RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mercenary-power-play-emmanuel-macron-vladimir-putin-wagner-group-mali-11645211128?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

France said last week that it will withdraw military forces from Mali, where Paris has led a counterterrorism campaign for nearly a decade. This is a setback for the fight against Islamic extremism, but it is also a victory for a Russian power play in Africa.

“We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday of the Malian government. He added that the pullout of some 2,400 French troops could take as long as six months as France considers where in the region to re-station forces fighting Islamic State and al Qaeda.

Mr. Macron acknowledged that Mali is free to choose its security partners but warned that Russian mercenaries with “predatory intentions” were arriving in the country. “The junta which is in power after two coups d’etats considers them to be the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism,” he said.

Mr. Macron is referring to Russia’s guns-for-hire Wagner Group. U.S. Africa Command recently confirmed the presence of the Russians and American officials have suggested they would be paid $10 million a month, though Mali denies it. The mercenaries’ numbers and influence are likely to grow as France pulls out.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/why-russia-wont-invade-ukrainistan/

No one wants Ukrainistan, least of all Vladimir Putin.

Its GDP of $98 billion (in constant 2015 US dollars), down 43% since 1989, falls in between Ethiopia and Angola on the World Bank tables. Its population has shrunk to just 35 million according to the country’s National Academy of Science from 52 million in 1989, rather than the 48 million reported in the official census, because nearly half of the working-age population has left. Its corruption ranking stands at 112 out of 116 countries surveyed by Transparency International.

Ukraine has some gas reserves but Russia has roughly ten times more, far more than it can transport without massive investments in infrastructure. Otherwise, Ukraine has no natural resources of note apart from farmland – and Russia already is the world’s largest wheat exporter.

Seizing Ukraine, in short, would be vastly more trouble than it is worth to Russia. To compare Putin’s threats to Ukraine with Hitler’s march eastwards offends common sense: There is no “there” there in Ukraine, nothing Russia wants: no Lebensraum, no productive population, no oil fields or other assets to be acquired by conquest.

If Putin doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, just what does he want?

He has three objectives.

The first is to thwart NATO expansion into Ukraine with the attendant threat of US missiles stationed on Russia’s border. As Jack Matlock, US envoy to Moscow 1987-1991, explained February 15 (“Is the Ukraine ‘crisis just another U.S. charade”), there is an analogy to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: The US put medium-range missiles in Turkey, so Russia retaliated by putting missiles in Cuba – and withdrew them in return for a US agreement to remove the missiles in Turkey.