World roundup: February 17-18 2025
Stories from Lebanon, Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
February 17, 1979: The Sino-Vietnamese War begins with a Chinese invasion, in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia (ousting the Khmer Rouge) the previous year. The “war,” such as it was, lasted only about a month and ended when the Chinese army, having stalled out around 20 kilometers over the border, declared victory and withdrew. Vietnam also claimed victory in repelling the invasion, and their claim is generally more accepted today—though admittedly the Chinese military did do serious damage to northern Vietnam’s infrastructure.
February 17, 2008: Kosovo declares its independence from Serbia. The Kosovan parliament voted (with ethnic Serb MPs boycotting) to declare independence after United Nations-supervised negotiations on a sort of independence-in-all-but-name status fell apart. Though still not recognized by Serbia and an ongoing source of tension in the Balkans, this date is commemorated as Independence Day in Kosovo.
February 18, 1229: The Sixth Crusade ends after a bizarre sequence of events including the excommunication of its leader, Holy Roman Emperor (and King of Jerusalem by marriage) Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Going all the way back to his coronation as “King of the Romans” in 1212, Frederick had repeatedly promised to go on Crusade only to flake out over and over again, until Pope Gregory IX finally excommunicated him in 1227. Frederick led the Crusade anyway (despite papal opposition) and actually wound up regaining control of the city of Jerusalem via negotiation, though the terms (agreeing to leave the city unfortified, for example) made it a paper victory only.
February 18, 1878: Members of the Jesse Evans Gang murder businessman John Tunstall in Lincoln County, New Mexico, sparking what became known as the “Lincoln County War.” Tunstall’s gang, the “Lincoln County Regulators,” retaliated for the killing by murdering county Sheriff William Brady and the festivities continued from there. The “war” lasted until the “Battle of Lincoln” in July and is today remembered in part for having launched the career of the most famous of the Regulators, outlaw Billy the Kid.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
This may be a bit premature, but archeologists are reportedly beginning to at least consider the prospects for restoring some of Syria’s most famous heritage sites, like Palmyra and the Crac des Chevaliers. Many of those sites have been heavily damaged since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011. France 24 has a video report:
LEBANON
Tuesday was the deadline for the Israeli military (IDF) to withdraw from southern Lebanon, and as expected it did not do so. Well, in fairness it mostly withdrew, I guess, though there’s really no partial credit in a situation like this. Israeli forces retained control over five “strategic points” (high points, basically) along the border, with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar insisting that the rest of the withdrawal would go forward “once Lebanon implements its side of the deal.” In theory this opens up most of southern Lebanon for displaced persons to return to whatever the IDF left of their homes, though as long as there are Israeli forces on the Lebanese side of the border I would think anyone in their general vicinity would still be at risk.
An IDF airstrike killed at least one person near Sidon on Monday. Israeli officials later identified this person as a “Hamas commander” named Mohammed Shahine, who they say was “recently planning terror attacks” against Israel.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Hamas announced on Tuesday that it’s speeding up the release of hostages and will free six of them on Saturday instead of the regularly scheduled three. That will secure the release of all of the living hostages (four who were taken in the October 7 attacks and two who have been in captivity in Gaza for several years) who were in line to be freed under the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal one week ahead of schedule. The main rationale behind this decision is, apparently, that Hamas officials believe the Israeli government intends to break that deal before the end of this phase and wanted to get the detainee exchanges finished ASAP. There are several Hamas-connected Israeli detainees who were scheduled to be released in the final exchange next week who should now be released this week.
Hamas is also releasing the bodies of four deceased hostages—including the two youngest, Ariel (4 years old) and Kfir (9 months old) Bibas—on Thursday, in return for which Israel will free all of the Palestinian women and minors it’s detained (without charges) since the October 7 attacks. There are additional considerations to speeding up the hostage releases and agreed to repatriate these bodies. The mediators (Egypt and Qatar) are reportedly hoping that this could generate goodwill that could be applied to negotiations on the agreement’s second phase. Those talks were supposed to start three weeks ago and still haven’t really begun, so this seems like a long shot. On the more immediate front the Israelis have reportedly agreed to allow mobile homes and heavy machinery into Gaza, which is something that also should have happened weeks ago, but better late than never.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
Gunmen attacked a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies into Pakistan’s restive Kurram region on Monday, killing at least one person in the convoy itself and five border security police officers who responded to the incident. The Kurram district, part of northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has seen nearly two years of off and on fighting between rival Sunni and Shiʿa communities. It’s unclear who carried out Monday’s attack but it does seem clear that a peace agreement announced earlier this year has not taken hold.
TAIWAN
To I assume no great surprise, the Chinese government is displeased by the changes the US State Department has quietly made to its “Relations with Taiwan” fact sheet. Most provocatively the department removed the language “we do not support Taiwan independence,” but it also added language expressing support for Taiwan’s membership in international organizations—which Beijing regards as an unacceptable assertion of independence. This is similar to a change the department made briefly in 2022, only to reverse course after a similarly frosty reception from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Speaking of which, ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun demanded on Monday that the US “stop emboldening and supporting Taiwan independence and avoid further damaging China-US relations and the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.” It remains unclear whether the Trump administration is trying to subtly signal a meaningful shift in US China policy, or whether Chinese officials are interpreting the language changes that way.
CHINA
The Financial Times considers the question of Xi Jinping’s potential successor. Xi is 71 and if there’s been any speculation about his overall health I’m unaware of it, so this may not be a pressing concern. He’s practically middle aged by US political standards. Nevertheless Xi will be 79 when his current term as Communist Party general-secretary ends in 2032, and demonstrating a clear succession plan might help bolster Beijing’s stature as a reliable great power on the world stage. Yet at this point Xi has not done much to indicate that there’s a plan at all—let alone what it might be. The death of former Premier Li Keqiang in 2023 complicated things a bit, as Li was the obvious next in line should anything have happened to Xi. But he was too old to be considered a realistic successor. Maybe a candidate or candidates will emerge in the next few years.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers rights group is reporting that the Rapid Support Forces militant group killed over 200 people during a three day assault on villages near the town of El Geteina in Sudan’s White Nile state. Sudan’s military-led government says it has tallied some 433 “victims,” which may include people who have been wounded or abducted in addition to the death toll. It’s unclear from the reporting whether the onslaught has ended or is ongoing.
Meanwhile, the RSF held what looks to have been a fairly grand event in the Kenyan city of Nairobi on Tuesday to advance the formation of a rebel government in the parts of Sudan that remain under its control. RSF deputy leader Abdul Rahim Dagalo was the main attendee, but notably he did not sign a charter forming that government as had apparently been the plan. The RSF is reportedly still negotiating with Abdelaziz al-Hilu, leader of a faction of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, who was also in attendance, about the details of the new polity. Hilu has ridden the fence during most of this conflict but his forces have recently clashed with the Sudanese military in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states and he now seems to be mostly aligned with the RSF. As, it would seem, is the Kenyan government, given the location of this conference.
BENIN
An attack apparently by jihadist militants killed at least six soldiers in northern Benin’s Alibori department on Saturday. Beninese officials say that at least 17 attackers were also killed in the fighting. There’s no specific indication as to responsibility, but northern Benin has increasingly suffered from spillover violence related to the jihadist insurgencies in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.
CHAD
The Chadian military is claiming that it killed 297 “terrorists” in an operation that it undertook in the wake of a Boko Haram attack on an outpost near the Nigerian border in late October. “Operation Haskanite,” which is apparently over now, also saw the deaths of 24 soldiers and three civilians. It’s probably best to take these figures with a grain of salt, but the end of the operation is noteworthy.
SOUTH SUDAN
According to South Sudan’s United Nations mission, fighting between security forces and “armed youth” in Upper Nile state on Friday and Saturday “resulted in deaths and injuries to civilians as well as armed personnel.” That is impressively vague even for the UN. There’s no indication who the “armed youth” were or really any other information about what apparently transpired.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
M23 militants and Rwandan forces appeared to be advancing on the Congolese city of Butembo on Tuesday, according to “residents” cited by the AP. Butembo is a fairly important commercial city in North Kivu province, around 210 kilometers north of Goma. Its capture would further consolidate the militants’ control over the Lake Kivu region and its valuable mineral assets. Having just taken the capital of South Kivu province, Bukavu, over the weekend, M23 and the Rwandans are also reportedly moving south from there and seized another town in that direction on Tuesday as well. Their next target to the south may be the city of Uvira.
If M23 were to capture Butembo, and at this point it’s meeting so little resistance there’s not much reason to think it won’t capture the city, that would put the militants in close proximity to Ituri province. As it happens, Ugandan military commander Muhoozi Kainerugaba threatened over the weekend to seize the capital of Ituri, Bunia, in response to repeated attacks against ethnic Hema communities in that region. On Tuesday, Ugandan forces did enter that city, though not to take over. Ugandan and Congolese officials met the previous day and worked out an agreement for a joint military deployment in Bunia. Uganda has been generally supportive of M23 but at this point there doesn’t seem to be any direct connection between these events and M23’s offensive and there’s no indication at this point that these Ugandan forces are going to have anything to do with the militants—indeed, at this point they’re working with the Congolese military. That said, it’s entirely possible that Kainerugaba and his father, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, are watching Rwanda carve out its own fiefdom in the eastern DRC via M23 and have decided to position themselves to do something similar.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
US and Russian negotiators, led respectively by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to (among other things) lay the groundwork for further talks on ending the war in Ukraine—Ukraine’s participation in those talks TBD. However, while Ukraine was the headline agenda item the actual headway the teams made on that front seems fairly minimal. This makes sense, given the enormity of the task and the fact that, you know, one of the two principals to the conflict was entirely absent. They did agree to appoint “high-level teams” to begin peace talks but I’ve seen no indication when those teams are supposed to be in place or when they’re actually supposed to start talking. Nor did they settle on a timeframe for a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, though Trump later opined that it could take place before the end of the month. More concretely, the negotiators did agree to normalize the functioning of US and Russian diplomatic missions, which have both been subject to restrictions on staffing levels and other functions since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Elsewhere, according to the Russian government a Ukrainian drone strike on a pumping station connected to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium has reduced oil flows through that outlet by 30 to 40 percent. The CPC carries Kazakh oil to the Caspian Sea, picking up oil from Russian fields along the way. It handles about 1 percent of the world’s daily oil supply, which may not seem like much but for a single pipeline is quite substantial. The news caused a rise in global oil prices on Tuesday.
UKRAINE
Coincidentally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to visit Saudi Arabia on Wednesday as he tours the Middle East. Not coincidentally, he’s now canceled that trip and rescheduled it for March 10. He doesn’t want to create even the appearance of endorsing Tuesday’s Russia-US meeting. Earlier this week he restated his insistence that Kyiv will not recognize any peace deal negotiated without its involvement. In Ukraine, meanwhile, Russian forces claimed the seizure of another village in Donetsk oblast on Tuesday.
The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported Monday on what he says is a “draft” of the mineral rights agreement that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented to Zelensky earlier this month and that Zelensky promptly rejected. And it’s not hard to see why he rejected it—Evans-Pritchard says that its terms “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” Among other things, the US would get a 50 percent cut of all future Ukrainian mineral revenues and priority over Ukraine itself in receiving those funds, “right of first refusal” to purchase future mineral exports, and “near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy.”
Perhaps most troublingly from Zelensky’s perspective, the offer seems to view this potential windfall (Trump has monetized it at around $500 billion, apparently based on Zelensky’s initial pitch to him) as payment for past US support rather than as a way to secure US support in the future. Left unclear is what the US would be entitled to do should all the mineral wealth not meet Trump’s $500 billion expectation—an outcome that seems highly probable, given that estimates of Ukraine’s mineral deposits are based on old and likely inaccurate Soviet-era surveys and in some cases on overvaluations of the materials themselves.
AMERICAS
BRAZIL
The Brazilian government on Tuesday agreed to join the OPEC+ group of oil exporting nations. The bloc had invited Brazil to join back in 2023 but officials hemmed and hawed about accepting, perhaps trying to square President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s reputation as an environmental leader and defender of the Amazon with his increasing emphasis on oil production as a major economic driver. Under Lula oil has become Brazil’s most valuable export and he continues to push regulators to approve exploratory drilling projects around the mouth of the Amazon River that could add significantly to the country’s oil production. As a member of the looser OPEC+ alliance Brazil will cooperate with the rest of The Gang in setting global oil production targets but will not be bound by any restrictions on its own operations.
COLOMBIA
National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels reportedly began a three day “armed strike” in western Colombia’s Chocó department on Tuesday. An “armed strike” is sort of like a regular strike except instead of people choosing not to work in order to advance some political or economic agenda, in this case they’ll be choosing not to work so as not to get shot by ELN fighters. ELN leaders say they’re striking, or rather forcing everyone to strike, to protest “alliances between the state, the military and mercenaries” and paramilitary groups like the right-wing militia/drug cartel Gulf Clan, whose forces have been battling ELN in Chocó. Colombian authorities are accusing the rebels of using the strike as a pretext for reducing road and river traffic “to facilitate the transport of equipment used in illegal gold mines and to move drug shipments.”
HONDURAS
Honduran President Xiomara Castro decided on Tuesday to reverse her previous decision to cancel her country’s 1912 extradition treaty with the United States. Castro announced the severing of that treaty back in August, after US ambassador Laura Dogu expressed “concern” over a meeting between the Honduran and Venezuelan defense ministers. Apparently Castro felt for some reason that the Honduran government should be allowed to conduct its own foreign policy. Frankly, I don’t know where people get such outlandish ideas. At any rate, Castro took to social media on Tuesday to say that she had “reached an agreement with the new American administration so that the extradition treaty will continue with the necessary safeguards for the state of Honduras.” What those safeguards might be is uncertain.
UNITED STATES
Finally, TomDispatch’s Michael Klare looks at the major changes that seem to be taking place within the US defense industry:
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The established contractors are still well entrenched in Washington generally and within the Trump administration specifically. But Trump’s burgeoning relationship with/dependence on Silicon Valley oligarchs gives them a huge leg up in any sort of competition for defense resources. My cynical expectation is that rather than forcing these firms to duke it out, we’ll decide instead to just balloon the already bloated defense budget to please everyone. But don’t go by me.
Hey Derek, I noticed a typo on this one and thought I'd let you know so you can fix it, and NOT because I'm a weirdo grammar nazi lol: "...in Sudan’s While Nile state" I believe should be "White Nile". Love the newsletter buddy!