Showing posts with label Eastern Bloc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eastern Bloc. Show all posts

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Resistance Leaders

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Portrait Galleries - WW2 >> .
Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito > .
Poland Stefan Rowecki > .
France Jean Moulin > .
Netherlands Walraven van Hall > .

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Thursday, February 27, 2020

Belarus↔(Russia)→Lithuania, Poland, EU


For > Poland Military >>, the migration crisis triggered by Belarus is the first tangible experience of the period of chaos that comes with the collapse of the unipolar order we have known so far. For the Polish authorities, this is the end of the geostrategic sleep in which they have been for the last 30 years. 

00:00 Intro
00:45 Border Crisis
05:55 Information Warfare
13:45 The End of Strategic Sleep
17:35 Outro

Geostrategic Projection
Belarus↔(Russia)→Lithuania, Poland, EU ..
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Saturday, December 28, 2019

55-5-14 Warsaw Pact

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The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), officially the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, commonly known as the Warsaw Pact (WP), was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. Signatories: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary. Poland, Romania, Soviet Union.

The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CoMEcon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created, shortly after West Germany was admitted to NATO, in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955 per the London and Paris Conferences of 1954, but it is also considered to have been motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe. 

The Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to NATO. The USSR was concerned by the remilitarisation of West Germany, something it had tried to avoid when it proposed a new European Security Treaty that failed to gain support from the Western powers in November 1954. There was no direct military confrontation between them; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and in proxy wars. Just five days after West Germany joined NATO representatives of the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria met in Warsaw where they signed the treaty. While the agreement established a system of collective security between the member states it also set up a unified military command under the leadership of the Soviet Union.
 
The Pact permitted Soviet troops to be garrisoned on satellite territory, consequently strengthening Soviet control over the Eastern Bloc and acting as a military counterpart to Comecon, the socialist economic organisation that had been established in 1949.

The presence of Soviet troops was a contributing factor to the 1956 uprisings in both Hungary and Poland. Both these countries did, however, take part in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended the Prague Spring. Only Romania and Albania refused to join the invasion, the latter subsequently withdrawing completely from the pact.

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. Its largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (with the participation of all Pact nations except Albania and Romania), which, in part, resulted in Albania withdrawing from the pact less than a month later. The Pact began to unravel in its entirety with the spread of the Revolutions of 1989 through the Eastern Bloc, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland, its electoral success in June 1989 and the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989.

East Germany withdrew from the Pact following German reunification in 1990. On 25 February 1991, at a meeting in Hungary, the Pact was declared at an end by the defense and foreign ministers of the six remaining member states. The Warsaw Pact was formally declared “nonexistent” on 1 July 1991, although in practice it had been in decline for two years as a result of the overthrow of communist governments in the member states that had begun in 1989. The USSR itself was dissolved in December 1991, although most of the former Soviet republics formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization shortly thereafter. Throughout the following 20 years, the seven Warsaw Pact countries outside the USSR each joined NATO (East Germany through its reunification with West Germany; and the Czech Republic and Slovakia as separate countries), as did the Baltic states which had been part of the Soviet Union.
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Tuesday, December 24, 2019

EaP - Eastern Partnership - EU

22-11-27 Polish military modernisation & buying Korean kit - Perun > .
22-9-7 Intermarium - Poland Ukraine Baltics | George Friedman > .
22-7-22 Poland could become strongest land force in the EU - Binkov > .
22-7-21 How the economy of Russia is dying (English subtitles) - Максим Кац > .
22-7-4 Intermarium: Is Strongest Union In Europe About To Appear? - Complete > .
22-6-30 Russia's Cyberattack on Lithuania ~ NATO's Deeper Problems - Spaniel > .
22-6-28 Jacek Bartosiak - Kaliningrad, Suwalki Gap - Ruscia, Poland, Ukraine - S&F > .
22-6-24 Russia's Kaliningrad Problem with Lithuania = Ukraine 2.0-ish - Spaniel > .
22-6-21 Kaliningrad at center of dispute between Russia and Lithuania | DW > .
22-6-21 Lithuania enforces sanctions on Ruscist shipments to Kaliningrad - Denys > .
22-5-6 Could Ukraine cause fall of Belarusian Dictator? - VisPol > . skip ad > .
22-4-20 Suwalki Gap - Lithuania strengthens forces b/o Russia | DW > .
22-3-23 Polish citizens join army b/o Russian invasion of Ukraine - BBC > .
22-1-27 Kazakhstan & Ukraine: Russia's Political and Military Manipulations - VP > .

Geostrategic Projection
European Geostrategic Projection ..

The EU's Eastern Partnership is a collection of 6 countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus*, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) and is an attempt from the EU to bolster support within the region and also (allegedly) protect them from the influences of Russia.

The Eastern Partnership (EaP) is a joint initiative of the European External Action Service of the European Union (EU) together with the EU, its Member States, and six Eastern European partners governing the EU's relationship with the post-Soviet states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The EaP is intended to provide a forum for discussions regarding trade, economic strategy, travel agreements, and other issues between the EU and its Eastern European neighbours. It also aims at building a common area of shared values of democracy, prosperity, stability, and increased cooperation. The project was initiated by Poland and a subsequent proposal was prepared in co-operation with Sweden. It was presented by the foreign ministers of Poland and Sweden at the EU's General Affairs and External Relations Council in Brussels on 26 May 2008. The Eastern Partnership was inaugurated by the European Union in Prague, Czech Republic on 7 May 2009.

The first meeting of foreign ministers in the framework of the Eastern Partnership was held on 8 December 2009 in Brussels.

The key focus of the EU engagement within the Eastern Partnership includes the achievement of tangible results for the citizens in the partner countries. The pursuit of tangible outcomes has resulted in 20 deliverables of Eastern Partnership cooperation for 2020. They were developed in close consultation with the stakeholders, and include the following:
  • Modernised transport connections through the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T);
  • Increased political ownership of energy efficiency;
  • Easier access to finance for SMEs, including to lending in local currency;
  • Establishing ways of reducing mobile telephony roaming tariffs between partners by conducting a study;
  • Increased trade opportunities;
  • Greater outreach to grassroots Civil Society Organizations; and,
  • More support for youth.
A joint working document "Eastern Partnership – focusing on key priorities and deliverables" drafted by the Commission and EEAS details the objectives across the five priority areas of cooperation agreed at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga in 2015:
  1. Stronger governance: Strengthening institutions and good governance
  2. Stronger economy: Economic development and market opportunities
  3. Better connectivity: Connectivity, energy efficiency, environment and climate change
  4. Stronger society: Mobility and people-to-people contacts
  5. Involvement of broader society, gender and communication
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Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Iron Curtain

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Iron Curtain: Cold War 1's Deadly Line of Demarcation - Megaprojects > .
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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

68-1-5 Prague Spring

.1968-1-5: Prague Spring - Alexander Dubček → leader of Czechoslovakia - HiPo > .

On 5 January 1968, the Prague Spring began when Alexander Dubček became the new First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).

Dubček was a committed communist, and had been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia since 1963 although he struggled to work with Antonín Novotný, the President of Czechoslovakia. Under Novotný’s control the country had experienced a slow and uneasy move towards de-Stalinisation while suffering a huge economic downturn.

Frustrated by the President’s failure to effectively restructure the country, Dubček and other reformists challenged him at a meeting of the Central Committee in October 1967. In response Novotný secretly invited the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to visit Czechoslovakia to secure his support. However, this plan backfired when Brezhnev learned just how unpopular Novotný was and instead gave his support to those who wished to remove him from power.

Dubček replaced Novotný as the leader of Czechoslovakia on 5 January 1968 and quickly began to introduce a series of political and economic reforms. Known as ‘socialism with a human face’ this programme was intended to keep the Communist Party in control of the government while allowing some mild democratisation and political liberalisation.

As the reforms took hold, the government was faced with public demands to go even further. At the same time, the USSR and its allies in the Warsaw Pact began pressuring Dubček to bring what had become known as the Prague Spring under control. On 20 August the countries of the Warsaw Pact took matters in to their own hands and moved their armed forces into Czechoslovakia.

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), and continued until 21 August 1968, when the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country to suppress the reforms.

The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. After national discussion of dividing the country into a federation of three republics, Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia, Dubček oversaw the decision to split into two, the Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic.[1] This dual federation was the only formal change that survived the invasion.

The reforms, especially the decentralization of administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets, who, after failed negotiations, sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country. The New York Times cited reports of 650,000 men equipped with the most modern and sophisticated weapons in the Soviet military catalogue.[2] A massive wave of emigration swept the nation. Resistance was mounted throughout the country, involving attempted fraternization, sabotage of street signs, defiance of curfews, etc. While the Soviet military had predicted that it would take four days to subdue the country, the resistance held out for eight months until diplomatic maneuvers finally circumvented it. It became a high-profile example of civilian-based defense; there were sporadic acts of violence and several protest suicides by self-immolation (the most famous being that of Jan Palach), but no military resistance. Czechoslovakia remained controlled by the Soviet Union until 1989, when the Velvet Revolution peacefully ended the communist regime; the last Soviet troops left the country in 1991.

After the invasion, Czechoslovakia entered a period known as normalization (Czech: normalizace, Slovak: normalizácia), in which new leaders attempted to restore the political and economic values that had prevailed before Dubček gained control of the KSČ. Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček as First Secretary and also became President, reversed almost all of the reforms. The Prague Spring inspired music and literature including the work of Václav Havel, Karel Husa, Karel Kryl and Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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Sunday, January 11, 2015

RvU 2021 Russia vs Ukraine

21-4-23 Ukraine and Russia preparing for a new war - CaRe > .
24-1-9 Volga River - History, Importance; Volga-Don Canal - Animation > .
23-10-23 Poland Must Defend Ukraine against Historical Rival: Russia - GeoP > .
23-9-10 Battle for Black Sea. R-U: Geopolitics, Grain, Naval Drones - U24 > .
23-8-31 P00ti’s Black Sea blockade is a sham | Defence in Depth - Telegraph > .
23-6-4 Freedom for Belarus tied to Freedom for Ukraine - Perspective > .
23-1-30 Inside Polish Armored Infantry (Squad to Division) - Battle > .
23-1-8 War Economies - Russia and Ukraine won't collapse tomorrow - Perun > .
22-11-22 Why [the Ruscian Federation] cannot become a democracy - Caspian > .
22-10-7 What If Pootin Nukes Ukraine? - OBF > .
22-9-22 How many troops can [desperate] Russia really mobilize? - Binkov > .
22-9-7 Intermarium - Poland Ukraine Baltics | George Friedman > .
22-7-22 Poland could become strongest land force in the EU - Binkov > .
22-7-21 Why Every NATO Member Joined (Why Others Haven't) - Spaniel > .
22-7-4 Intermarium: Is Strongest Union In Europe About To Appear? - Complete > .
22-6-30 Russia's Cyberattack on Lithuania ~ NATO's Deeper Problems - Spaniel > .
22-6-28 Jacek Bartosiak - Kaliningrad, Suwalki Gap - Ruscia, Poland, Ukraine - S&F > .
22-6-24 Russia's Kaliningrad Problem with Lithuania = Ukraine 2.0-ish - Spaniel > .
22-6-21 Kaliningrad at center of dispute between Russia and Lithuania | DW > .
22-12-1 Belarus: Lukashenko: Europe's Last Dicktatorship [sic] - Shadows > .
22-5-6 Could Ukraine cause fall of Belarusian Dictator? - VisPol > . skip ad > .
22-3-23 Polish citizens join army b/o Russian invasion of Ukraine - BBC > .
22-3-17 Russia’s Nuclear Arsenal, World’s Largest, Comparisons | WSJ > .
23-1-10 1st anniversary of Elbasy’s ousting. Lessons for Pootin - Katz > .
22-1-27 Kazakhstan & Ukraine: Russia's Political and Military Manipulations - VP > .
21-12-30 What's Next for U.S. and Russia as Tensions Grow Over Ukraine | WSJ > .
22-1-15 Finland and Sweden consider NATO membership - Caspian > .
22-1-10 Why Ukraine is Not a NATO Member - NATO > .
21-7-14 Lithuania accuses Belarus of using refugees as 'political weapon' - BBC > .
21-6-26 Lukashenko losing grip on Belarus? - Into > .
21-4-23 Alexei Navalny: will the West stand up to Russia? | Economist > .

Geostrategic Projection
European Geostrategic Projection ..

A Ryanair plane from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to Belarus for several hours on Sunday, with activists saying it was done to arrest a dissident journalist on board. EU leaders are due to discuss their response to what the union's executive called a "hijacking" and the US state department said was "a shocking act". Belarus scrambled a fighter jet to force the plane to land in Minsk, claiming a bomb threat. Police came and took Roman Protasevich away when passengers disembarked.

In recent weeks, Russia has been increasing its military presence on their border with Ukraine, leading many to worry the country might be preparing for conflict. So in this video we explain the context or Russian Ukrainian conflict and discuss if Russia's readying for war.

The situation in eastern Ukraine is escalating. The conflict involves many international players, and each of them pursues its national interest. What is the current balance of power? Can the fighting in Donbas escalate into a full-blown war?

00:00​ Intro . 
01:04​ Mobilization . 
03:57​ Novorossiya . 
07:10​ NATO or a nuclear weapon . 
11:10​ Realpolitik . 
12:16​ Outro .

Lenin Volga–Don Shipping Canal (Волго-Донской судоходный канал имени, В. И. Ленина, Volga-Donskoy soudokhodniy kanal imeni V. I. Lenina, abbreviated ВДСК, VDSK) is a broad ship canal that connects the Volga and the Don at their closest points. Opened in 1952, its length is 101 km (63 mi), 45 km (28 mi) of which is through rivers and reservoirs.

The canal forms a part of the Unified Deep Water System of European Russia. Together with the lower Volga and the lower Don, the canal provides the shortest navigable connection between the Caspian Sea and the world's oceans, if the Mediterranean is counted, via the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

2014 Strategic Importance of the Caspian Sea - Strat > .

Russia's Endgame? 

Russia does not have a good press in the west. But what's under the slogans? What is the imperative for Russia? 

00:00​ Intro
00:59​ A state of constant vulnerability
05:00​ The end of the unipolar world
08:00​ The interior problem
11:10​ A place at the table
14:30​ Outro


The Protocol on the results of consultations of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, or commonly known as the Minsk Protocol, is an agreement to halt the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, signed by representatives of that country, the Russian Federation, the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on 5 September 2014. It was signed after extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, under the auspices of the OSCE. The agreement, which followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the Donbas, implemented an immediate ceasefire. It failed to stop fighting in Donbas, and was thus followed with a new package of measures, called Minsk II, which was agreed to on 12 February 2015. This too failed to stop the fighting, but the Minsk agreements remain the basis for any future resolution to the conflict, as agreed at the Normandy Format meeting.

The Normandy Format talks (Format Normandie) involve the representatives of four countries, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France, who met informally during the 2014 D-Day celebration in Normandy, and who aim to resolve the war in Donbas. It has been also known as the Normandy contact group.

The group was created on June 6, 2014, when leaders from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine met on the margins of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day allied landings in Normandy. It operates mainly through telephone calls between the leaders and their respective ministers of foreign affairs. The Normandy Format has sometimes been expanded to include Belarus, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Negotiations and talks were stalled from 2016 until autumn 2019.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his May 2019 inaugural address made peace talks with Russia his top priority. He reaffirmed that priority in July that year when he invited via YouTube his co-equal to a dialogue with the words:
Let's discuss who Crimea belongs to and who isn't in the Donbas region.
On 18 July, a "comprehensive" cease-fire was agreed with arbitration by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine.

The revelation in late September 2019 of a phone call between DJT and Zelenskiy in which the latter described the support of France and Germany as lukewarm damaged Zelenskiy's image in Europe. On 10 October, Zelenskiy repeated his statement in a public news conference. On 21 September, "continuing bickering" had been cited as causing "a political tug-of-war" over the preliminaries to negotiations, as they had been ever since the Normandy Format meeting in 2016 at Berlin, but the 9 September agreement between French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconvene quadripartite talks was duly remembered, and the decision to hold new talks was cemented at a joint Franco-German leaders meeting on 16 October.

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.

The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

As a result, between 1994 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, of which Ukraine had physical, if not operational, control. Their use was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system.

In 2009, Russia and the United States released a joint statement that the memorandum's security assurances would still be respected after the expiration of the START Treaty.

After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the US, Canada, the UK, along with other countries, stated that Russian involvement was a breach of its obligations to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum, which was transmitted to the United Nations under the signature of Sergei Lavrov and others, and in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. On 4 March 2014, the Russian president Vladimir Putin replied to a question on the violation of Budapest Memorandum, describing current Ukrainian situation as a revolution "a new state arises, but with this state and in respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents." Russia stated that it had never been under obligation to "force any part of Ukraine's civilian population to stay in Ukraine against its will." Russia tried to suggest that the US was in violation of the Budapest Memorandum and described the Euromaidan as a US-instigated coup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances .

2021-4-6 Ukraine-Russia tensions - BBC > .

Ukraine says 25,000 Russian troops have been stationed on its borders. This has drawn attention to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 – the biggest landgrab in Europe since World War Two.


1 - https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/h... .
​2 - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-... .
​3 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro... .
4 - https://www.janes.com/defence-news/ne... .
5 - https://www.defence24.com/iskander-mi... .
6 - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/na... .
7 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro... .
8 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/202... .
9 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro... .
10 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro... .
11 - https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/12/g... .
12 - https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/12/g... .
13 - https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20... .
14 - https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20... .
15 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2... .
16 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2... .
17 - https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/to... .
18 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/202... .
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sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...

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