Belarus to host three CSTO military drills this year
Belarus will this year host three drills of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-dominated alliance of former Soviet states, according to state-run Belta news agency.
The agency on Monday quoted the secretary general of the organization as saying the exercises would be code-named Cooperation, Echelon and Search.
— Karen Gilchrist
What to expect from Russia’s new offensive in Ukraine
A renewed Russian offensive in the east of Ukraine is underway. And while the scope of Russia’s plans remains uncertain, whatever happens, it comes at a tricky time for Kyiv.
Moscow is thought to be focused on creating a land corridor to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsular that it annexed in 2014, by targeting Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kherson in the south.
“The main objective has to be to have fully occupied the territory of the four provinces annexed by Russia with great fanfare last year,” Jamie Shea, a former NATO official and international defense and security expert at think tank Chatham House, told CNBC.
Ukrainian servicemen walk on the road toward their base near the front line in the Donetsk region on Feb. 4, 2023.
Yasuyoshi Chiba | Afp | Getty Images
“Russia is controlling about 50% of the territory of those four provinces so clearly, that has to be the objective because anything less than that — to annex them and not fully control them — would be a humiliation for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” he noted.
Shea, who was deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges at NATO until 2018, said he did not expect a big bang start to the offensive. Instead, he expects Russia to “grind out these slow advances,” a tactic it has been employing in the Donbas in recent months.
“The Russians are going to make sure they’ve got overwhelming superiority, advance a couple of kilometers, capture a village, and keep going with that step-by-step kind of…
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