As my colleague Adam Garrie has rightly written, the meetings yesterday and today in Moscow between Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia are far more important than any of the other bilateral meetings which will be taking place this week during the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Unfortunately that includes the ill-starred meeting between President Putin and President Trump.
Back in April, at the time of the US-Chinese summit in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, I said that US President Trump, inexperienced in foreign affairs, was badly misreading China’s President Xi Jinping.
In particular President Trump misread the Chinese President’s habitual courtesy as a concrete commitment that China would take action against North Korea in connection with that country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme, and as a sign of Chinese support for the US cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al-Shayrat air base.
This article first appeared on Russia Feed
As was universally predicted, the European Council meeting last week ended with a decision to extend the sectoral sanctions which were imposed on Russia in July 2014 for a further 6 months.
One of the most important things to have happened in the Syrian war over the last few months is that the veil of Israel’s neutrality in the war has been thrown off.
This veil was always very thin. It is no secret in the Middle East that the Syrian conflict has been all about breaking the ‘Axis of Resistance’ of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah by attacking Syria, which was supposed to be its weakest link.
Colonel Ryan Dillon, the spokesman for the US led Coalition against ISIS, has spoken of the Syrian government today in more positive terms than any other US official since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.
On 11th January 2017, shortly after publication of the now notorious Trump Dossier, I speculated that this obviously fictitious document might have been the cause of the whole Russiagate scandal.
After carefully explaining why the document is certainly a fiction I made the following point
Attorney Dan Kovalik has written an extremely important book that challenges the current media/political focus on “Russia-gate” and warns that dark forces of war are taking us in an ever more dangerous direction. The book, released just a few weeks ago, has received high praise from numerous writers.
In his foreword to the book, best selling author David Talbot says:
The strong Russian reaction to the shooting down of the Syrian SU-22 near Rusafa in northern Syria is unlikely to be matched by a similarly strong Russian response to the US shooting down of an Iranian built drone near the US base in southern Syria at al-Tanf.
Back in April, in the immediate aftermath of the US cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al-Shayrat air base, Russia retaliated by switching off the ‘de-confliction’ hotline between the US and Russian militaries in Syria, which enables these militaries to avoid accidental clashes with each other.
I have now watched the first three episodes of the Putin Interviews, which is sufficient to give an overview of the series.
In my opinion it is by far the best and most interesting series of programmes which have appeared on Western television about Vladimir Putin.
