Proxy Wars

The Kremlin asked Xi Jinping for military assistance to bolster Russia’s efforts in Ukraine, US officials said Sunday.

They declined to disclose the nature of the request other than to say Vladimir Putin asked for “equipment” and support. In addition, Moscow also asked Beijing for economic aid in a bid to help offset the impact of Western sanctions.

The news came as a Russian air strike killed nearly three-dozen people at a military training facility just a few miles from Poland’s border. Prior to Putin’s incursion, NATO made regular use of the base. More than 130 people were injured in the attack on the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, in Ukraine’s Lviv region. Although an air defense system managed to intercept 22 of the 30 missiles fired by Russian warplanes, the remaining eight wreaked havoc.

“Five hours after the attack, the fires at the base were still raging. Dozens of people injured in the attack were raced to area hospitals,” The New York Times, which published verified footage of both the strike and its aftermath, wrote, adding that American forces were housed at the facility until February, but “withdrew days before the Russian invasion.”

Andriy Sadovyi, Lviv’s mayor, took to Facebook Sunday to beg NATO for a no-fly zone. “Do you understand that war is closer than you imagine?”, Sadovyi asked, calling out Joe Biden and Jens Stoltenberg by name. “Russia is already on your border.”

Just before the attack, the Kremlin warned it would treat foreign weapons shipments as legitimate targets. The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday claimed the strikes killed “foreign mercenaries” and destroyed weapons supplied by other countries.

Ukraine is now a full-on proxy war between Russia and NATO. If Beijing grants Putin’s request for military equipment, it’ll be a proxy war between the US and China.

At the same time, Tehran claimed a missile attack near the US consulate in Erbil, a brazen move the IRGC said was retaliation for an Israeli strike in Syria that killed a pair of Revolutionary Guard soldiers. Although no one was injured, and the State Department said the pot shots weren’t directed at US personnel, it was the first time Iran admitted to firing in the direction of a US outpost since the weak-willed retaliatory strikes on al-Asad following Donald Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani. Of course, Tehran’s proxies used to fire missiles at US personnel in Iraq regularly, a habit that ultimately cost Soleimani his life. The Kurdish regional government said Iran targeted civilian areas, not facilities belonging to foreign nations. There was no damage to US government buildings.

The US called the strikes “an outrageous violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.” Iraq said it violated “international law and norms,” although given Iran’s influence in Baghdad, it’s always difficult to know how irritated Iraqi politicians actually are with Iranian aggression. Speaking of Baghdad, Iran suspended talks with Saudi Arabia being held in the city after the Saudis executed 81 people in the Kingdom’s largest ever mass execution. Apparently, at least three-dozen of those killed were Shiite, which didn’t sit well in Tehran.

“It wasn’t clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world’s attention remained focused on Russia’s war on Ukraine and as the US hopes to lower record-high gas prices as energy prices spike worldwide,” the AP noted, somewhat wryly.

An aggrieved IRNA called the executions “a violation of basic principles of human rights and international law.” The regional rivals broke off diplomatic relations in 2016 after Riyadh’s ill-advised decision to execute Nimr al-Nimr, a Shiite cleric whose death touched off a firestorm, pushing the countries to the brink of war. The Baghdad talks, which have been going on for a year, are at least partially aimed at resolving the conflict in Yemen, the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and the staging ground for never-ending drone strikes by the IRGC-backed Houthis on Saudi infrastructure.

The read-through of the Erbil attacks for talks to revive the nuclear deal with Iran weren’t immediately clear, but suffice to say the strikes were a headache for Washington at a time when the return of Iranian barrels may have helped offset some of the pain from sanctions curtailing Russia’s capacity to export energy.

An eleventh hour demand by Sergei Lavrov that the West provide Moscow with a written guarantee that sanctions “launched by the US won’t in any way harm” Russian trade, economic ties and military cooperation with Iran risked torpedoing the discussions at the last minute. “Experts disagree about whether Moscow’s approval is legally required for the nuclear deal to be restored, but China and Iran may not want to proceed without Moscow, and Russia is a member of the joint commission that supervises compliance,” The New York Times noted, adding that “Russia also has the responsibility under the agreement for taking control of Iran’s excess enriched uranium and working with Tehran to convert its Fordow nuclear plant into a research facility.”

Meanwhile, an American journalist was killed in Ukraine Sunday. Brent Renaud, an award-winning filmmaker, was shot in a suburb north of Kyiv. Local police said Renaud and a colleague were riding in a vehicle that took fire from Russian troops. During an interview with CBS, Jake Sullivan called Renaud’s death “shocking and horrifying.”

In a separate interview with CNN, Sullivan addressed the prospect of Xi bailing Putin out. “We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia,” Sullivan said, insisting that the US “will not allow there to be a lifeline to Russia from these economic sanctions from any country, anywhere in the world.”

One imagines the same goes for military assistance.