World roundup: June 20 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere
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Today’s roundup is early and a bit abbreviated due to a personal commitment that I have this evening. I will cover anything we miss tomorrow. Thanks for reading!
TODAY IN HISTORY
June 20, 1631: Algerian pirates sack the Irish village of Baltimore. They carted off 107 captives, of whom only three ever made it back to Ireland.
June 20, 1789: Members of the French Third Estate take the Tennis Court Oath, in which they pledged not to dissolve under royal pressure. This was one of the first serious acts of defiance in the French Revolution and helped establish the power of the National Assembly.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Two of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisers, national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, are scheduled to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday. This is the consolation the Biden administration apparently offered in lieu of the larger “strategic dialogue” session it reportedly scrapped in response to the video Netanyahu released earlier this week in which he accused the administration of interfering with Israel’s obliteration of Gaza. The administration naturally took offense to that message, pointing to its clear support for said obliteration since October 7. The “dialogue” will apparently be rescheduled. It’s unclear what this foursome intends to discuss, though I assume there will be some conversation about the Biden administration’s preference that Israel not start a full-blown war with Hezbollah, including assurances that the administration will completely support the Israelis if/when they do start that war.
Elsewhere:
The Israeli military (IDF) “pounded” (to borrow Reuters’ parlance) much of central Gaza overnight, including the city of Deir al-Balah and several refugee camps. Israeli forces also pushed deeper into western Rafah, forcing people displaced by their previous assaults on eastern and central Rafah to flee north, I guess, “north” being the only direction they can go even though clearly things aren’t any safer there. Of around 1.4 million people who were estimated to have crammed into Rafah before the IDF began assaulting the city last month, it’s now believed that fewer than 100,000 remain. The Biden administration continues to regard this operation as “limited” in scope.
According to Palestinian authorities, IDF soldiers killed a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Thursday. There’s been no comment from Israeli officials as yet and the circumstances around the shooting are unclear.
According to The Wall Street Journal and “a U.S. official familiar with the latest U.S. intelligence,” as few as 50 October 7 hostages may still be alive in Gaza. That assessment is apparently “based in part on Israeli intelligence” and would mean that some 66 of the 116 hostages who have not been recovered (alive or otherwise) are dead. The Israeli government’s public estimate is that around 40 are dead, and Hamas officials continue to insist that they just don’t know how many are still alive. This estimate has obvious implications for ceasefire negotiations, though that process already seems largely defunct at this point.
Joe Biden Memorial Pier fans will no doubt be thrilled to learn that it is back up and running, again, after having been dismantled for the second time in a month last week due to choppy seas. It’s unclear how much longer the JBMP is going to be in service. The initial plan was to operate it for 90 days and reassess, but given that it’s been out of service for much of its first 30 days I suspect it will be going away at the end of that initial period if not before. The US military insists that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the pier has been a huge success that has enabled some 3500 metric tons of humanitarian aid to come ashore in Gaza. Whether any of that aid has actually made it to Palestinian civilians is unclear.
LEBANON
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a fiery speech on Wednesday in which he insisted that his organization is “prepared” for a war with Israel and warned that “no place” in Israel “will be spared our rockets” in the event of such a conflict. Nasrallah also threatened to attack Cyprus, which has understandably generated a number of blaring headlines though the coverage seems to be overstating the threat. What Nasrallah said was that Hezbollah could attack Cyprus if the IDF were to use Cypriot airfields and other facilities to attack Lebanon. This would mean that the Cypriot government had made an affirmative decision to join the conflict and seems like a pretty non-controversial statement in any other context. I suppose threatening violence over something that hasn’t happened and might not ever happen is kind of provocative, but clearly Nasrallah’s intent was to deter the Cypriot government from getting involved.
ASIA
MYANMAR
The rebel “Three Brotherhood Alliance” is accusing the Myanmar junta of repeatedly violating the terms of a ceasefire that the Chinese government brokered back in January. One of the alliance’s members, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, says the junta has carried out multiple airstrikes this week against TNLA positions in Myanmar’s Shan state, where the ceasefire is supposed to be in effect, and claims those are just the latest of several violations over the past few months. The junta responded by accusing the TNLA of breaking the ceasefire and said it acted in response to those alleged violations.
VIETNAM
Russian President Vladimir Putin took his Asian tour to Vietnam late Wednesday, and on Thursday articulated his desire for “developing a reliable security architecture” for the region that eschews “closed military-political blocs.” So that seems nice. He signed a number of bilateral agreements with Vietnamese President Tô Lâm, though nothing on the order of the strategic partnership agreement he’d signed with North Korea the previous day. Russia and Vietnam already have a strategic partnership in place though it doesn’t include, for example, the mutual defense pact contained in the North Korean accord—which seems kind of like a “closed military bloc,” but I digress. The US and European Union have criticized Vietnam’s decision to host Putin but are unlikely to take any action beyond rhetoric.
SOUTH KOREA
Speaking of that new North Korean-Russian pact, it’s apparently caused the South Korean government to “reconsider” its restriction on providing direct military aid to Ukraine. Seoul criticized the pact as “a violation of UN Security Council resolutions” and said that it should be “subject to monitoring and sanctions by the international community” in a statement released on Thursday. South Korea has indirectly supported Ukraine in the past, by providing munitions to the US that were then sent on to Ukraine, but a more direct channel could provide a boost to Ukraine’s ever-dwindling supplies of artillery ammunition, among other things.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces group has reportedly seized Al-Fulah, the capital of Sudan’s West Kordofan state. That city contains a power station and one of two Sudanese military bases in the province, which itself is strategically located on the South Sudanese border. In other words, it’s a significant gain for the RSF, which could now push the Sudanese military out of the province’s other base and bring the entire area under its control.
Meanwhile, a new investigative report finds that cemeteries across Sudan, and especially in the Darfur region, are swelling with bodies. This is relevant inasmuch as there is no reliable estimate of the number of people who have died as a result of the military-RSF conflict, either directly or as a result of its knock-on effects. The United Nations maintains an “estimate” of around 15,000 killed but that’s generally viewed as woefully inadequate and based on limited information mostly drawn from Sudan’s three-city capital region. With aid agencies warning of worsening famine conditions the real death toll is likely far higher and increasing rapidly.
SOMALIA
The Somali government has, according to Reuters, asked the African Union to slow down the withdrawal of its peacekeeping forces. The AU’s current peacekeeping mission is supposed to be out of Somalia by the end of the year, with plans to replace them with a smaller AU force. Some 4000 AU soldiers were due to be withdrawn by the end of June but the Somali government reportedly sent a letter to the AU last month asking that half of them remain in Somalia at least until September due to fears that al-Shabab could exploit a security vacuum. This is not the first time the Somali government has expressed that concern but it does appear to be the first time it’s made reference to delaying a specific withdrawal deadline. The US and EU, which fund the Somali peacekeeping operation, are pushing for the transition to a smaller AU force mostly over concerns about cost.
KENYA
Police in Nairobi clashed violently on Thursday with protesters who are opposed to Kenyan President William Ruto’s planned tax increases:

EUROPE
NATO
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis has withdrawn from the “race” to be NATO’s next secretary-general, clearing the field for outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. I put “race” in quotes because there’s never really been much of a contest here—Rutte was always the clear favorite, with only the opposition of a handful of NATO member states standing in his way. That opposition has now completely dissipated, quashing whatever slim chance Iohannis might have had.
RUSSIA
EU member states have reportedly agreed on a new tranche of sanctions against Russia, this time focusing on its liquefied natural gas exports. It seems to be a fairly minimal effort. The new sanctions won’t ban EU imports of Russian LNG but will ban the re-export of Russian LNG from Europe, a restriction that will affect around 10 percent of Russia’s total LNG exports and can presumably be worked around. A proposal to block the re-export of EU goods to Russia by third parties was apparently quashed, perhaps just temporarily, by the German government.
According to Reuters, the Russian and Chinese governments have devised a workaround in response to recent US-imposed banking sanctions:
Since Putin's visit, specially authorised banks have been set up in border regions which allow Russian firms to open non-resident accounts (NRA) with Chinese banks, a step that has become more important since VTB's (VTBR.MM) Shanghai branch was targeted with sanctions, they told Reuters.
Trade between Russia and China ballooned to a record $240 billion in 2023. Maintaining the flow of income and goods, which is crucial to the Kremlin, depends on ensuring smooth payments.
The workaround, which involves smaller, regional banks that can for the time being fly below the U.S. sanctions radar, shows how Moscow and Beijing are having to take increasingly complex steps to ensure bilateral payments continue to be made but at the same time potentially exposing some Chinese financial firms to U.S. sanctions as they look to circumvent restrictions.
Using banks in border regions makes it easier for go-betweens working on behalf of Russian companies to flit between them. The scheme, involving small banks with limited or no business with countries which Russia considers unfriendly, also reduces the potential fallout for China.
UKRAINE
The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it’s putting a hold on planned exports of air defense weaponry and “re-prioritizing” those shipments for Ukraine. The announcement comes as the Russian military has once again settled on pounding Ukrainian infrastructure, particularly its power grid, as a primary tactic in its ongoing war. The Ukrainian government has been clamoring for additional air defense support for months but the members of its support network have been reluctant to weaken their own air defenses to bolster Ukraine’s. That may be changing a bit, though—the Romanian government now says it’s sending a Patriot air defense battery to Ukraine and other countries may follow suit. The US decision will reportedly not affect any planned air defense shipments to Israel or Taiwan, so the full scope of the new policy isn’t entirely clear.
AMERICAS
MEXICO
The Biden administration on Thursday blacklisted eight individuals linked with the Mexican La Nueva Familia Michoacana cartel over its drug and particularly fentanyl trafficking operations. It also announced new measures ostensibly meant to help banks flag and report transactions that could involve Mexican cartels purchasing fentanyl precursors and/or manufacturing equipment from China.
UNITED STATES
Finally, The Intercept’s Nick Turse looks at the US military’s plans for the future of its drone program:
In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of “all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems”: Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines — in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones — that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces.
Earlier this month, two Pentagon offices leading this charge announced that four nontraditional weapons makers had been chosen for another drone program, with test flights planned for later this year. The companies building this “Enterprise Test Vehicle,” or ETV, will have to prove that their drone can fly over 500 miles and deliver a “kinetic payload,” with a focus on weapons that are low-cost, quick to build, and modular, according to a 2023 solicitation for proposals and a recent announcement from the Air Force Armament Directorate and the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s off-the-shelf acceleration arm. Many analysts believe that the ETV initiative may be connected to the Replicator program. DIU did not return a request for clarification prior to publication.
The new robot planes will mark a shift from the Defense Department’s “legacy” drones which DIU says are “over-engineered” and “labor-intensive” to produce. The four contractors chosen for the program are Anduril Industries, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos Dynetics, and Zone 5 Technologies, which were selected from a field of more than 100 applicants.
The goal is to choose one or more variants of what look to be suicide drones (weapon-makers prefer “loitering munitions”) that can be mass produced through “on-call” manufacturing and churned out in quantity as needed. (DIU did not offer clarification on whether all prototypes are expected to be strictly kamikaze aircraft.) These drones will likely be smaller than the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones — which were used extensively as ground-launched, reusable, missile-firing assassination weapons during the first decades of the war on terror — and more versatile, since the new ETVs must include an air-delivered variant that can be dropped or launched from cargo aircraft.
More drones means potentially more drone strikes which would inevitably mean more civilian casualties, and that’s without opening the Pandora’s Box into fully autonomous, artificial intelligence-controlled devices. Eh, I’m sure it will be fine.