settlers' assaults against Palestinian citizens and their properties under the protection of the occupation army. For his part, Tebboune affirmed Algeria's unwavering stances in support of the Palestinian people and their cause.
He also stressed that Algeria is exerting efforts to stop the ongoing Israeli aggression in Jerusalem, al-Aqsa mosque, and other Palestinian territories, stressing that Algeria will continue to defend the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.

Senior Iraqi Intelligence Officer Killed during Tribal Dispute in Dhi Qar
Baghdad - Fadhel al-Nashmi/Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
For years, the southern governorates of Iraq have been ailed by tribal strife that kills dozens of citizens each year. Despite placing army and security units in areas of dispute, the Iraqi government has failed to curb clan violence. In the latest wave of clashes, a senior Iraqi officer was killed on Wednesday while mediating to resolve a tribal conflict in Iraq's oil-rich south. General Brigadier and the head of the Intelligence Department of the Sumer Operation Command, Ali Jamil Abd Khalaf, was killed during the resolution of a tribal dispute in Dhi Qar's al-Shatra district, Iraq’s Security Media Cell said in a tweet.
In Dhi Qar, local authorities announced the imposition of a curfew in al-Shatra district until further notice. Dhi Qar Governor Muhammad Al-Ghazi announced the curfew against the background of clan conflicts. The governor called on the security services in the governorate and the operations command to “take their role in arresting the perpetrators and imposing security in al-Shatrah.”In a statement carried by the local Nasiriyah TV, Al-Ghazi revealed that “a security operation has been launched to pursue security violators in al-Shatra after the killing of Khalaf.”According to the governor, the operation would be carried out with the support of an anti-terror regiment and two special forces. Dhi Qar lawmakers strongly criticized the role of the security leaders in the governorate and their failure to impose security. “If the solution is to dismiss the security leaders, let them be dismissed, Dhi Qar is now on hot tin, lives lost and security lost,” Dhi Qar parliamentarian and former labor minister Adel Al-Rikabi told reporters. “Security leaders are part of this dangerous situation,” noted Al-Rikabi, adding that security officials are taking time to negotiate between clans while abandoning their security and military duties.

Erdogan Threatens to 'Crush the Heads' of Kurdish Units in Syria
Ankara - Saeed Abdulrazzak/Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged to expand the operations against the Kurdish forces in Syria, as was the case against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. Speaking at the parliamentary group meeting of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Ankara, Erdogan announced that the Turkish forces would expand their military operations against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria, coinciding with the Claw-Lock military operation in northern Iraq, which started Monday dawn. The president asserted that sooner or later, Turkey will "crush the head of terrorist organization," in reference to the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). Turkey considers the YPG an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, whose leaders are stationed in northern Iraq and have been engaged in an armed conflict for more than 40 years for the autonomy of the Kurds of Turkey. Turkey designated the PKK a "terrorist organization," saying they constitute a threat to its national security. Erdogan stressed that Turkey will continue its operations against "terrorists" in northern Iraq and northern Syria until their final elimination. On the issue of Syrian migrants, Erdogan asserted that his country embraces migrants, noting that the Syrians will want to return to their homes when peace is established, and the construction is completed. Meanwhile, Turkish forces bombed Ain Issa district's eastern and western countryside, targeting Mushaiyrefah and the international M4 highway in the eastern al-Raqqah countryside and Hoshan and al-Khalidiyah in the western countryside of Ain Issa district in northern al-Raqqah countryside. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that Turkish forces fired six rocket shells on the Qubour Qrajanah area in the countryside of Tel Tamr, north-west al-Hasakah.
Also, the Turkish Defense Ministry said it "neutralized" ten terrorists who attempted to infiltrate and launch attacks in the Operation Olive Branch and the Operation Peace Spring zones in northern Syria. "The fight against the PKK/ YPG continues in Syria," the ministry added.
Later, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said the government is considering banning Syrian refugees residing in Turkey from visiting their country during the upcoming Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha holidays. Soylu accused the head of the Republican People's Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of adopting a provocative approach to inflame xenophobia in Turkey ahead of the election. Kilicdaroglu reiterated Tuesday that his party would send Syrian migrants to their countries, and they would "voluntarily" leave. "They will come to visit Turkey as tourists," he said, adding that his party would mend ties with the Bashar Assad regime to facilitate their return. The decision came after the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader said that Syrians who go back to their country to celebrate Eid al-Fitr should not be allowed to return to Turkey, adding that the migrants sheltered in Turkey should return voluntarily with dignity once the decade-old internal conflict ends in their country. "Our fundamental objective should be to see Syrians off in a voluntary way and with dignity after the harsh conditions that led them to flee their country disappear," MHP leader Devlet Bahceli said in his weekly address to his lawmakers at parliament.
Turkey used to allow Syrian migrants to return to their country for the Eid holidays in previous years. However, intense pressure from the opposition ahead of the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections in June 2023 forced the government to make some changes to the Syrian issue in Turkey.

Egypt Upholds Life Sentences Against 3 Muslim Brotherhood Leaders
Cairo - Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
Egypt's Court of Cassation upheld life sentences against Supreme Guide of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Badie and two other senior members of the group, Mohamed al-Beltagy and Safwat Hegazy, in the case dubbed "Arab Police Department" storming in Port Said.
The court sentenced six other people to 15 years in prison, three years in jail for another person, and acquitted 59 others. The cases refer to the incident on August 16, 2013, when the convicts stormed the police department in Port Said with guns and weapons and assaulted police officers to avenge the toppling of former President Mohamed Morsi. The convicts were on trial for killing five people and attempting to kill 70 others following the dispersal of the armed sit-in in the Rabaa al-Adawiya area in Cairo. They were accused of inciting Brotherhood members to storm the Arab police station in Port Said, kill its officers and soldiers, steal the department's weapons, and set detainees free. In August 2015, the Port Said Criminal Court issued verdicts convicting the defendants in the case, so they filed an appeal before the Court of Cassation. In 2017, the court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial in one of the Port Said Criminal Court departments. In a retrial in September 2020, the Port Said Criminal Court convicted the defendants again, and the sentence was upheld in the Appellate Court in 2021. The Public Prosecution charged them with incitement to murder, attempted murder, forming an armed gang to attack the Arab Police Department, kill everyone inside it, and steal weapons. The investigations stated that they misused funds and sabotaged public property in the Arab Police Department, owned by the Ministry of Interior. The investigations indicated that the defendants possessed and obtained unlicensed weapons, personally and through an intermediary, with the intent of public security, as they possessed and received ammunition, explosives, knives, and tools that were used in the assault on people without a license and justification.

Aden Launches Development ‘Battle’ in Freed Governorates
Riyadh - Abdulhadi Habtor/Asharq Al-Awsat/Thursday, 21 April, 2022
A new battle for restoring Yemen was launched in the war-torn country’s interim capital, Aden. Yemeni officials are looking to rebuild the country and normalize the situation in different regions by unifying the ranks of national forces and taking the blessing of regional states and the international community.
Brigadier-General Tareq Saleh, Vice-Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), explained that Aden opens the horizon for a national coalition towards Sanaa, to restore Yemen. “The first victory against Iran was in Aden,” said Saleh at the PLC swearing-in ceremony.
Yemeni Ambassador to Qatar Rajih Badi described the establishment of the PLC as a “historic” moment that won’t be erased from the people’s memory.  “Yemenis are pinning their hopes on what happened in Aden, to unite their ranks and direct their energies and capabilities in order to restore the state,” Badi told Asharq Al-Awsat. He added that state restoration, whether in peace or by war, is the greatest goal of the PLC. Badi noted that the PLC’s efforts have the support of the Saudi-led Arab Coalition. For his part, Marwan Noaman, the deputy permanent representative of Yemen to the United Nations, considered the return of the PLC and all state agencies to Aden a defining historical moment in the history of Yemen. “Aden is once again witnessing a new historical stage in the present and future of Yemen by uniting the word of all Yemenis to restore the state, end the coup, achieve sustainable peace, stability and prosperity, and launch Yemen towards the bright future,” Noaman told Asharq Al-Awsat. “There is great optimism among various segments of society in Yemen, and hopes are pinned on the country's new leadership in order to launch the process of development, economic recovery, and integration into the Gulf economy,” he added. Moreover, a Yemeni official affirmed that “Aden has always been a symbol of peace, construction and civilization, and has embraced all Yemenis since ancient times.”“The return of the PLC and the government means the return of life to all Yemenis,” said the official who requested anonymity. They added that the coming days will witness a major development battle in liberated governorates.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on April 21-22/2022
The Difficulties Hindering a Victory Day Celebration
Hussam Itani/Asharq Al-Awsat/April 21/2022
May 9th, the day that marks the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany, which Russia usually celebrates with large military parades and a speech by President Vladimir Putin, is still the date Moscow is expected to announce major progress in its war on Ukraine.
However, this May 9th, which is drawing closer, has still not produced significant military changes in the Donbas –whose “liberation” is Russia’s stated goal for this war. A number of observers have tried to explain Russia’s slow pace in preparing for this third phase of their campaign, attributing it to great difficulties faced by Russian military leadership and their failure to make use of the faults that appeared during the battles near Kyiv and in the Ukrainian northeast. On April 17, in its daily assessment of ongoing military developments, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) stated that Russian forces had practically occupied the port of Mariupol and reached the port of the city despite Kyiv authorities’ denials. Only a small group of Ukrainian soldiers remains deployed in some neighborhoods of Mariupol, in addition to a few hundred, mostly from the Azov Battalion, trapped in the Azovstal iron and steelworks factory.
The assessment adds that Russian units that participated in the Kyiv offensive seem to have begun redeploying in eastern Ukraine without being reorganized or remobilizing their ranks (today filled with inexperienced soldiers) and without addressing the shortages in manpower and equipment. Meanwhile, the forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk “Republics” are being pushed towards the front lines.
In its analysis, the ISW rules out that the aforementioned military and paramilitary units will be able to carry out a large-scale military operation beyond the tactical assaults currently being launched along the Izyum-Rubizhne axis. In light of an urgent need to compensate for human losses, the assessment points to images that appeared on Russian social media sites depicting the financier of mercenary recruitment company Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in eastern Ukraine, in what appears to be an effort by the Kremlin to boost the recruitment of paid Wagner mercenaries.
The failure of the Russian army to launch its long-awaited offensive on the parts of the Donbas that Ukrainian forces control indicates that Moscow is looking for ways to ensure it eliminates the threat of a new defeat, even if that means a longer war that misses the Victory Day deadline of the ninth of May.
Indeed, the final analysis of many Western military observers pits the difficulties that Ukraine will face in preventing a Russian occupation of their territory against what they call the “chronic diseases” afflicting the Russian army, the most serious symptoms of which were assumed to have been treated by the modernization process overseen by Putin in recent years.
According to them, the extreme centralization of decision-making within the Russian chain of command is a major problem that has deprived officers in the middle and lower ranks of the freedom to take the initiative or make field decisions independently.
Moreover, the difficulty of changing battle plans and the lack of flexibility are due to a host of unresolved issues both in terms of the doctrine that Russian officers receive, which places them in isolation from the footsoldiers, or the mistakes and errors made on the field of battle. Inertia and excessive centralization are largely to blame for the breakdown of the chain of command and control, the repercussions of which were also on display in the unhinged actions of Russian soldiers, who launched a wave of killings and thefts, as many observers have noted.
In light of the regime in Moscow, the extent to which military modernization has managed to achieve the leadership’s political aims is another question that has been extensively debated. This question rose to the fore as the diminished willingness of Russian soldiers to fight and their low morale became evident as they abandoned their vehicles and tanks as soon they ran out of fuel and in the poor quality of food given to these forces, as well as a host of supply-line and logistical problems more generally.
According to experts, modern armies are a reflection of their societies, and it is difficult to build a fighting force capable of attaining significant victories if the soldiers don’t believe in their country’s political, ideological, or moral superiority. Added to this are problems associated with Russian technology, which has been shown to be less advanced than that of the West on the battlefield. Indeed, it has even become evident that the weapons that Russia had bet on to gain the upper hand in Ukraine were poorly supplied, stored, and maintained, as they had lost much of their operational effectiveness before ever arriving on the battlefield. It seems that the Russian military will miss the landmark date of May 9th due to the multitude of structural problems already revealed by the first round of war against Ukraine. However, there is no reason to believe that Moscow will abandon this war as the strategic option in dealing with the Ukrainian issue, nor are there signs of Russia abandoning its dependence on quantity over quality in military affairs, even if such dependence costs it colossal human and material losses.

Dngers of Over-Reach
Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy/Asharq Al-Awsat/April 21/2022
When it comes to conducting international relations the West has a tendency to over-reach, this is particularly true when it is engaged in armed conflict. Included amongst them are the instances where the West over-promised and under-delivered as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. The results have been counterproductive to the West’s interests and disastrous to the people of the countries involved. Given the topical issue of the crisis in Ukraine, I will confine myself to Europe and most particularly those cases that involve Russia in one way or the other. The first over-reach was the humiliation of Germany in the First World War. This unleashed the drive to restore national pride that gave birth to Nazism. The outcome was the Second World War.
The second was again the over-kill of Germany which resulted in its total defeat in the Second World War. The goal was the total obliteration of Germany’s industrial and physical infrastructure. The consequence was the vacuum created in Europe which lead to the emergence of an even more potent adversary: the Soviet Union. This resulted in a forty-year Cold War that diverted the United States and Soviet resources to an unnecessary arms race with worldwide consequences.
In both situations had the total defeat of Germany been avoided and thus sparing it unnecessary humiliation, a strong Europe could have emerged sooner with Germany at its center that would have acted as a counterweight to a formidable ideological adversary, the Soviet Union. I guess we will never know whether such a scenario could have occurred.
In the first case, the rise of Nazism could have been prevented and WWII would have been avoided. In the second case a rapidly recovering Germany would have been at the center of a vibrant new Europe that could have prevented the communist takeover in the eastern part of the continent. Europe would have been a different place and the dynamics between it and both the US and the Soviet Union would have been different.
The third came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The West's policy was to exploit the weakness of Russia in its early years by creating a fait accompli in which Moscow had to resign itself to accepting a secondary status. Therefore there was the hurried expansion of NATO and the European Union through the absorption of the former Soviet allies in Eastern Europe. At the time, Russia was too weak to resist. What this policy failed to take into account was that Russia was a proud nation possessing a long and illustrious history and strong traditions which gave it a sense of exceptionalism, not dissimilar from that of the United States.
This sense of exceptionalism, again like the United States, is manifested in a missionary zeal. Whereas the United States' mission is to spread freedom and democracy around the world, Russia's divine mission is to provide the world with a superior moral model derived from the Orthodox Church.
The Western political model is based on diffusion of power, a system of checks and balances and a pragmatic outlook. Russia has always known centralized authority and takes pride in its moral purity. Russia faced a dilemma in that it was not entirely accepted by the West, and at the same time it is not entirely comfortable with the Western value system. Had western civilization absorbed Russia, the West would be different from what is today.
Anyone familiar with Russian history cannot overlook the fact that Russian mentality possesses immutable characteristics that are reflected in the political system: the belief in exceptionalism, accepting centralized authority and a security phobia arising from the fact that Russia, over the centuries, has been invaded from all directions.
It is these characteristics that are largely responsible for intermittent rivalry between Russia and the West. However, not all Russians consider the West as their rival. There are those who would like Russia to absorb long the western value system. But there are also Russians who see themselves both as Europeans as well as Asians, and Eurasians. The latter believe that they possess a value system that is morally superior to that of the materialistic West. No one captures Russian nationalism, in its extreme form, better than Alexander Dugin, a Russian political philosopher in his 1997 book “ Foundations of Geopolitics “.
The humiliation Russia suffered during the Yeltsin years would not stand. It was only a matter of time before Russia would force the West to deal with it as a great power and treat it with the respect it deserves.
President Putin in one important aspect draws a historical comparison with former President Gorbachev. Both - as all Russian leaders from the Czars to the communists - strove to ensure Russian greatness. Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union at a time when it was ripe for change. The communist system was no longer sustainable for a variety of reasons. If it were not for Gorbachev, it would have been someone else from his generation who would have attempted to reform the system.
The issue of generation is critical. Lenin and Stalin, who represented the first generation of communist leaders, rode the tide of revolutionary romanticism inculcated in them in the early twentieth century. Their political formation took place before and during the Revolution. Their point of reference was pre- revolutionary Russia where the overwhelmingly majority of the population was living in destitute. With the Revolution, in spite of the civil war and foreign military interventions and subsequently the famines , the vast majority improved their lot. At least that was how the leadership justified its policies. They succeeded against all odds. Communism would ultimately triumph as the dominant system of government everywhere.
The second generation, represented by both Krushchev and Brezhnev, whose political formation was influenced by both the Second World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet Union emerged victorious and Europe was devastated. The economic conditions in the Soviet Union were therefore not worse than the rest of Europe. The Soviet Union was therefore still on its path to greatness. Khrushchev famously announced in 1956 to Western ambassadors in Moscow that
“ We (the Soviet Union) will bury you ( the West) ”.
The third generation was represented by President Gorbachev. This generation was born long after the Bolshevik Revolution and were too young to be politically influenced by the Second World War. Their point of reference was therefore elsewhere. This generation had seen the world shrinking into a global village. It was no longer possible to convince the Soviet people to compromise on the quality of their lives. Their point of reference was no longer the 1917 Revolution or WWII, but the West where the contrast with the standard of living was glaring. The Soviet government had to deliver a better life for its citizens.
In short, all Russian leaders from the Czars to the communists to Putin were driven by a seemingly uncontrollable urge to ensure that Russia be treated with respect as a great and powerful nation.
The need to erase the humiliation that Russia suffered during the Yeltsin years and the overwhelming urge to remind the world of Russian exceptionalism is the historical context in which President Putin came to power.
Similar to the case of Gorbachev, if it were not Putin, it would have been someone else from the same generation who would have pursued policing to redress the humiliation Russia suffered during the Yeltsin years. Maybe he would have gone about matters in a different manner, but he would not have veered from the goal of ensuring that the world would deal with Russia in a respectful manner. This meant respecting Russia’s interests and security concerns.
This is also the context in which the crisis in Ukraine occurred. Russia chose to trigger a crisis in Ukraine to draw the attention of the world to its grievances.
The Russian body politic is not monolithic. There are those who oppose President Putin, the majority of which probably also oppose the war in Ukraine. They are, however, very far from the critical mass that can influence decisions in so far as Ukraine is concerned.
So attributing the crisis in Ukraine solely to Putin and his “Siloviki”
security entourage misses the point. It overlooks Russia’s historical aspirations to be treated as a great nation. The danger is that Russia cannot accept defeat in Ukraine.
Pursuing Russia’s defeat in Ukraine would be another disastrous over-reach on the part of the West. A new formula of co-existence and cooperation between Russia and the West is the only way to avoid a prolonged crisis in which the entire world will suffer.

Are We Letting Putin Win?
Guy Millère/Gatestone Institute/April 21/2022
General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, keeps repeating that Russia is on the verge of defeat: "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to stop the atrocities by driving them [the Russians] out. He wants a victory, and he can get it".
A small contingent of Ukrainian soldiers is still heroically resisting Russian forces in what remains of the destroyed city [Mariupol]. Is anyone coming to their rescue?
Others still say that Putin should be offered an "off-ramp" as a face-saving device. Putin does not want an off-ramp. Putin wants Ukraine -- as much of it as he can get. Putin getting any of it simply sets a precedent for other predators. Putin should not be rewarded with land. He should be rewarded with a war crimes tribunal, perhaps similar to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda or, as former US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton recommended, by Russians or Ukrainian tribunals -- just not by the "illegitimate" and "lawless" International Criminal Court (ICC). But that would be later.
Arming Ukraine, providing it with means to defeat Russia's unprovoked aggression and drive the Russians out of Ukraine, should be seen as a way to force Putin, and other potential predators, to understand that the costs for aggression are astronomical. So far, although the Biden administration has been generous, many Americans find that it has not given Ukraine many of the weapons it desperately needs, or given them fast enough. Hopefully, this is changing.
Does the Biden administration secretly want Putin to win? The former chess grand champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has suggested that Putin is "the devil you know." The US seems naively to have considered Russia an ally to negotiate a new "nuclear deal" with Iran and as a partner for "climate change". For Russia, climate change concerns in the US means Russia can sell more oil to a country that has shut down its own gargantuan energy supply. So far, as Russia and Iran plan how to evade US sanctions on Russia and enrich themselves, America's interests appear the last concern of Russia's negotiators in the Iran nuclear talks.
There seems to be a current Washington fantasy about Russia: that Putin and Russian officials are people "you can do business with." The business has, in fact, been done: according to the New York Post, a "[US Senate] report says, Hunter Biden profited from a 'financial relationship' that he and associate Devon Archer had with Russia's richest woman, Elena Baturina, former wife of the late Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov."
The Biden administration appears to have gambled that if they were nice to Russia, Russia would be nice to them. They began their term by giving Putin the two things he wanted most. They extended the New START Treaty so that Russia could continue making tactical nuclear weapons, and they gave Putin the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to ensure that he would be able to supply Europe and Germany with natural gas in winter (while bypassing Ukraine) -- or shut the gas off. The US also allowed Russia's negotiators in the talks to revive the 2015 JCPOA "nuclear deal" with Iran in Vienna, Austria – where the US was not allowed in the same room with Iranians -- to have Russia's lead negotiator, Mikhail Ulyanov, represent the US. Not surprisingly, Ulyanov emerged from the talks saying that "Iran got much more than it expected."
The way to end the war, of course, is to defeat Putin -- and send a message to other aggressors waiting in the wings that they should not even think about taking on the United States.
Trump, an experienced businessman, spoke nicely to and about Putin -- but delivered nothing. Putin, however, especially after the woebegone US surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, quickly took the measure of Biden and his administration. If they had wanted Putin to go to war, they seemed to do everything they could to bring one about.
Putin could be on the verge of defeat -- if the West, which has everything to lose, would just enable Ukraine to defeat him. Allowing Putin to win would not only be a betrayal of that international commitment to Ukraine; it would also broadcast to the world that any country can commit all the war crimes it wants without suffering any consequences. It would signal the defeat of all the values​​ Western world leaders claim to defend. The geopolitical implications could well be devastating.
A small contingent of Ukrainian soldiers is still heroically resisting Russian forces in what remains of the destroyed city of Mariupol. Is anyone coming to their rescue? Pictured: An aerial view of Mariupol, Ukraine, taken on April 12, 2022, showing the widespread destruction of residential buildings.
Last month, Russian army tanks entered Mariupol, a peaceful city of 431,000 inhabitants, which has since been bombarded for weeks. Tens of thousands of people left the city; those still there have taken refuge in cellars, often with no food, water or electricity. No one knows how many civilians are still alive in the city.Russian President Vladimir Putin called in Chechen militias, accused of crimes against humanity, and sent by Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Russian Federation's Chechen Republic. Putin seems to be about to deliver an even more brutal assault. Schools, hospitals, supermarkets, retirement homes -- Russia has spared nothing. A theater where children were gathered -- and the Ukrainians had written the word "children", hoping that the Russian soldiers would at least spare them -- was reduced to ashes. Ukrainian officials estimated that 300 people were killed there. People trying to rescue them also were shelled. A small contingent of Ukrainian soldiers is still heroically resisting Russian forces in what remains of the destroyed city. Is anyone coming to their rescue?
The war Putin started against Ukraine on February 24 keeps increasing in carnage.
Britain's Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said that Putin believed that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as "liberators." Instead, Ukrainians regarded the Russian invaders as invaders, even in areas where Russian is spoken. Ukrainian soldiers, instead of surrendering, fought with breathtaking courage and are continuing to fight. According to American officials, when the US government offered to evacuate Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, his answer was, "I need ammunition, not a ride".
The Russian troops were evidently not equipped for an action lasting more than three or four days. There was a lack of food and fuel; tanks broke down, military columns were immobilized for miles. Russian soldiers were apparently told they were just going on a training exercise, and were on Russian territory. According to Ukrainian officials, some Russian prisoners of war said in interviews that they were reluctant to invade Ukraine and kill Ukrainians. Some deserted. Some reportedly shot themselves in the leg not to fight. Some surrendered to Ukrainian soldiers. According to one report, Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsimbalyuk wrote in a Facebook post that one Russian tank driver ran over the Colonel commanding his unit because he blamed him for the deaths of his friends.
The Ukrainian army not only fought; it obstructed the advance of the Russian army, soon stalled in mud, and even managed to push the Russians back.
Putin's dreamed of conquering Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, did not take place.
The weapons the United States eventually provided to Ukraine, though woefully insufficient, have helped. The weapons Ukraine needs, which could have been pre-positioned months ago, are not arriving fast enough and in a quantity that is sufficient. US aid has had trouble arriving. The Russians stole 14 tons of humanitarian aid on its way to Mariupol. According to Reuters, Zelensky claimed that Russian forces have suffered 20,000 killed. One report says that at least 18 senior Russian officers have been killed. The figures are equivalent to double the losses suffered by the Russian military in Afghanistan over ten years. Some Western media outlets report that the Russians have brought mobile crematoria, apparently to hide form the Russian public the number of their dead.
Putin, on March 16, described the need for the "self-purification" of Russia from "scum and traitors", a sign that he is confronted with opponents within his regime. Russia has fired "about eight" generals and placed the head of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch, Sergey Beseda, in prison.
Putin likely fears that if he loses this war, he will be overthrown, and that he has no choice but to persist. What Putin is doing now resembles what he did in Grozny, Chechnya, in 1999 and Aleppo, Syria, in 2016.
The Russian military is now committing, in cities such as Bucha, war crimes as gruesome as that of Mariupol, not sparing homes or the civilian population. Russia has reportedly used cluster bombs and thermobaric weapons, despite a ban on their use. Russian forced have fired at a nuclear facility and used a hypersonic missile.
On March 25, an official Russian statement was issued saying that the Russian forces had "attained their main objectives" in the rest of the country and were going to "redirect" their action and limit it to the Donbass region. The statement was immediately questioned as a ruse; the bombardments continued. On April 19, Russia launched a major assault in eastern Ukraine.
General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, keeps repeating that Russia is on the verge of defeat: "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to stop the atrocities by driving them [the Russians] out. He wants a victory, and he can get it".
Others still say that Putin should be offered an "off-ramp" as a face-saving device. Putin does not want an off-ramp. Putin wants Ukraine -- as much of it as he can get. Putin getting any of it simply sets a precedent for other predators. Putin should not be rewarded with land. He should be rewarded with a war crimes tribunal, perhaps similar to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda or, as former US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton recommended, by Russians or Ukrainian tribunals -- just not by the "illegitimate" and "lawless" International Criminal Court (ICC). But that would be later.
Negotiations were used by Putin for buying time to keep shelling Ukrainians. Putin's demands have not changed: he wants the recognition by Ukraine of the Crimea as Russian territory and of the self-declared republics of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states; a broad disarmament of the Ukrainian military; the transformation of Ukraine into a "neutral" state (therefore a passage of Ukraine to a status of "limited sovereignty" similar to the status of the countries of Central Europe at the time of Soviet Union), and the recognition of Russian as an official language of Ukraine. He seems to have given up on demanding Zelensky's departure, but that is not certain. Putin reportedly has sent multiple squads to try to kill Zelensky, and has possibly tried to poison a negotiating team.
Zelensky refused on March 7 to give in unconditionally to Russia's demands. He has renounced ​​asking for Ukraine's entry into NATO, and has said that he was ready to negotiate the status of Crimea and the two self-proclaimed republics of Donbass. On March 27, he held an interview with Russian journalists. "Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state, we are ready to go for it", he said. He added that Ukraine would not try to retake Crimea by force and that a peace deal with Russia would have to be put to a referendum.
The offer apparently did not satisfy Putin, who said on April 12 that negotiations had hit a dead end. The war goes on.
Arming Ukraine, providing it with means to defeat Russia's unprovoked aggression and drive the Russians out of Ukraine, should be seen as a way to force Putin, and other potential predators, to understand that the costs for aggression are astronomical. So far, although the Biden administration has been generous, many Americans find that it has not given Ukraine many of the weapons it desperately needs, or given them fast enough. Hopefully, this is changing.
Does the Biden administration secretly want Putin to win? The former chess grand champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has suggested that Putin is "the devil you know." The US seems naively to have considered Russia an ally to negotiate a new "nuclear deal" with Iran and as a partner for "climate change". For Russia, climate change concerns in the US means Russia can sell more oil to a country that has shut down its own gargantuan energy supply. So far, as Russia and Iran plan how to evade US sanctions on Russia and enrich themselves, America's interests appear the last concern of Russia's negotiators in the Iran nuclear talks.
There seems to be a current Washington fantasy about Russia: that Putin and Russian officials are people "you can do business with." The business has, in fact, been done: according to the New York Post, a "[US Senate] report says, Hunter Biden profited from a 'financial relationship' that he and associate Devon Archer had with Russia's richest woman, Elena Baturina, former wife of the late Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov."
The Biden administration appears to have gambled that if they were nice to Russia, Russia would be nice to them. They began their term by giving Putin the two things he wanted most. They extended the New START Treaty so that Russia could continue making tactical nuclear weapons, and they gave Putin the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to ensure that he would be able to supply Europe and Germany with natural gas in winter (while bypassing Ukraine) -- or shut the gas off. The US also allowed Russia's negotiators in the talks to revive the 2015 JCPOA "nuclear deal" with Iran in Vienna, Austria – where the US was not allowed in the same room with Iranians -- to have Russia's lead negotiator, Mikhail Ulyanov, represent the US. Not surprisingly, Ulyanov emerged from the talks saying that "Iran got much more than it expected."
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden hinted that if Putin were to carry out just a "minor incursion," that it might be acceptable. When the Biden administration then said it would not use its military, Putin saw it as a "green light". The administration is apparently under the illusion that, down the road, Russia will actually be helping the US with "climate change" and is presently advocating for US interests in negotiating a new "nuclear deal" with Iran. Russia is not; Russia is helping Russia -- and Iran.
For weeks, Putin has been methodically turning Ukraine into scorched earth, with relatively few negative consequences to himself. He seems to be trying to landlock Ukraine, preventing commerce by closing off access to the Black Sea. Ukraine wants more surface-to-air missile systems, tanks, anti-ship missiles and fighter jets to protect what is left of its seacoast, as well as to drive the Russians back.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been dragging its feet on delivering requested and promised items. Secretary of State Antony Blinken protests that "What we're trying to do is end this war in Ukraine, not start a larger one."
The way to end the war, of course, is to defeat Putin -- and send a message to other aggressors waiting in the wings that they should not even think about taking on the United States.
Putin would likely not even have started this war if Biden and his administration had not deeply damaged one of the major assets that the United States had under previously: deterrence.
During Trump administration, Putin did not lift a finger. Trump, an experienced businessman, spoke nicely to and about Putin -- but delivered nothing. Putin, however, especially after the woebegone US surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, quickly took the measure of Biden and his administration. If they had wanted Putin to go to war, they seemed to do everything they could to bring one about.
The day of his inauguration, Biden blocked the Keystone XL pipeline project, then quickly led the United States from energy independence to energy dependence. Since then -- as all commerce, manufacturing and transportation depend on energy -- prices for everything in America, especially staples items such as food, gasoline and heating, have skyrocketed, bringing with them a crushing inflation. Meanwhile, higher global prices for Russia's oil and gas exports allowed Putin to immediately began raking extra billions, enabling him to finance his war.
On March 8, the Biden administration decided to ban US imports of Russian oil, natural gas and coal: too little, too late. European countries continue to buy gas and Russian oil at their new higher prices, thereby financing Russia's war against Ukraine.
To Russia, Biden's decision to lift sanctions on Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in May 2021 showed only extreme weakness. Pretending to reinstate sanctions on Russian oil that do not begin until June 24, when the weather is warm, showed even greater weakness. "Let's have a conversation in another month or so to see if they're working," President Biden said in February with a straight face about US sanctions on Russia. In an asymmetrical war, a month means untold thousands captured, tortured, or dead.
In Brussels for a meeting of NATO heads of state, Biden said that "sanctions never deter" -- contradicting what Kamala Harris, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken had been saying for weeks.
Sanctions, Matthew Continetti wrote, "are punitive... They may constrain an autocrat. They rarely stop him. Why? Because money matters less to tyrants than power".
Europe, not the United States, has been leading the way to help Ukraine, but does not seem likely to do more than it is doing, Putin is counting on that. Europe, mainly through the massive missteps of Germany's elites, is energy-dependent on Russia, industrially dependent on China and militarily dependent on the United States. Even though the leaders of the European Union seem to have received a wake-up call, they have a long tradition of generally appeasing their enemies. French President Emmanuel Macron, although he has obtained absolutely nothing, apparently wants to maintain his dialogue with Putin and appears reluctant to see that it is useless.
The Biden administration apparently has no dialogue with Russian officials, and according to the Washington Post, top Russian military leaders have declined to take calls from their American counterparts.
The Biden administration does not even appear to feel humiliated, and has blandly been accepting more humiliations: Iranian negotiators have refused to meet with the American negotiators in talks, now hopefully dead, to revive the 2015 JCPOA deal. The United States evidently would like to delist as a terrorist group the world's foremost terrorist organization, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as if were not actually a terrorist group, but at least for the moment has mercifully shelved that idea.
Biden, who is supposed to be the leader of the free world, has been doing almost nothing to stop the war. And he also seems ready to let other authoritarian powers, in particular the Chinese Communist Party, use force to get their way.
On March 26, in a speech in Poland, Biden, referring to Putin, said, "this man cannot remain in power." It was likely the most constructive sentence he has ever said.
Within minutes, a communiqué from the White House tried to "clarify" what he said:
"The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change."
It was the third time in less than three days that the White House rushed to "clarify" something Biden said.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances states:
"The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine"
Putin could be on the verge of defeat -- if the West, which has everything to lose, would just enable Ukraine to defeat him. Allowing Putin to win would not only be a betrayal of that international commitment to Ukraine; it would also broadcast to the world that any country can commit all the war crimes it wants without suffering any consequences. It would signal the defeat of all the values​​ Western world leaders claim to defend. The geopolitical implications could well be devastating.
According to Garry Kasparov:
"How does Putin fall? A million Russians in Red Square? A palace coup of military or security? An oligarch's rebellion? All of the above. It must be apparent that Putin is an obstacle to their goals, whether of power, liberty, or prosperity.... Don't give off-ramps to Putin. Give off-ramps to Russia after Putin, to Russians who will abandon him for the good of the nation and world."
Let us let Putin fall. It would be doing the world a great favor. How many people are we going to allow him to slaughter before we make him stop?
*Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
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The absence of an off-ramp...A diplomatic end to Putin’s war is becoming unlikely
Clifford D. May/The Washington Times/April 21/2022
Let’s acknowledge that we’re treading on dangerous ground. Russia is ruled by a thug who has launched a war intended to extinguish Ukraine as an independent nation.In 1990, there was a similar crisis. Another thug, Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied Kuwait which, he insisted, was not a real country but only a rogue province of Iraq.
“This will not stand!” pronounced President George H. W. Bush who then mobilized more than two dozen nations to participate in a military campaign to oust the aggressors.
They did so not because Kuwait was lovely, free, and democratic. They did so to support Mr. Bush’s vision – a quintessentially American vision – of “a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.” And, yes, they also didn’t want the Iraqi dictator to get his hands on Kuwait’s oil which he would have used to support terrorism and other nefarious purposes.
Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire nuclear weapons but was denied that capability when Israel, in 1981, bombed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad.
By contrast, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ruler, has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, including ten times as many tactical nukes as the U.S. So, the perils of taking him on directly are much greater.
America and its NATO allies have not sent troops to defend Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky has not asked for that. The democratically elected Ukrainian leader is only asking that he and his fellow countrymen be given the means to defend their land, their families, and their freedom. We should give them those means – urgently and unstintingly.
They have been fighting with inspiring zeal and success. Over the weekend, it was reported that another Russian general had been killed – the eighth since the invasion began.
A few days earlier, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva, was destroyed. Russian officials said it was an accident. More plausibly, the ship was hit by two made-in-Ukraine ground-to-sea Neptune missiles. “We have one more diving spot in the Black Sea now,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov tweeted Friday.
Are such developments inducing Mr. Putin to think about what diplomats call an “off-ramp”? I suspect he’s thinking about revenge instead.
Simultaneously, his lengthening list of war crimes is leading Ukrainian patriots and their supporters to conclude that there can be no diplomatic solution.
“Ukraine must be victorious, and any instrument of peace should document this fact,” former undersecretary of state Paula Dobriansky and former first deputy assistant secretary of the Navy Richard Levine wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
That is certainly the outcome justice demands. Can it be achieved? At present, I don’t see Mr. Putin winning. But neither do I see him being decisively defeated and expelled from all of Ukraine, including Crimea and the eastern region of Donbas where he’s maintained forces since 2014 and where a new phase of the war is about to begin.
Nothing we’re hearing from the Putinists suggests they are reconsidering their insistence that Ukrainians are rebels and traitors to their neo-colonialist empire.
“Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien civilization,” snarled RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned media agency.
Some Russian officials are also now insisting that the Cold War never ended. Olga Kovitidi, a Russian senator from Crimea, went even further, telling an interviewer that “the Second World War did not end.” She added that “this snake of Nazism (has) raised its head” again in Ukraine. Germany, too, she added, remains a Nazi regime.
Such propaganda is being relentlessly disseminated by multiple Kremlin media outlets. If the polls can be believed, many if not most Russians are buying it.
That may be further emboldening Mr. Putin who reportedly sent a letter to Mr. Biden warning of “unpredictable consequences” if he does not “stop the irresponsible militarization” of “the Kiev regime.”
In other words, Mr. Putin is instructing the U.S., a sovereign nation, not to help Ukraine, a sovereign nation, defend itself from his barbarism.
Similarly, Xi Jinping, Mr. Putin’s key ally and the ruler of the increasingly powerful Chinese empire, recently warned that he would “take strong measures” if the U.S. does not cease official interactions with the democratically elected government in Taiwan, which he calls a rogue province of China.
American isolationists on both the left and right will urge Mr. Biden to back off, to grant Russia and China their “spheres of influence.” If tyrants run roughshod over the world beyond our shores, why should that matter to Americans, ensconced as we are between two deep blue oceans?
What they have failed to learn from history is that appeasement never sates the appetites of those ambitious to conquer and subjugate others. Once men like Messrs. Putin and Xi believe they have the algorithm for making America and other free nations retreat and capitulate, they’ll use it again and again.
To paraphrase Churchill: No matter how much you feed the crocodile, in the end you’ll be the dessert.
No, we don’t want the new Cold War now being waged against us by Moscow, Beijing and their allies – notably the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea – to turn hot. But attempting to make ourselves inoffensive to aggressors who despise and want to destroy us is no solution.
So, as noted, we’re treading on dangerous ground. It will require an unusually wise and courageous leader to walk the strategic tightrope and choose the least-bad policy options. Let’s acknowledge, too, that it’s been a while since we’ve had a leader who fits that description.
*lifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. Follow him on Twitter @CliffordDMay. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Little Ukraine and the solidarity of a diaspora in New York
Janine di Giovanni/April 20, 2022
In May 1986, when news of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster was finally leaked from behind the Iron Curtain, hundreds of people reverently gathered in New York City's St George Ukrainian Church on East 7th Avenue and Taras Shevchenko Place, named after Ukraine’s most famous poet.
The East Village had been the heart of the city’s Ukrainian population since the 1950s post-war immigration boom, when many fled Soviet repression. St George’s, a golden Byzantium structure built in 1905 towering over Cooper Square, is really the heart of it.
As stories poured in about the catastrophic nuclear accident in Ukraine – then part of the Soviet Union – relatives frantically tried to get information from fellow church goers. How many people were affected? When would it end? How many died? They sought news from the anti-communist Ukrainian newspaper which was published across the Hudson River in Jersey City.
In those days, after church people wandered to Veselka, the 24-hour Ukrainian diner famous for borscht, or to Surma, a Ukrainian general store where they could buy Ukrainian anti-communist newspapers or pysanky, hand-painted Easter eggs thought to protect families from ill-deeds. Or they could browse postcards painted by the Ukrainian-American artist Yaroslava Surmach, whose family owned Surma.
While Little Ukraine did not have the majestic architecture of Lviv, or Kyiv’s grandeur, people there in the community felt at home. They could gossip in front of the Ukrainian meat market, bank their money at the Ukrainian Credit Union, or frequent the shops where only Ukrainian (or sometimes Polish) was spoken. They could eat stuffed cabbage at “Ukie Nash” – the Ukrainian National Home, which burnt down and was then rebuilt with a dive bar called the Karpaty after the Carpathian Mountains. They sent their children to Ukrainian scouts camp called Plast, or sent their daughters to Ukrainian dance classes. Preserving their identity, language and culture was paramount. Theirs was one of the proudest diasporas.
Today, the population of Little Ukraine is smaller than it was during Chernobyl days, but the fierce sense of identity still exists. Although the numbers are unclear, we do know that just after the Second World War, about 60,000 Ukrainians lived between Houston Street and East 14th Street. Now, it is estimated about one-third of the city’s 80,000 Ukrainians live here.
The war with Russia has reignited the community’s pride, nationalism and resistance. This year, Ukrainian Easter is on April 24, right in the middle of a fierce offensive on the eastern part of the country. Little Ukraine – my neighbourhood – is bonded even tighter in a mixture of fierce solidarity and profound sadness. There are flags everywhere, but the local shop where I buy paper or pens says he sold out in late February after the war started.
“You can’t get a flag for love or money,” he says.
Still, every morning when I wake up, I see a blue and yellow banner hanging out the window of my neighbour in the opposite building. He bought one early on. Up and down Second Avenue, there are more flags, alongside anxious conversations. What will Vladimir Putin do? Will there be a nuclear war? How can I get my relatives to Warsaw, then to New York? How is the counter-offensive going?
America is a country of immigrants but also of continuation. Except for Mayflower descendants, everyone comes from somewhere else. My maternal great-grandparents were married in 1888 at St Anthony’s, the Roman Catholic church on East Houston Street, where I now go to mass, on the edge of Little Italy. bThey then moved across the river to Newark, where there was a firm Italian American community in the Forest Hills section, many from the same villages in Southern Italy where they were born. They spoke Italian, bought bread from Italian bakeries, meat from Italian butchers, cheese from local farms. The same could be said for Germans, Poles, Swedes. Immigrants clustered together for safety and information. I have friends who grew up in Chinatown with three generations of family, whose grandparents escaped the Chinese Civil War. Further south from where I live, past Little Ukraine and east of Little Italy and Chinatown is the Lower East Side, Jews from Russia flocked to Delancey Street.
I am not sure why the Ukrainians chose the area south of East 14th street and west of what is now known as Alphabet City. Some opted for Canada, which has a large and vocal diaspora, including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who played a key role in getting sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank in place, and has been a leading voice in solidarity. Many Ukrainians also ended up in the coal mines of Pennsylvania near Wilkes-Barre, or Chicago. But many also settled here in the East Village, bringing their food, their faith, their customs. Never have those bonds been more important, as Ukraine struggles to resist a gruesome war. America is a country of immigrants but also of continuation. Except for Mayflower descendants, everyone comes from somewhere else
My local breakfast place, Veselka, opened in 1954 by Wolodymyr Darmochwal, a Ukrainian refugee, fleeing Soviet oppression after the Second World War. It serves “Ukrainian comfort food” – that is, borchst and perogi. But now, on the menu is a sign advertising “Eat Borscht and Stand With Ukraine”. The restaurant is staffed by Ukrainians and Poles and is donating 100 per cent of its borscht sales to Ukrainian charities, some supporting children, some supporting soldiers.
Eavesdropping, I hear conversations over kovbasa, a sausage, and eggs about the war. I hear hushed tones as people huddle over their iPhones reading news reports and watching videos using key words such as “Mariupol”, “Odesa”, “Lviv hit by rockets” and “War crimes”. No one uses the word “Russian”.
“I won’t use that word,” a woman who lent me her newspaper said.
The people at Veselka are also collecting non-monetary items, medical supplies such as band aids and Betadine, which will be shipped overseas for soldiers. It has been a gathering place for potential foreign fighters who meet and share tactics for getting to their motherland (cheap flight to Warsaw, train to Kyiv or cross at the border) as well as an “Amazon Wish List” to donate tactical backpacks, flak jackets and face respirators to survive chemical attacks.
“Every little bit helps, thank you for your contribution, glory to Ukraine,” they say. On the Veselka website, there is also a link to a speech of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of what Ukraine needs to win the war and a list of heavy artillery, armour, aircraft and air defence systems. I got more military information about why Ukraine needs attack aircraft on their page than I did in all my previous research and reading.
More from Janine di Giovanni
Bosnians have something to say to Ukraine about life after a siege
Before the war started, my neighbourhood was always colourful and very much a part of seedy old New York. There is rent-controlled low-income housing, dusty shops that sell ornaments or homemade bread, tiny hole in the wall restaurants, the East Village Meat Market staffed by Ukrainian butchers. The experimental theatre at the end of my street, LaMaMa was once a Ukrainian theatre. KGB, a famous dive bar, was once the Ukrainian Labour Home. Even though I am not yet in Ukraine, I have felt connected to the heart of the diaspora.
Next week on Ukrainian Easter, I plan to forgo my Roman Catholic church to visit St George’s, which still celebrates by the Julian calendar and where, in past years, people wore Ukrainian folk costumes. This year, I will try to make a traditional Ukrainian Easter egg with beeswax and paint. They go back to before Ukraine merged with Christian traditions in the 10th century. They were presents to the gods and symbolise rebirth and spring after a long winter.
I speak to people in Kyiv every day for a war crimes project and I will soon leave to work in Ukraine. But in a strange way, I feel completely connected to the country when I wander down Second Avenue. I understand the strength of the resistance by seeing these solid and brave Ukrainian Americans who came to the US searching for a dream.
Janine di Giovanni
*Janine di Giovanni teaches human rights at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and is a columnist for The National

Iran’s supreme leader in waiting
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/April 21/2022
Major signs point to the high probability that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has been selected to be the country’s next supreme leader.
The modus operandi of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has always been anchored in pointing an accusing finger at his presidents — across the political spectrum — for the country’s political and economic problems. By blaming other officials, Khamenei attempts to evade accountability and responsibility. This was the case with former presidents including the so-called moderate Hassan Rouhani, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, and the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But Khamenei has taken a different approach when it comes to Raisi. In a surprising move, Khamenei, who frequently criticized the nuclear negotiations under Rouhani’s presidency, recently endorsed Raisi during a meeting with the latter’s hardline administration.
He remarked that the efforts of Raisi’s administration were “faithful and diligent” and the nuclear talks “are going ahead properly.” He added: “So far our negotiation team has resisted before the other party’s excessive demands and, God willing, (that resistance) will continue.
“There is nothing wrong with criticizing and commenting on their performance, as long as it is free from suspicion and pessimism and, as I have said many times, does not weaken the elements of the field and disappoint the people.”
Aside from the nuclear talks, Iran’s supreme leader has been commending Raisi in other areas as well. During a meeting with the head of the judiciary, and other officials, Khamenei stated: “Raisi was a prominent example of the jihadist movement that we always advocate, which is working day and night to achieve a good result.”
In addition, Khamenei added, Raisi “revived the people’s hope for the judiciary, and this matter is a great social wealth for the country … we must commend Sayyed Ebrahim Raisi for his tireless efforts during the two years and a bit more in which he was Chief Justice of Iran.”
There were indications several years ago that the regime was grooming Raisi to be the next supreme leader of Iran.
For instance, Raisi ran for president in 2017 and the regime was hoping that he would win. However, the theocratic establishment made several mistakes; the Guardian Council approved some moderates, probably thinking that people were less likely to vote for Rouhani a second time due to his administration’s mismanagement of the economy, as well as Rouhani’s failure to fulfill his campaign promises of improving people’s social, political and religious freedoms.
For many ordinary Iranians, the presidential election was a choice between bad and worse. As a result, they voted for the so-called moderate Rouhani to prevent the hardliner Raisi from winning. Rouhani won by a wide margin, claiming 57 percent of votes cast compared to Raisi’s 38.5 percent.
The next time around, the regime learned its lessons and the Guardian Council introduced many restrictions such as announcing that “all nominees must be between 40 and 70 years of age, hold at least a master’s degree or its equivalent, have work experience of at least four years in managerial posts … and have no criminal record.” The Guardian Council even disqualified some of the regime’s top insiders, such as Ali Larijani in order to remove any hurdles that might prevent Raisi from becoming president.
It is worth noting that Raisi fits what the Islamic Republic is looking for in the next supreme leader.
Raisi’s policies are aligned with those of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite branch, the Quds Force. He would probably allow the IRGC to wield more power in the country and in the region.
First, he does not hesitate to use brutal force and crack down on any opposition, and those who stand against the regime. For example, when he was the deputy prosecutor of Tehran, he was involved in one of the world’s largest mass executions.
A US bipartisan Congressional resolution recently shed light on the scope and nature of this massacre, where thousands of people were executed, including children and pregnant women. According to the resolution “over a four-month period in 1988, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out the barbaric mass executions of thousands of political prisoners and many unrelated political groups ... according to a report by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, the massacre was carried out pursuant to a fatwa, or religious decree, issued by then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,” that mainly targeted members of the opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
Second, Raisi’s policies are aligned with those of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite branch, the Quds Force. He would probably allow the IRGC to wield more power in the country and in the region.
In summary, all developments point to the high likelihood that Raisi has been handpicked by Khamenei and the senior cadre of the IRGC to be the next supreme leader of Iran.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. Twitter: @Dr_Rafizadeh