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Europe
Greenland
(12 March 2025) Greenland's centre-right opposition wins election. The Demokraatit party - which favours a gradual approach to independence - is getting nearly 30% of the vote. About 44,000 Greenlanders out of a population of 57,000 were eligible to cast their votes to elect 31 MPs, as well as the local government. Six parties were on the ballot. Naleraq, another opposition party which wants to immediately kick-off divorce proceedings from Copenhagen and have closer ties with the US, is polling second with about 25%. Prime Minister Mute B Egede's Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) - also a pro-independence party - is third with over 21%. (Source: BBC - United Kingdom)
European Commission
Mar 12, 2025 The European Commission has invited Syria’s Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) administration to an official conference in Brussels after the slaughter of hundreds of Alawites in the country's west. Hipper, the European Commission spokesperson, revealed at a daily press briefing that ’an invite was sent’ to HTS foreign minister Shaibani to attend the donor conference for Syria's new rulers on March 17, Press Tv reported. Titled ‘Standing with Syria: Meeting the Needs for a Successful Transition’, the donor conference – which the EU has been organizing annually since 2017 – is set to be the first held since the ouster of the Assad administration in December. Hipper said the conference presents a ’very important occasion’ to engage with the new Syrian rulers. HTS-led forces have over the past weeks perpetrated a vast array of massacres against minorities, especially Alawites, in the country’s northwestern coastal region. More than 1,540 people, the majority of them civilians, have been killed so far in the violence in the provinces of Tartus, Latakia, Hama and Homs, according to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). In harsh rebuke of the massacres by HTS-led forces, human rights groups as well as the international community have called for an immediate halt to ethnic cleansing and sectarian-based atrocities in Syria. They have also called for the establishment of an independent international investigation committee under the UN’s direct oversight. EU foreign policy chief Kallas, yesterday ’stopped short of condemning the killings and defended the deeds of HTS militants’. ’It is very, very early to tell whether this goes to the right direction. The first signals are good, but we are not rushing into any kind of arrangements yet, if we don't have certainty,’ she said. Kallas only expressed concern about the risks of sectarian violence in Syria and a resurgence of extremism in the Arab country. According to SOHR, at least 973 Alawite civilians were slaughtered on March 10 alone. Violence has surged in Syria under the HTS rule, with kidnappings and extra-judicial killings reported since the fall of Assad’s government on December 8, 2024. While the HTS administration claims its killing operations target remnants of the old regime, the military crackdown on Alawites that started in early March quickly has descended into open massacres of civilians. (Source: MEHR News Agency – Iran)
March 12, 2025 The European Union's member states would place countermeasures to the Trump administration's steel tariffs. The measures were designed to match the scope of U.S. tariffs, which the European Union said would be worth about $28 billion. The countermeasures were expected to begin on April 1 and be fully in place by April 13, the commission said. (Source: ABC News - U.S.)
Wed, 12 Mar, 2025 The 25% US levies on global imports of the metals came into force today. The EU retaliates against Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs with €26bn in countermeasures, which would come into force from April 1. The retaliatory measures target notable US goods - often from Republican states - worth €4.5bn and include Brussels reimposing tariffs on US goods including bourbon whiskey, jeans and Harley-Davidson motorbikes. The European Commission plans further retaliation targeting goods worth €18bn, including a wide range of steel and aluminium products, as well as agricultural produce, such as poultry, beef, seafood and nuts. These tariffs would be imposed from mid-April, after a vote by EU member states and consultations with industry. ’We try to hit … where it hurts,’ said a senior EU official: ’The bloc was targeting soya beans, which are grown in Louisiana, the state of the US speaker of the House, Johnson’. ’We’re happy to buy them from Brazil or from Argentina or from anywhere else’. ’If it came to a situation where we had to go further, digital services or intellectual property could be included,’ France’s European affairs minister, Haddad said. Lange, the German Social Democratic MEP who chairs the European parliament’s trade committee, described the tariffs as ’another dose of self-inflicted tariff pain by the Trump administration’,’particularly bad’ because they target US trade partners, ’they are set arbitrarily, without legal and economic justifications, and they fail to address non-market overcapacity – the main issue steel and aluminium industry across the Atlantic is confronted with’. EU officials said they were talking to counterparts in other countries, including the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Canada and Japan, but there had not been any coordination over responses. Officials not ruled out imposing tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminium from other countries – if US trade barriers resulted in a flood of imports into Europe. (Source: Irish Examiner - Ireland / The Guardian - United Kingdom)
England
(Wednesday), March 12, 2025 A 59-year-old Russian national was the captain of the Portugal-flagged Solong cargo ship which collided with a U.S. tanker off the coast of England, according to Russ, the owner of the cargo ship. The ship’s 14 crew members were a mix of Russian and Filipino nationals. One of them remains missing and is presumed dead. The Solong collided Monday with MV Stena Immaculate, a U.S.-flagged tanker transporting jet fuel for the American military. /Photo/ (Source: Fox News - U.S.)
Russia
March 12, 2025 Four reasons why Russia have no reason to - may not accept - ceasefire with Ukraine at this stage: Russia is on a serious offensive - a breather to Kyiv would mean an opportunity to regroup and re-energise; Europe’s military industrial complex, the key supporter of the counter-offensive to the Russians, is in a depleted state. 'The European Commission has proposed to set up a 150-billion euro ($157.76 billion) fund to majorly rearm Europe - part of a bigger package that could garner 800 billion euros for the European military buildup'; The Russian economy is with rising stock value, unlike in Europe where the economies are in a spot of crisis; Fourthly, a main military aim to gain a land corridor to Transdniestria, a Russian separatist enclave in Moldova. That aim has not been achieved yet. (Source: The Week - India)
Asia
Iran
(Wednesday), Mar 12, 2025 Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said on Saturday that Tehran would not be bullied into negotiations, a day after Trump said he had sent a letter urging Iran to engage in talks on a new nuclear deal. While expressing openness to a deal with Tehran, Trump has reinstated the 'maximum pressure' campaign he applied in his first term as President to isolate Iran from the global economy 'and drive its oil exports down towards zero'. In an interview with Fox Business, Trump said last week, "there are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal" to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran has long denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon. Yesterday President Pezeshkian said Iran would not negotiate with the US while being threatened. "It is unacceptable for us that they (the US) give orders and make threats. I won’t even negotiate with you. Do whatever the hell you want', state media quoted Pezeshkian as saying. (Source: India Today)
Saudi Arabia
(March 12, 2025) Following the talks, US President Trump’s administration lifted its suspension of military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine. (Source: AfricaNews - located in Lyon, France)
March 12, 2025 A temporary 30-day ceasefire in the Russian-Ukrainian war is set to be discussed between March 17 and 23, Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office told early today, following U.S.-Ukrainian talks in Saudi Arabia. Teams at the technical expert level will begin discussing all the details, he said. The United States brings the proposals developed during the talks to Russia. (Source: Meduza, located in Riga, Latvia)
North America
United States
12 March 2025 President Trump has promised the US will respond after the EU announced counter-tariffs. (Source: LBC – United Kingdom)
March 12, 2025 President Trump reversed course yesterday afternoon on a pledge to double tariffs on steel and aluminium from Canada to 50 per cent, just hours after announcing the higher tariffs, in rapid-fire moves that scrambled financial markets. The switch came after a Canadian official, Ontario Premier Ford also backed off his own plans for a 25 per cent surcharge on electricity which Canada's most populous province supplies to more than 1 million US homes. Stocks rebounded after Ford said he would suspend the surcharge and Ukraine agreed to a 30-day ceasefire. US stocks have fallen hard since reaching a record high about a month after Trump took office on Jan 20, with nearly US$5 trillion of market value erased from US indexes. (Source: AsiaOne - Singapore)
12 March 2025 The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives passed legislation to fund the government through 30 September and avert a shutdown at the end of the week. Senate Republicans will need at least seven Democrats to vote with them to prevent a lapse in funding, which could disrupt everything from financial oversight to scientific research and force hundreds of thousands of federal workers to go without pay. Several have said they would vote for the measure to avert a shutdown. (Source: RNZ - New Zealand)
March 12, 2025 The breadth and depth of Department of Defense’s supply chain. The DoD needs to understand the total impact, requires real-time supplier data to understand and mitigate supply chain risks, to have the necessary visibility into the materials and components its warfighters rely on to protect the nation. (Source: War on the Rocks - U.S.)
by Dr. Michienzi, a former senior defense official, the owner of MMR Defense Solutions LLC, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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