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.


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6 thoughts on “Proxy Wars

  1. Anyone see any positive news towards resolution this weekend, that can be verified? Or was it a complete shutout (again)?

  2. H-Man. there are rumblings that UKR and Russia want to do a deal. Crimea, the southern states revert to Russian control. It sounds like a deal may be struck. Stay tuned.

    1. If there is a “deal”, it is not a real deal. They will either present it as a cease fire or a conclusion to the violence. Either way, Russia will resume attacks next Oct. Any imminent “deal” is solely because the spring thaw is coming and Russia has calculated they cannot complete their objectives in time.

      The region is well known for marshy bog and heavy equipment needs frozen ground to advance.

      Still entirely possible the prospect of a deal is simply another Russian ruse.

      I expect a chemical weapons attack after this current push concludes. Each push usually lasts 7-10 days before they run out of ammo/food/fuel. After which an “operational” pause is needed to resupply. Wash, rinse, repeat.

      I believe Putin believes a chemical weapons attack will yield greater concessions in a cease fire.

  3. Interesting sideshow going on with Putin’s oil. Apparently it’s not the hottest brand going, at least for China, which is somewhat constrained by their immediate abilities to refine millions of barrels per day. Putin’s oil sort of has a major liquidity problem. LNG is a different story for the EU.

    “With Asia as the only likely destination for a multi-million bb/d change in global crude flows, the dearth of new supertanker bookings for delivery to China is telling. Sinopec, one of the largest global purchasers of Urals crude, has added precisely zero new supertankers to its shipping commitments since the invasion.”

  4. Interesting. Xi has to choose between the butcher of Ukraine or the rest of the world. Let’s see where his wallet (sorry) his heart goes.

  5. One of the (many) bits I don’t get is how the sanctions fit in with a ceasefire, in the minds of the two parties. The sanctions are absolutely open-ended solely at the discretion of the west. But the Russians don’t seem to be trying to negotiate sanctions relief as part of the ceasefire negotiations; the necessary parties aren’t even at the table. They can’t seriously intend to end the war (and surrender their leverage) while leaving the west in position to end the sanctions based on arbitrary future demands, or never end them at all. I guess this backs up Hopium’s point: any ceasefire deal is likely just an intermezzo awaiting either the next phase of war and grabbing all Ukraine no matter the cost or, if we’re lucky, wider and broader negotiations between Russia and pretty much everybody else to reach a “final” settlement of the conflict that implements some new status quo regarding Russia, Ukraine and NATO, sanctions, reparations, etc.

    If that’s the case, it may not matter much what the Ukrainians offer up now. It will all be a tossed salad again when the “real” negotiations begin that include the sanctioning countries. This would somewhat follow the pattern of the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, in which Russia simply declared victory after carving out tiny Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while agreeing to a ceasefire and limited withdrawal and leaving for the future wider international agreements to resolve, or not, as it has turned out, the security issues and the questions of whether or not these two regions were countries. The concrete result Russia got (and perhaps it was all that Putin wanted then) was that Georgia was effectively excluded from NATO. The current war is obviously more ambitious and thornier and I don’t think the Russians will walk away unscathed this time around. By the time they have run the multi-year gauntlet necessary to come to terms with 33 sanctioning countries and one new eternal enemy, they’ll be lucky to walk away with their sanity, much less the Donbas or anything more. And the status of NATO membership for Ukraine? Exactly the same status as pre-war, and has been for years: NATO isn’t offering. We’ll all say that never has less been achieved for so great a cost in human and economic suffering on the part of 190 million Ukrainians and Russians. Just baffling.

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