—3 European leaders go to Kyiv, expected to meet with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy
—10,000 civilians remaining in Sievierodonetsk, governor says
—Germany says can deliver weapons to Ukraine ‘end of July or the start of August’

This was last updated at 07:22 UTC/GMT

Governor says 10,000 civilians still in Sievierodonetsk
Serhiy Gaiday, the governor of the eastern Ukrainian Luhansk region, said that around 10,000 civilians are still in the key city of Sievierodonetsk, where fighting has been raging amid a dire humanitarian condition.

“Out of 100,000 residents, around 10,000 remain,” Gaiday said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said Ukraine’s army is “holding back the enemy as much as possible.”

Earlier this week, Ukraine said Russian forces destroyed all bridges connecting the city, making it difficult to evacuate civilians or deliver humanitarian aid.

Russia is believed to be now in control of at least the majority of the city.

European leaders arrive in Kyiv
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi arrived in Kyiv on Thursday, the French presidential palace said.

Scholz said the three leaders wanted “to show their support for Ukraine and the citizens of Ukraine.”

“But we don’t just want to demonstrate solidarity, we also want to assure that the help we organize — financial and humanitarian, but also when it comes to weapons — will be continued,” he said. Support will continue for as long as is necessary, he said.

The trio took an overnight train to Kyiv from Poland. They are expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Major German and Italian media outlets, including Germany’s ZDF and Italy’s Repubblica, had earlier published a photo of the three leaders on the train.

It is the first time the three travel to Kyiv since the war started in Ukraine.

There had been speculation earlier this week that Scholz would be part of the joint trip ahead of a G7 summit at the end of June.

The visit also comes a day before the European Commission is set to make a recommendation on Ukraine’s status as an EU candidate.

The three leaders have come under criticism over their response to the war. Critics say France and Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy, have been slow to deliver weapons to Ukraine. Scholz and Macron have also been criticized for maintaining contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

German minister: Weapons can be delivered to Ukraine by August
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said three multiple rocket launchers could be delivered to Ukraine in July or August after Ukrainian forces receive adequate training on them.

Kyiv has complained that weapons that Germany pledged to Ukraine were not delivered. Berlin says Ukrainian troops must first be trained to use them.

“The training on these multiple rocket launchers can begin at the end of June, meaning they can be delivered at the end of July or the start of August,” Lambrecht told reporters as she arrived for a second day of talks with her NATO counterparts in Brussels.

German ex-chancellor seeks to recuperate parliamentary office
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has sent a letter to the Bundestag budget committee that challenges the decision to revoke his right to a parliamentary office.

Schröder was Germany’s chancellor from 1998 to 2005. After leaving office he was involved with Russian energy firms Gazprom and Rosneft. Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, he has drawn criticism for his ties to Moscow.

The committee voted in May to wind down his office. The office was allocated more than €400,00 ($418,000) last year.

In a letter to the committee’s chair, Schröder’s lawyer said that the former chancellor had learned “via the media” that his office was being “put on hold.”

“This decision is based on the determination that he no longer has any ‘continuing obligations arising from the office,'” Schröders lawyer said in the letter, adding that this determination is not substantiated and that it was unclear what these “continuing obligations” would constitute.

The letter also argues that a resolution taken from the media is “evidently illegal and unconstitutional.”

Schröder’s lawyer said that he hopes for “the chance to reach a mutually acceptable settlement by way of conversation on an even playing field.”

Gazprom cuts gas supply to Germany by around 60% in 2 days
Russian energy giant Gazprom has begun reducing the volume of gas it supplies to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to a daily maximum of 67 million cubic meters early on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Gazprom announced it would reduce the maximum delivery volume to 100 million cubic meters of gas per day, down from 167 million cubic meters.

Overall, the cut represents an approximate 60% reduction in gas supplies to Germany in just two days.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck accused Moscow of attempting to create unease and increase gas prices. He added that it was still possible to source alternative gas supplies on the market, albeit at a high price.

Report: 2 US volunteers in Ukraine missing
Two Americans who volunteered to support Ukraine’s armed forces have reportedly gone missing.

The Telegraph newspaper cited an unnamed fellow fighter as saying that the two Americans were captured by Russian forces during a June 9 battle northeast of Kharkiv.

The two Americans are identified as Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh, US military veterans who had been living in the state of Alabama.

White House spokesperson John Kirby said that he could not confirm the disappearance, but that “if it’s true, we’ll do everything we can to get them safely back home.”

Kirby went on to discourage Americans from volunteering to fight in Ukraine.

“It is a war zone. It is combat. And if you feel passionate about supporting Ukraine, there’s any number of other ways to do that that are safer and just as effective,” Kirby said.

Ukraine says Russian companies use Georgian entities to bypass sanctions
David Arakhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator with Russia, said Russian people and companies are circumventing Western sanctions by making use of Georgian entities to do so.

He told a German Marshall Fund event in Washington that Russians are “heavily” using “Georgian banks, Georgian financial system, Georgian companies and so on,” to dodge the West’s sanctions regime.

“If you are a sanctioned Russian person, you go to the Internet, you open up a Georgian company, open up remotely the bank account and start processing,” Arakhamia added.

He also urged Washington to take action to close the loophole.

What happened in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said defending the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine was “vital” as the outcome would indicate “who will dominate in the coming weeks” of the war.

Serhii Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, said that the fighting around the contested city of Sievierodonetsk and other places in eastern Ukraine “is getting more difficult.” By contrast, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said that Russian forces were now in control of the city of Sievierodonetsk.

The United States will provide Ukraine with another $1 billion (€963 million) to help the country amid Russia’s assault in the eastern Donbas region. The latest boost of aid will include major weapons systems that the Ukrainian government has appealed for such as howitzers, anti-ship missile launchers and rounds for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems.

The US will also send an additional $225 million in humanitarian aid to provide assistance for drinking water, food, shelter and other essential items.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its missiles had destroyed a warehouse in the Lviv region, which was being used to store ammunition for weapons donated by NATO members.

Germany will only be able to deliver three instead of four planned rocket launchers to Ukraine, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his country is ready to host four-way talks with the UN, Russia and Ukraine in order to unblock the passage of grain through the Black Sea.

A UN panel investigating possible human rights violations said they are collecting evidence, but that it is too early to say whether the allegations constitute war crimes.

Chinese state media reported Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin by phone and said his country would continue to support Russia’s “sovereignty and security.”

You can revisit our updates from Tuesday, June 15, here.

fb, ar, sdi/jsi (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-german-chancellor-scholz-arrives-in-kyiv-live-updates/a-62146502

The post Ukraine: German Chancellor Scholz arrives in Kyiv — live updates first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

We know who our friends are. Source: DPA

Donald Trump is making an intolerable show of himself in Europe. Not only has he cast doubt on America’s commitment to mutual defense under NATO; the US president has also unilaterally withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany and the European Union.

Since then, the Trump administration has unilaterally imposed an embargo on goods deliveries to Iran from any third country, including the other signatories of the agreement. Foreign firms that continue to conduct business in Iran now face the threat of sanctions, and banks that process transactions risk losing access to the US financial system.

Meanwhile, the US has been threatening similar action with respect to the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that will run from Russia to Germany. Congress is considering legislation that allows the Trump administration to impose sanctions on European firms taking part in the project, even though these companies are contractually obliged to see the work through. And, according to Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor who now chairs the pipeline project, the US ambassador to Germany has been acting more like an “occupation officer” than like a diplomat.

All told, the Trump administration’s disruptive behavior has left the French and German governments furious. But, beyond fueling anger, Trump’s attacks on other countries’ sovereignty are adding momentum to a new push for European political unification.

Vassals? Not us

It is no secret that Europe is in the midst of an internal economic crisis — a result of the euro saddling southern euro-zone countries with high inflation prior to the 2008 financial crash, which severely reduced their competitiveness within the euro system. These problems have led to the emergence of Euroskeptic nationalist parties and movements across the continent. More recently, the European project has been weakened further by the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the EU.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s actions are actually something of a godsend, because they have forced Europeans to accept that they must stand together in defense of their sovereignty and prosperity. A union of almost 450 million people (after Brexit) cannot allow a country two-thirds its size to treat it like a group of vassal states.

Accordingly, both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared this month that they support the need to create a joint European army. The best way to understand this effort, said German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen, is as an answer to Trump’s demand that Europeans spend more on defense.

Of course, von der Leyen knows that the formation of an independent European force isn’t really what the US president had in mind. But the German establishment credibly maintains that a European army is meant to supplement and strengthen NATO. The trans-Atlantic alliance will be no less necessary than it was before, nor will European citizens regard their American counterparts with any less sympathy and fellow feeling. The deep historical ties between the US and Europe remain unchanged; everybody knows there will be an America after Trump.

Political union to the fore

Better yet, Europe is once again pursuing political unification with vigor and a sense of collective purpose, and that is how it should be. The European project has long suffered from giving economic integration pride of place while pushing political unification to the backburner. Indeed, France, Italy, the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), and Germany had agreed to form a European army as early as 1952 under the Framework of the European Defense Community. But the French National Assembly never ratified that treaty, so it never entered into force.

Then came the Maastricht Treaty, which offered a second chance for a political union. Yet France stood in the way once again. The French supported membership of the euro, because they wanted the Mediterranean countries, including themselves, to be able to borrow at the same low rates as Germany on the capital markets. But they successfully resisted the creation of a political union, which is predicated on a central state with a joint army and monopoly on the use of military force.

If France is now serious about merging national armies into a joint defense force under a central EU command — rather than just an intervention force for its former African colonies — Macron could well secure his place in the history books. There is much work to be done. But if it happens, he will have Trump to thank.

Source: https://global.handelsblatt.com/opinion/europe-military-force-hans-werner-sinn-983056

The post Europe finally pulls the trigger on a military force first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

• Angela Merkel has had a profound influence on German politics and could get away with radical changes because she tightly controlled her own party
• However, Merkel’s inability to explain her actions during the 2015 refugee crisis helped fuel the Alternative for Germany party — a radical-right populist party whose only policy plank is hostility to immigrants and minorities.
• Merkel had one last chance to leave behind a coherent union— but with her allies demanding “less Europe,” it is clear that she has failed.

The British politician Enoch Powell famously observed that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to defy this rule.

The present is hardly a happy juncture for her, yet her October 29 announcement that she will step down as leader of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has been lauded by observers as both dignified and elegant.

Whether she can continue as chancellor until 2021, as she has said she would, is de facto not in her hands: Were the Social Democratic Party to leave the ruling coalition before then, prompting elections, she would not run again.

Still, she is perceived as supremely in control, just as she has always seemed in control since heading her first government in 2005 — with the fateful exception of the fall of 2015, when many citizens felt that the German state was no longer in charge of its own borders, as hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into the country.

‘You know me’

Conventional wisdom has it that her decision to let in refugees might mar her legacy; in reality, historians might well celebrate her for this moment of courage and compassion.

Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images

It is the long-term effects of her reign on German politics and her evident inability to create a lasting architecture for European integration that make a straightforwardly positive assessment of her tenure more doubtful.

Merkel has had an even more profound influence on German politics than the oft-discussed fragmentation of the party system suggests.

As the German political scientist Philip Manow has argued, she was less a chancellor with a strong party behind her than a president, or sometimes even something like a civil servant-in-chief, floating above parties in an era when a succession of crises — starting with the financial crisis — made concentration of power in the executive more legitimate.

SEE ALSO: Germany is taking a step to punish Saudi Arabia that Trump has repeatedly said he won’t go near

Contrary to the cliche that strong political leaders must be charismatic, she often appeared passive or even impersonal. She once suggested to German citizens that they should re-elect her because, “You know me.” In actual fact, most Germans will feel precisely the opposite: They see Merkel as an eminently reliable and highly analytical civil servant, but not as a politician who has ever systematically staked out a vision for the country.

She could govern smoothly, because for most of her time in office, public coffers were full. (Whether Germany’s boom is the result of the harsh labor market and welfare state reforms undertaken by her Social Democratic predecessor Gerhard Schröder remains disputed; what cannot be disputed is Manow’s insight that, unlike previous chancellors, she had to contend much less with the checks and balances built into the German political system, because rising tax revenues made compromises easier.)

Merkel’s sharp policy turns, on nuclear energy and the draft, for instance — which actually outright contradicted the “you know me” claim — could only have been pulled off by someone who was seen as more of a civil servant-in-chief, someone who simply chose the most seemingly reasonable course of action, quite beyond partisan commitments.

Something like technocracy

In fact, she raided the policies of her competitors, the Social Democrats in particular, thereby systematically demobilizing the party’s voters. At the same time, the decision to abandon nuclear reactors after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster opened the possibility of coalitions with the Green party — thereby increasing the room for strategic maneuver of the CDU.

Merkel could get away with such radical changes partly because she tightly controlled her own party, sidelining potential competitors in a Machiavellian manner. But the other reason was that she convinced many Germans that there was a reasonable center over which she presided, where partisan differences did not matter all that much.

 Christian Hartmann/Reuters

A less polite way of saying this is that Merkel’s default way of governing was something like technocracy. Especially during the euro crisis, she claimed that there was no alternative to her solutions to policy challenges. All who disagreed effectively revealed themselves as irrational — and bad Europeans, as well as, by implication, bad Germans to boot, because the definition of a good German is being enthusiastic about European integration.

As in other countries, technocracy actually paved the way for populism. It is not an accident that the far-right party that was created in response to Merkel’s leadership is called Alternative for Germany (AfD). Populists can (correctly) claim that democracy without choices makes no sense; there is always an alternative, and it is up to voters whether they prefer it or not.

Migrants weren’t the crisis

In retrospect, the initial reaction of many centrist politicians to the AfD, then still mostly led by respected conservative professors and businesspeople, was probably a mistake: All criticism of measures to rescue the common European currency was condemned in highly moralizing terms, which arguably contributed to the radicalization of the AfD.

 Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters

In 2015, the Euroskeptic party still seemed likely to disappear, as many right-wing challengers to the CDU had done in the past. After all, Merkel took a very tough stance on Greece in the summer of that year and thereby satisfied voters who (wrongly) believed that Berlin was giving money to Athens for free.

Yet, soon after, the decision to take in refugees revived — and further radicalized — the AfD, making it what it is today: a radical-right populist party whose only real policy plank is hostility to immigrants and other minorities (and which, alas, is now represented in all German state assemblies, as well as the federal parliament).

It was Merkel’s inability to explain her conduct in 2015 — and the fact that all parties represented in parliament at the time supported her, alongside many in the media — that probably helped to solidify the image on which all populist parties crucially depend: that of an homogeneous elite that is in all likelihood corrupt, but at the very least not acting in the interests of ordinary people.

To this day, many Germans find it hard to understand whether the temporary opening of the borders was a matter of hard-nosed strategy to prevent a collapse of the European Union or humanitarianism. The answer that there was no alternative proved insufficient then and is insufficient today.

Democracy is not just talk, but politics can also never stay silent. Merkel’s pronounced pragmatism — combined with a discourse so noncommittal that it would drive journalists crazy — has contrasted sharply with, for instance, the sometimes sentimental conceptions of Europe put forward by her Christian Democratic predecessors, most notably Helmut Kohl. And Merkel’s aversion to anything like visionary leadership has certainly made it more difficult now to build a proper structure for the EU in the wake of the euro crisis and what is often misleadingly described as the “migrant crisis” — as French President Emmanuel Macron pointed out, migrants weren’t the crisis; it was a crisis of the European political order.

‘Less Europe’

While many Europeans (not least in Brussels) are allergic to talking about the EU as a state in the making, the obvious fact is that at least parts of the union by now have two of the essential attributes of statehood: a common currency and a common border. The challenge after 2015 would have been to make both function properly.

Clearly, Merkel’s attempts to forge a common European approach to refugees became more difficult as an increasing number of politicians, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, discovered that xenophobia could make their political careers.

Still, Merkel had a last chance to leave behind a coherent union when Macron launched his plans for a renewed EU in 2017 and when she was forced into a coalition with the Social Democrats earlier this year.

Rather than simply muddling through in yet another grand coalition, Merkel and her defeated opponent, Martin Schulz (who had spent most of his political life in the European Parliament), could have provided a real rationale for their cooperation by laying out an ambitious plan to remake the EU — which would have justified the two largest parties working together to maximize backing from German society.

None of this has happened, and it is now unlikely to happen, as Macron is losing momentum and even nominal Merkel allies such as Dutch leader Mark Rutte mechanically demand “less Europe.”

Perhaps one day Germans will blame Merkel for not having used excellent economic conditions to dare to do more. They might also wonder whether the creation of an eminently reasonable, technocratic center was not ultimately detrimental for democracy — and if the fragmentation of the party system, while making political life more complicated, was actually also a way to re-establish a sense of democratic choice.

In any case, they will think of Merkel as embodying a fundamental decency — an especially important contrast with certain other leaders today.

Read the original article on Foreign Policy.

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  Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/angela-merkel-leader-world-failed-2018-11?r=UK&IR=T

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