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Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 ships and submarines sail in formation in the Ionian Sea off the coast of Sicily.
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Turkey's President Erdogan has officially withdrawn Ankara's objection to the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, with the three countries signing a trilateral memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid.
The removal of Erdogan's objection was reportedly obtained via significant natsec concessions from the other two nations largely geared toward facilitating Turkey's ongoing conflict with regional Kurdish factions, and it removes the final obstacle to Finland and Sweden beginning the process of becoming NATO members. Finland's addition will more than double the size of NATO's direct border with Russia, a major national security concern for Moscow.
"Sweden and Finland moved rapidly to apply to NATO in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, reversing decades of security policy and opening the door to the alliance's ninth expansion since 1949," Axios reports.
So the western empire will be expanding NATO again in response to a war that was predominantly caused by NATO expansion. Brilliant.
At the same NATO summit, President Joe Biden announced plans to ramp up U.S. military presence in Europe in response to the Ukraine war.
"Speaking with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sa'nchez, Biden said the U.S. will increase the number of U.S. Navy Destroyers stationed at a naval base in Rota, Spain, from four to six," Antiwar's Dave DeCamp reports. "The president said that this was the first of multiple announcements the U.S. and NATO will make at the summit on increasing their forces in Europe, steps being taken in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
This news comes out as a new CNN report tells us that the Biden administration does not believe Ukraine has any chance of winning this war, yet still won't encourage any kind of negotiated settlement to end the bloodshed.
From CNN:
White House officials are losing confidence that Ukraine will ever be able to take back all of the land it has lost to Russia over the past four months of war, U.S. officials told CNN, even with the heavier and more sophisticated weaponry the U.S. and its allies plan to send.
Advisers to President Joe Biden have begun debating internally how and whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should shift his definition of a Ukrainian "victory" " adjusting for the possibility that his country has shrunk irreversibly. U.S. officials emphasized to CNN that this more pessimistic assessment does not mean the U.S. plans to pressure Ukraine into making any formal territorial concessions to Russia in order to end the war.
This would confirm what I and many others have been saying since Russia invaded: that this proxy war is being waged not with the intention of saving Ukrainian lives by delivering a swift defeat to Moscow but with the intention of creating a costly, gruelling military quagmire to weaken Russia on the world stage.
This is further confirmed by a new Politico report that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has discouraged France's President Macron from facilitating a negotiated peace settlement between Moscow and Kyiv, which would support an earlier Ukrainian media report that Johnson had discouraged President Zelensky from such a settlement during his visit to Kyiv in April.
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