World roundup: February 19-20 2022
Stories from Iran, Niger, Ukraine, and more
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THESE DAYS IN HISTORY
February 18, 1229: The Sixth Crusade ends
February 18, 1965: The Gambia declares independence from the United Kingdom. Initially it remained a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but Gambian voters opted to form a republic in a referendum held shortly after independence. Annually commemorated as Independence Day in The Gambia.
February 19, 197: The Roman army under Emperor Septimus Severus faces off against forces loyal to Roman usurper Clodius Albinus in the Battle of Lugdunum. After a two day fight Severus and his army were victorious, and Albinus either committed suicide or was murdered. Exact casualty figures are obviously impossible to tabulate, but there were a large number of Roman soldiers involved (a total of between 100,000 and 150,000, split more or less evenly between the two principals) and later reports suggest high casualties on both sides. Consequently, many historians hold that Lugdunum produced the greatest number of Roman military casualties of any single battle in the history of the empire.
February 19, 1913: Mexican politician Pedro Lascuráin enjoys the shortest presidency in history.
February 20, 1865: The Uruguayan War, which began as a rebellion by the Colorado Party (aided by Brazil and Argentina) against the Blanco Party-led Uruguayan government (aided by Paraguay), ends with the Blancos’ surrender and the formation of a new Colorado-led government. The results of this relatively short (a bit over six months) conflict were mostly subsumed by the much longer (almost five and half year) and more destructive Paraguayan War (AKA the “War of the Triple Alliance”) that spun out of it. Brazil and Paraguay had already gone to war the previous year, and when the Uruguayan War ended both Argentina and the new Uruguayan government also declared war against Paraguay.
February 20, 1988: Leaders of the predominantly Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh enclave declare independence from Azerbaijan along with their intention to merge the region with Armenia, kicking off the six year long Nagorno-Karabakh War. A relatively low-level conflict in its first couple of years, the war really heated up with the fall of the Soviet Union, when both Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent states free to conduct their own wars without oversight. The conflict ended in 1994 with an Armenian military victory that established both Karabakh’s de facto independence and an Armenian military occupation in surrounding parts of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani forces recovered those regions and part of historic Karabakh in a second war in late 2020.
INTERNATIONAL
In today’s global news:
Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
According to Turkish media (you can tell it’s Turkish media because they’re using “Turkiye” instead of “Turkey,” something I tried here and gave up because it made my eyes bleed), the Turkish military has killed at least 14 YPG militia fighters in recent operations in Syria. The report, apparently based on a tweet by the Turkish Defense Ministry, doesn’t go into any detail as to when these operations took place or whether they involved airstrikes or ground attacks (or both).
IRAN
There were a couple of signs over the weekend that an agreement to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal may be forthcoming. On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told his cabinet that he expects an agreement to be concluded “shortly” and that it will be “shorter and weaker” than the 2015 accord. It’s likely the Biden administration is keeping Bennett briefed on the happenings in Vienna so presumably his prediction has some foundation in what he’s been told. Also on Sunday, Bennett told the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations that Israeli is “deeply troubled” by the prospects of a renewed nuclear deal, which he argued would “create a more violent and less stable Middle East.” He then ordered his nuclear armed military to carry out a few more airstrikes on Syria, probably.
In Iran, meanwhile, most of the members of the Iranian Majles (250 in the 290 seat parliament) have signed on to a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi laying out six conditions for the restoration of the nuclear deal. Since the final say on reviving the deal (from the Iranian perspective) rests with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and nobody else, you could’ve rounded up 250 random Bulgarians to sign this letter and it would have had about the same relevance. But the fact that these parliamentarians are trying to get their say on the record now does suggest that they also believe a deal is in the works.
ASIA
NEPAL
Hundreds of people hit the streets of Kathmandu again on Sunday to express their opposition to a potential $500 million infrastructure grant from the US Millennium Challenge Corporation. Police responded with standard crowd control tools like tear gas and rubber bullets, leaving an unspecified number of people injured (both protesters and cops). This is the second protest over the MCC grant in the past few days, with critics arguing that accepting the money would infringe on Nepalese sovereignty and could even lead, eventually, to Nepal hosting US military forces as part of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific/anti-China project. Public opposition as well as a disagreement within Nepal’s governing coalition—with Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s centrist Nepali Congress party mostly in favor of the grant but its left-wing partners, chiefly the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), opposed—forced the coalition to suspend parliamentary debate over the grant on Wednesday but the issue will certainly be on the legislative agenda in the next few days. Nepal has until the end of the month to accept the grant.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudanese security forces killed another anti-junta protester on Sunday, this time in the city of Bahri (also known as “Khartoum Bahri” or “Khartoum North”). Protests also took place in several other Sudanese cities, including Bahri’s neighbors Khartoum and Omdurman. According to the Central Committee for Sudanese Doctors, the victim was shot while attempting to escape a cloud of tear gas, which police deployed in abundance to break up the crowd of demonstrators. This brings the number of protesters killed since last October’s coup to at least 82.
ALGERIA
Algerian authorities say that their security forces killed seven “terrorists” during an operation in Skikda province on Saturday. They don’t seem to have offered any details beyond that. “Terrorists” is a vague descriptor but in Algerian parlance is usually reserved for militants of the Islamist variety. Algeria doesn’t have much of a problem with jihadists these days but there are occasional reports of clashes with what are presumably remnants of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. For example, two Algerian soldiers were reportedly killed in a confrontation with jihadist militants near the Nigerien border on January 28.
MALI
The Malian military reportedly carried out an attack on a jihadist insurgent base near the village of Arham in Mali’s Tombouctou region on Friday, killing at least 57 insurgents while losing eight soldiers. It’s unclear who these insurgents were but both al-Qaeda’s Jamaʿat Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin affiliate and Islamic State’s Greater Sahara affiliate are active in the area.
NIGER
A Nigerian airstrike may have gone awry on Friday and resulted in the bombardment of a village just over the border in southern Niger’s Maradi region. The governor of that region reported Sunday that the strike killed seven children and left five more wounded, while Doctors Without Borders is citing a death toll of 12, four of them children. It’s not entirely clear how Nigerien officials know that this was a Nigerian airstrike, though it is true that Nigeria conducts occasional airstrikes against bandit gangs in the northern part of that country and one of those strikes could have taken place near enough to the border for this type of mishap to occur. Nigerian officials say they’re investigating but haven’t yet acknowledged any responsibility for the incident.
ETHIOPIA
Ethiopia is generating electricity via its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a milestone that is likely to inflame tensions with Sudan and Egypt over the dam’s impact on downstream water levels. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed visited the GERD on Sunday to mark the official start of operations. The GERD’s reservoir hasn’t yet been completely filled so it’s generating only a small portion of its estimated 5000 megawatt capacity, but the indication that it’s continuing to fill said reservoir despite the lack of a regional agreement on water management is probably going to be received poorly in Khartoum and Cairo.
SOMALIA
An al-Shabab suicide bomber killed at least 13 people on Saturday targeting a restaurant in the town of Beledweyne in central Somalia. Officials in Hiran region are citing a higher death toll, 15, with another 20 wounded. One of the people killed was apparently running in Somalia’s ongoing indirect parliamentary election, which is scheduled to wrap up on February 25 and which al-Shabab has been trying to disrupt.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The US embassy in Moscow has issued an advisory for US citizens in Russia to prepare “evacuation plans” in light of the ongoing possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The advisory cited “threats of attacks…in major urban areas” as well as along the Russian-Ukrainian border, drawing a query from the Russian Foreign Ministry as to why the US hasn’t shared any information about those “threats” with Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin personally oversaw a major missile exercise on Saturday. The Russian military billed the event as an “exercise of strategic deterrence forces” during which both “ballistic and cruise missiles” were tested. Hopefully everybody had a good time and of course there’s no reason to connect this event to anything that might or might not be happening in Eastern Europe even as I write this.
BELARUS
It’s my sad duty to inform you all that the diabolical Putin has conquered a helpless Eastern European state. No, I’m not talking about Ukraine. In this case I’m referring to Belarus, which according to The Washington Post (which exclusively cites, as far as I can tell, members of Belarus’s political opposition) Putin has subjugated “without firing a shot.” This sudden development comes as Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin—you’ll have to bear with me, as I’m not sure how many of these folks will still have jobs in the post-conquest government—announced on Sunday that Russian military forces currently in Belarus for exercises will be staying there beyond the scheduled end of those exercises on Sunday.
That’s it, actually. No actual conquest, not even much of a loss of Belarus’s already weakened autonomy. Yes, this new development could be construed (and is presumably meant to be construed) as a threat to Ukraine, and it does contradict previous Belarusian statements that those soldiers would be leaving as soon as the exercises were over. It also may contradict a statement Putin himself made in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday. But Belarus has been enthralled to Russia for a long time now, increasingly so since the August 2020 presidential election that left Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko even more cut off from the rest of Europe than he’d been before. The presence of Russian forces in Belarus, even if it winds up being permanent (and there’s as yet no reason to think it will), doesn’t really change that status quo very much.
The way many in the US media talk about Vladimir Putin, as though he were Genghis Khan reborn or something, frequently veers into irresponsibly sensationalist territory. Characterizing (in what appears to be a “straight news” story, not an opinion piece) his fairly mundane patron-client relationship with Lukashenko as a Russian “conquest” of Belarus, particularly given the state of tension over Ukraine, is grossly sensationalist in the worst possible way.
UKRAINE
Where to even begin?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on Sunday that Russia is “on the brink” of invading Ukraine. The most recent archeological estimates tell us that Russia has been on the brink of invading Ukraine since sometime in the late second millennium BCE, though the decision to extend the deployment of Russian forces in Belarus (see above) and satellite imagery showing additional Russian troop deployments in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border are only adding fuel to this proverbial fire.
Diplomacy is not entirely dead, it seems, as Putin did hold a phone call with Macron on Sunday, as I mentioned above. I was going to say that they don’t seem to have accomplished anything, but late Sunday it emerged that Macron had successfully brokered a summit between Putin and US President Joe Biden. It sounds like they’re still working out details, including when this summit might take place, but presumably Putin wouldn’t agree to such a meeting and then upend the whole thing by invading Ukraine before it happens. Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were already scheduled to meet on Thursday, and it sounds like they’ll focus on planning this summit.
The general evacuation that leaders of the Donestk and Luhansk “people’s republics” ordered on Friday is ongoing, I guess, though it’s unclear at least to those of us relying on Western media how it’s going. The New York Times reports that Donbas civilians are arriving in Russia and that at least in some cases they haven’t been entirely thrilled with the welcome they’ve received. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, meanwhile, are both reporting that most Donbas residents ignored the evacuation orders altogether. The Post found a number of people in Donbas who were surprisingly willing to agree with Ukrainian and Western officials that the evacuations were staged as part of a crude “false flag” operation. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether any of these accounts accurately reflects what’s happening on the ground in the Donbas and over the border in Russia.
In the Donbas, meanwhile, Reuters reported “multiple explosions” in Donetsk and Luhansk on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning, with no explanation as to their cause. There have been unconfirmed reports of at least two shells that exploded on the Russian side of the border, again with no word as to their origins. Leaders of the DNR and LNR (their Russian acronyms) issued a call for a military “mobilization” on Saturday, though as with the evacuation orders it’s hard to know how many people are actually going to respond to it. The secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Stanislav Zas, helpfully offered on Saturday to send “peacekeepers” to the Donbas if, you know, that would help anything. I put “peacekeepers” in quotes because a CSTO deployment to the region would be functionally indistinguishable from a Russian military occupation.
On the Ukrainian side, authorities closed down one of the seven checkpoints between the government- and rebel-held parts of the Donbas on Sunday due to heavy artillery fire. At least two Ukrainian soldiers were killed along the front line on Saturday. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his military will not respond to “provocations” from the other side, but I’m not sure how he’s defining “response” or “provocation” here. There are claims that Ukrainian forces aren’t returning fire in the Donbas at all, which I find somewhat implausible though I suppose that could be the posture they’ve adopted. For what it’s worth, the LNR is claiming that two civilians were killed by Ukrainian artillery fire late Sunday, which if true would kind of undermine the claim that Ukrainian forces aren’t giving as well as getting.
We should probably talk a bit more about Zelensky’s MSC appearance, in which he lambasted his Western counterparts for adopting a policy of “appeasement” toward Russia. This is coming from the same guy who even a few days ago was still asking Western leaders to stop hyping the threat of an invasion because that sort of talk was pulverizing the Ukrainian economy. We all contain multitudes, I suppose. Part of me wonders if Zelensky might not be putting on a show of distancing himself from the West in order to calm whatever fears Putin has of “losing Ukraine.” He even called on NATO “be honest” about the chances of Ukraine someday joining that alliance, which sort of sounds like an invitation for Brussels to say it’s not going to happen. But I’m just speculating.
By the way, deep within that Washington Post article about Zelensky’s MSC speech we learn that “some high-level European officials have expressed frustration” that Washington hasn’t been forthcoming with the intelligence that’s allowed the Biden administration to state with such certitude that Putin has decided to invade. Apparently some European officials haven’t come to that same conclusion. I guess “trust us” is the Biden administration’s approach to its European counterparts as well as the US media and American public.
AMERICAS
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The Dominican government has begun construction on what is supposed to be, eventually, a roughly 200 kilometer wall sealing off about half of the country’s 392 kilometer border with Haiti. The ostensible goal is to combat smuggling and other illegal activities across the border but controlling migration from Haiti into the DR is also part of the wall’s rationale.
UNITED STATES
Finally, this isn’t specifically about the United States, but since this is the space where I usually end on a big piece that I think you all should check out I thought it would be the appropriate place to share the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s latest expose, this time involving a massive leak of client data from the secretive Swiss bank Credit Suisse:
Swiss banks have been synonymous with secrecy for decades, conjuring up visions of vast riches safely held in mountain vaults. It's a strong brand — one Switzerland's government does everything it can to protect.
But what's good for the banks' wealthy clients can be bad for everyone else. When corrupt politicians or organized criminals turn to Switzerland to keep their money safe from prying eyes, the victims of their crimes will likely never see it again. And once dirty money makes it into a Swiss bank account, it's free to go anywhere.
Switzerland's draconian banking secrecy laws have made it nearly impossible for other governments or journalists to hold the industry to account. Until now.
Through our partner, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, OCCRP obtained leaked records on more than 18,000 Credit Suisse accounts, the largest leak ever from a major Swiss bank. This is just a small subset of the bank's overall holdings, but we still found dozens of dubious characters in the data, including an Algerian general accused of torture, the children of a brutal Azerbaijani strongman, and even a Serbian drug lord known as Misha Banana.
There are plenty of fascinating details at OCCRP and I would imagine new revelations will trickle out as reporters spend more time digesting these materials. For its part, Credit Suisse insists that it’s done nothing wrong in taking on clients engaged in such wholesome activities as tax evasion, fraud, and drug and/or human trafficking. And those are some of their more savory customers.