RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iranian-drones-in-ukraine-project-tehrans-power-beyond-mideast-testing-u-s-europe-11666880851

Wave of Russian attacks highlights how sanctions failed to stop Tehran from building a drone army that can arm proxies and friendly governments.

Russia’s expanding use of Iranian drones in Ukraine poses an increasing threat for the U.S. and its European allies as Tehran attempts to project military power beyond the Middle East.

In recent weeks, Ukrainian officials say, Russia has launched more than 300 Iranian drones that have targeted military units, power plants and civilian buildings in the capital, Kyiv. The Ukrainian military said it has shot down more than 70% of the drones, but Ukrainian officials are asking the U.S. and NATO allies for more help to counter the threat. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has vowed to rush hundreds of drone jammers to Ukraine as part of a deepening effort to shore up Ukraine’s air defenses.

The wave of attacks has made Iran Moscow’s most important military ally in its faltering campaign in Ukraine and highlighted how Tehran has created one of the world’s most successful drone fleets despite years of Western sanctions.

“Drones have become the spearhead of Iranian power projection globally,” said Dr. James Rogers, an associate professor of war studies at the University of Southern Denmark. “Iran has one of the oldest and, arguably, one of the most efficient drone programs in the world.”

While the international community focused for years on trying to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran methodically built an army of drones that reached across the Middle East. Iran and its proxies have been accused of carrying out attacks on everything from U.S. forces in Syria and commercial ships in the Arabian Sea to Israeli cities and Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19028/turkey-nato-ally

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common?

With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world’s democratic bloc of nations.

“I told Putin… Let us in so we’ll break up with the EU. The Shanghai Five is better [than the EU]. It is much more powerful. [With membership] we’ll have a chance to be together with the countries with which we share common values” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, January 2013.

And finally, in September 2022, Erdoğan became the first head of a NATO state attending an SCO summit, in Uzbekistan…. Erdoğan went to the summit upon Putin’s personal invitation.

This is the natural outcome of West’s deaf ears and blind eyes. When Erdoğan first spoke of SCO membership for Turkey a decade ago, Western capitals reacted with shy laughter and a misdiagnosis: that Erdoğan was just bluffing to win quicker membership accession to the European Union.

Western bigwigs did not even get the message when in 2013 Erdoğan spoke of Eurasian dictatorships as “countries with which we have common values.” He was just speaking what, to him, was the truth.

Funny, Erdoğan became the first NATO head of state attending an SCO summit while pressuring Congress for the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 Block 70 fighter aircraft for his air force. Behind closed doors in Washington, his envoys and back channels will be telling their U.S. audience that “Turkey’s future is in the Western bloc, that the SCO talk is for Turkey’s balancing act between its commitment to the West and its inevitable proximity with Russia.”

Turks are living in a totally different economic realm than the recent past. Turkey’s official annual inflation climbed to a fresh 24-year high of 80% in August — though ENAG, an independent research organization, estimated the true annual inflation rate at 181% for the same period. Worse may be yet to come.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s currency, the lira, has lost more than half of its value against the US dollar since 2021.

The Shanghai Five group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), was created on April 26, 1996 with the signing of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, in Shanghai by the heads of states of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.