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Europe
Hungary
September 11, 2024 5:27pm EDT In 1944, hundreds of Nazi Germany's explosives-laden Black Sea fleet vessels were scuttled along the River Danube, destroying the ships themselves as they retreated from advancing Soviet forces. After a drought in July and August that saw the river's water level drop, four vessels have come to light in Hungary's Danube-Drava National Park near Mohács, this year. Strewn across the riverbed, some of the ships still have turrets, command bridges, broken masts and twisted hulls, while others lie mostly submerged under sand banks. Wrecks of ships have also emerged near Serbia's river port town of Prahovo. The Danube stood at 1.17 metres in Budapest today. During floods the Danube rises well above 6 metres there. Long-awaited rainfall set in on Monday (September 9) is expected to raise Danube levels by the weekend, with the river likely to submerge the shipwrecks again. (Source: foxnews / Reuters)
11.9.2024 17:55 Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wants to station about 200 soldiers in Chad to stem migration, after meeting Chadian leader Deby in Budapest. "Chad is a key country in the fight against illegal migration in Africa. Migration from Africa to Europe cannot be stopped without the countries of the Sahel region. That is why Hungary is building a partnership with Chad. We are working on this today and tomorrow with President Deby," Orbán stated. Bordering Sudan, Libya, Niger, and the Central African Republic, Chad, which as a population of approximately 19 million, occupies a crucial position in the Sahel strategic location. Its status as a key Western ally in a volatile part of the world, underscores its significance in the global geopolitical landscape. By deploying troops in Chad, Orbán has economic interests in the region. The Hungarian prime minister is also trying to score political points at a time when troops from EU member states like France have lost favor and are scaling down on their presence in the Sahel, Owusu, a Ghanaian political and security analyst, told. The abundant resources in the Sahel in terms of oil, uranium, gold, and other resources are yet to be exploited, Owusu said. "Gold, cobalt, lithium, and other resources are major pull factors that could pull Budapest to the Sahel, and they should not be overlooked." But while some think the deployment could significantly impact the security situation in the Sahel region, Owusu is skeptical. "Chad itself is far larger than Hungary and many Western European countries. Therefore, 200 troops may not make an impact," he emphasized. If Hungary is interested in Chad's resources, then perhaps eventually it will have to contribute more forces to ensure that such interests are well protected, Awusu added. Cummings, a security analyst at Signal Risk in South Africa, told that strategies the Sahelian states have used to counter armed non-state actors, usually from a military perspective, have not effectively addressed security challenges in the region. "Up until now, the strategy by Sahelian countries where they've leveraged off European or Western forces, or whether they've leveraged off Russian forces, focuses on addressing the symptoms and not the causes of these insurgencies or why these terrorist groups are receiving the support that they're receiving," Cummings said. Over the past year, Hungary has rapidly developed ties with Chad, opening a humanitarian aid center and diplomatic mission in the capital and signing agreements on agriculture and education. Hungary has a historically weak presence in Africa, but Orbán has championed a foreign policy of opening up to the East and South by seeking closer ties with China, Russia, and African countries. Marsai, director of the Migration Research Institute, said Budapest has also sought a more significant military role in the Sahel to train its defense forces. Hungary this time would need to provide everything by itself. This could pose significant challenges, particularly in terms of resources and coordination. Despite disagreements with Budapest, the European Union welcomed Hungary's initiative in Chad. Amid the domestic and regional challenges, "it is important for more international partners to work with Chad," an EU spokesperson told AFP news agency. But at home, the military mission has drawn criticism, with opposition parties branding the deployment 'dangerous and wasteful." The Hungarian government has also been accused of nepotism. The premier's only son, Gáspár, had discreetly participated in official negotiations. Budapest dismissed the criticism, pointing to Gáspár's language skills and expertise as a captain in the Hungarian army. He has since been appointed a "liaison officer to help prepare the mission in Chad." (Source: dw)
United Kingdom
(11 September 2024) ’There are strong indications that the US and UK are poised to lift their restrictions within days on Ukraine using long-range missiles against targets inside Russia.’ ’The UK has supplied Storm Shadow long-range missiles to Ukraine’ after a request from Kyiv for its fight against invading Russian forces. Storm Shadow is an Anglo-French cruise missile with a maximum range of around 250km. The French call it Scalp. It is launched from aircraft then flies at close to the speed of sound, hugging the terrain, before dropping down and detonating its high explosive warhead. Storm Shadow is considered an 'ideal' weapon for penetrating hardened bunkers and ammunition stores. Each missile costs nearly US$1 million. Britain and France have already sent these missiles to Ukraine - but with the caveat that Kyiv can only fire them at targets inside its own borders. They have been used with great effect, hitting Russia’s Black Sea naval headquarters at Sevastopol and making the whole of Crimea unsafe for the Russian navy. Kyiv has lobbied for its use inside Russia, particularly to target airfields being used to mount the glide bomb attacks that have recently hindered Ukrainian front-line efforts. Moscow has already taken precautions for the eventuality of the restrictions being lifted. It has moved bombers, missiles and some of the infrastructure that maintains them further back, away from the border with Ukraine and beyond the range of Storm Shadow. Even if Russian aircraft pull back further from Ukraine’s frontiers to avoid the missile threat they will still suffer an increase in the time and costs per sortie to the front line. At the Globsec security forum in Prague this month, it was suggested that Russian military airbases were better protected than Ukrainian civilians getting hit because of the restrictions. Kyiv argues that in order to push back the Russian air strikes, it needs long-range missiles, including Storm Shadow and comparable systems including American Atacms, which has an even greater range of 300km. ’Storm Shadow is unlikely to turn the tide’. ’It might "unlock' another system, the Atacms’. ’Washington worries that although so far all of President Putin’s threatened red lines have turned out to be 'empty bluffs', allowing Ukraine to hit targets deep inside Russia with Western-supplied missiles could just push him over the edge into retaliating. The fear in the White House is that hardliners in the Kremlin could insist this retaliation takes the form of attacking transit points for missiles on their way to Ukraine, such as an airbase in Poland. If that were to happen, Nato's Article 5 could be invoked, meaning the alliance would be at war with Russia. Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the White House's aim has been to give Kyiv as much support as possible without getting dragged into direct conflict with Moscow, something that would risk being a precursor to the unthinkable: a catastrophic nuclear exchange’. (Source: bbc)
North America
United States
Wednesday, September 11, 2024 8:31 pm CET 'Ukrainian hopes that U.S. Secretary of State Blinken would use the occasion of his Wednesday trip to Kyiv to announce a loosening of the rules preventing it from hitting targets inside Russia with donated weapons came to nothing". Kyiv is starting to regularly attack Russia 'with its own long-range weapons'. Today, the Arctic city of Murmansk, 2,000 kilometers to the north of Ukraine, shut two of its airports after reporting attacks by Ukrainian drones. A day earlier, Ukraine attacked Moscow and other targets inside Russia. Both the U.K. and the U.S promised continued military aid. UK FM Lammy announced over £600 million in humanitarian, military and economic support during the visit. Blinken announced $717 million in new economic and humanitarian assistance. Further supplies of Western weapons to Ukraine are 'fraught with uncontrolled escalation,' warned Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zakharova today. 'And we’ve now seen this action of Russia 'acquiring ballistic missiles from Iran', which will further empower their aggression in Ukraine. So if anyone is taking escalatory action, it would appear to be Mr Putin and Russia,' Blinken said. He added: 'We're working with urgency to continue to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to effectively defend itself.' 'I can announce we will now also send hundreds of additional air defense missiles, tens of thousands of additional artillery ammunition rounds and more armored vehicles to Ukraine by the end of the year,' Lammy added. (Source: politico)
September 11, 2024 4:54pm EDT During Tuesday night's presidential debate, former President Trump discussed his relationship with foreign leaders, - leaders of rival nations and allies alike during his term - most notably Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the "strongman" of Europe. "He’s a tough person, smart prime minister of Hungary," Trump said, adding that Orbán insisted "you need Trump back as president" because "they were afraid of him.’ "China was afraid, and I don’t like to use the word afraid, but I’m just quoting him," Trump said. 'China was afraid of him. He said Russia was afraid of him." "Look, Viktor Orbán said it: He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president," Trump added. Trump also responded to Vice President Harris’ claim that he ’admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one" and he "exchanged love letters with Kim' by noting that Russian President Putin had endorsed her last week and said he hoped she wins 'because what he’s gotten away with is absolutely incredible.’ Trump said Russia's invasion of Ukraine would never have happened during his time in office, noting that he knew Putin 'very well." Trump has repeatedly compared his foreign policy record to that of the Biden administration, roping in Harris as part of that policy, and noted the more interventionist approach he took, using force as deterrence against Iran and meeting with Putin and North Korean leader Kim to ensure stability in regions faced with uncertainty. Trump and Orbán enjoyed a rosy relationship during the Trump administration, often pictured together smiling and shaking hands in sharp contrast to the more demure meetings between Orbán and Biden. During a visit to the U.S. in March, Orbán visited with Trump, not Biden, when trying to court potential foreign policy in the U.S. He also spoke at a panel with the leader of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Orbán made headlines over the summer when he prematurely ditched a high-level NATO summit in Washington, D.C., to meet with Trump in Florida at a time when Biden faced questions about his fitness for office and in seeking a second term. Orbán was seeking a cease-fire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, having met separately with Putin and Zelenskyy. "We continued the peace mission in Mar-a-Lago," Orbán wrote on his official social media account on X after the meeting. "President @realDonaldTrump has proved during his presidency that he is a man of peace. He will do it again!" "It was an honour to visit President @realDonaldTrump at Mar-a-Lago today," he wrote in a separate post that labeled the visit "Peace mission 5.0." "We discussed ways to make peace. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!" Orbán, who assumed the role of president of the European Union as part of a six-month rotational leadership scheme,’joked’ at the time that Hungary would "make Europe great again" and ’warned’ that "the next American president will not be the same president who is today." He told other leaders at the formal NATO dinner that allies who still thought Biden could win the upcoming presidential election "were like people on the Titanic playing violins as the ship went down." (Source: foxnews)
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