Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Sweden's NATO Question

Sweden's Strategic Posture. Will the Swedes Join NATO? - gtbt > .23-9-22 Sweden in the EU - EU Made SIMPLE > .22-12-10 Sweden's joining NATO would crush Russian power - Caspian > .Why is Finland building an underground city? | ABC > .

Sweden adopted neutrality for years, but the present times pose new geostrategic challenges for the Swedes. So Stockholm joined NATO.

00:00​ Intro
01:00​ Geostrategic pause
04:27​ The key to the Baltic's defense
09:15​ Breaking strategic neutrality
13:40​ Outro

2016 Sweden concerned about Russian provocation → Gotland - BBC > .

Sweden's NATO Question ..

Gotland ((listen); Gutland, local dialect), also historically spelled Gottland or Gothland is Sweden's largest island. It is also a province, county, municipality, and diocese. The province includes the islands of Fårö and Gotska Sandön to the north, as well as the Karlsö Islands (Lilla and Stora) to the west. The population is 58,595, of which about 23,600 live in Visby, the main town. The island of Gotland and the other areas of the province of Gotland make up less than one percent of Sweden's total land area. From a military viewpoint, it occupies a strategic location in the Baltic Sea. As of 2018, the Gotland Regiment has been re-raised and it is the first time since WW2 that a new regiment has been established in Sweden.

 https://www.foi.se/report-summary?rep... .
​ https://www.foi.se/report-summary?rep... .
​ https://www.foi.se/report-summary?rep... .
​ https://www.gu.se/sites/default/files... .
​ https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/sm... .
​ https://www.politico.eu/article/swede... .
​ https://euobserver.com/foreign/150363 .
​ https://www.reuters.com/article/swede... .
​ https://neweasterneurope.eu/2020/09/2... .
​ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl... .
​ https://thebulwark.com/why-sweden-sho... .
​ https://www.defensenews.com/global/eu... .
​ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs... .
​ https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buz... .
​ https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buz... .

The current Lithuania–Poland border has existed since the re-establishment of the independence of Lithuania on March 11, 1990. Until then the identical border was between Poland and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. The length of the border is 104 kilometres (65 mi). It runs from the Lithuania–Poland–Russia tripoint southeast to the Belarus–Lithuania–Poland tripoint.

It is the only land border that the European Union- and NATO-member Baltic states share with a country that is not a member of the Russian-aligned Commonwealth of Independent States. To the military planners of NATO, the [chokepoint] border area is known as the Suwalki gap (named after the nearby town of Suwałki), because it represents a tough-to-defend flat narrow piece of land, a gap, that is between Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and that connects the NATO-member Baltic States to Poland and the rest of NATO. 

In July 2016, two years after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the beginning of the War in Donbass, NATO's member states agreed at the 2016 Warsaw summit to forward NATO Enhanced Forward Presence. A 2017 NATO exercise was for the first time focused on defense of the gap from a possible Russian attack. As well in 2017, Russia and Belarus had the Zapad 2017 exercise. In 2020, Ben Hodges and Heinrich Brauss wrote a study for the think tank Center for European Policy Analysis.
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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Turkey versus Greece

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Middle East, North Africa - AuDu >> .

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Saturday, September 6, 2014

Western Balkan Accession to EU?

22-1-27 How Erdoğan Destroyed Turkey (doc) - My Take > .
23-5-11 Turkey Votes. Erdoğan’s Last Dance? - gtbt > . skip > .
23-1-26 Pan-Turkism & Turkey's Ambitions in Central Asia - gtbt > .
22-12-30 [Kurds] Why Turkey is Preparing to Invade Syria (Again) - Real > .

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Wrongers - France

Centrist incumbent president Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected French president with an estimated 58.2% of the vote, while his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, took 41.8%. After a fractious campaign that has seen the far right come its closest yet to winning power.

21-6-27 France elections: Far-right-wrong National Rally loses key battleground states - poll: France's far-right-wrong National Rally (RN) look to have failed in their bid to win their first ever region. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur was a target for Marine Le Pen's party. But exit polls suggest their hotly-tipped candidate, Thierry Mariani, took only 43% of the vote and lost to the centre-right Republicans. 

The election - which saw a potentially record low turnout of less than 30% - also brought disappointment for President Emmanuel Macron. His centrist party, La République En Marche (LREM), also failed to win control of any region. It also performed badly in the first round, which was held last week. It was the first time President Macron's party has taken part in regional elections, as it did not exist the last time they were held in 2015.

Other early results from the second round suggest wins for traditional centre-right parties, and for the left.

Comment: "French citizen here,

Le Pen currently seems to be ahead in the polls by around 2%, as much as many people outside the country may think, it is very unlikely that Le Pen will win. In order to win the election without a second round happening, you need more than 50% of the votes, which is extremely unlikely nowadays.

That means that the second round will happen between Macron (or another candidate) and Le Pen. It always happened this way: if the National Rally is in the second round of any election, the rest of the entire French political spectrum will vote against Le Pen. This is why Macron and Le Pen as a duel seemed pretty tight during the first round of 2017, but Macron ended up winning with 60% of the votes during the second round.

Contrary to the US, being the incumbent candidate in France usually isn't an advantage, it's hard to be popular as a President in France, your average President in France doesn't have a very high popularity. In the case of Macron however.. as much as he is unpopular among many, if he ends in the second round against Le Pen, he will be the first President to pull off a second term since 2002.

As for Les Républicains, they are indeed on the Center-Right, however their most Right-wing side is usually very Conservative and tends to try to "steal" electors from the National Rally by talking against the migration crisis and about security. The Socialist Party is pretty much done and the major force in the Left-Wing is now "La France Insoumise", though it's very unlikely they will pass the first round.

Could Le Pen Win? I don't think she will, but feel free to return to this comment if I do end up being wrong. It's possible she will gain more votes than last time however, one can be impressed by how she managed to recover from her 2017 disastrous debate. See you next year!"
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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Yugoslavia - Collapse

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Tito vs Stalin - Cold War Doc > .
Josip Broz ‘Tito’: Too Tough for Stalin - Biog > .
Third Balkan War - Explained in 20 minutes | Balkans during WW1 - Knowledgia > .Animated History of Croatia - Suibhne > .
How did Kosovo become a country? | Economist > .
23-1-23 Could Serbia Invade NATO-Defended Republic of Kosovo? - VP > .21-12-24 Albania and Kosovo move towards a backdoor union - Caspian > .
Yugoslavia. For many, a long-forgotten failed nation. For others, an all-too painful, and recent, memory. A once-united federation made up of six neighboring republics, Yugoslavia’s existence was never a simple one. With constant ethnic and religious division, it seems that it was only a matter of time before a breakup would be imminent. 

Yugoslavia (lit. 'South Slavic Land') was a country in Southeast Europe and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after WW1 in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (which was formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.

Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944 King Peter II, then living in exile, recognised it as the legitimate government. The monarchy was subsequently abolished in November 1945. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. In 1963, the country was renamed again, as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević sought to restore pre-1974 Serbian sovereignty. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as president until his death in 1980. After Tito's death, Milošević made his way to becoming the next superior figure and political official for Serbia.

The six constituent republics that made up the SFRY were the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Serbia, and SR Slovenia. Serbia contained two Socialist Autonomous Provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, which after 1974 were largely equal to the other members of the federation. After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise of nationalism, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics' borders, at first into five countries, leading to the Yugoslav Wars. From 1993 to 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried political and military leaders from the former Yugoslavia for war crimes, genocide, and other crimes committed during those wars.

After the breakup, the republics of Montenegro and Serbia formed a reduced federative state, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), known from 2003 to 2006 as Serbia and Montenegro. This state aspired to the status of sole legal successor to the SFRY, but those claims were opposed by the other former republics. Eventually, it accepted the opinion of the Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession and in 2003 its official name was changed to Serbia and Montenegro. This state dissolved when Montenegro and Serbia each became independent states in 2006, while Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia in 2008.

A seemingly localized Kosovar dispute covers the conflicting interests of the EU, the US, and Serbia, while setting a dangerous practice for the wider periphery.

Balkans - Kosovo ..
Bosnia - Unrest ..
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