Nickel/Metals/ War – Geopolitical Flashpoints

https://apnews.com/

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The U.K. prime minister said Tuesday the country is putting its defense industry on a “war footing” by increasing defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade, and pledged to send arms worth 500 million pounds ($620 million) to Ukraine.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the increase as the “biggest strengthening of our national defense for a generation.” “In a world that is the most dangerous it has been since the end of the Cold War, we cannot be complacent,” Sunak said at a news briefing alongside NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a visit to Poland. “As our adversaries align, we must do more to defend our country, our interests and our values.”

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https://thehill.com/

Polish President Andrzej Duda says Poland is ready to host U.S. nuclear weapons, saying the topic was one of frequent discussions between Warsaw and Washington.

Duda told Polish tabloid Fakt in an interview published Monday that Russia is increasingly militarizing the Kaliningrad province between Poland and Lithuania and has relocated tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus. “I must admit that when asked about it, I declared our readiness,” the Polish president said of talks with U.S. officials.

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https://www.ft.com/

US treasury secretary delivers message to vice minister He Lifeng during meetings in Guangzhou

The US has warned of “significant consequences” if Chinese companies provide support for Moscow’s war against Ukraine in one of the sharpest messages it has yet delivered to Beijing.

Following discussions in Guangzhou on Friday and Saturday, the US Treasury said: “Secretary Yellen emphasised that companies, including those in the PRC, must not provide material support for Russia’s war against Ukraine . . . and the significant consequences if they do so.”

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https://www.bloomberg.com/

An authoritative new study finds there are 183 regional and local conflicts underway in 2023, the highest number in three decades.

“It’ll all be over by Christmas” has become one of the most derided prophesies in history. It was made by wiseacres in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Europe as the First World War exploded in August 1914. These misguided optimists founded their projection on recent experience: Europe had suffered no long, big conflicts since the fall of Napoleon a century earlier.

Yet as everybody knows today, far from being over before Santa Claus called, the terrible struggle that began with Austria’s invasion of Serbia lasted four years and killed around 20 million people before the 1918 armistice.

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https://www.bbc.com/

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has delivered a blunt warning that Europe has entered a “pre-war era” and if Ukraine is defeated by Russia, nobody in Europe will be able to feel safe.

“I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past,” he told European media. “It’s real and it started over two years ago.” His remarks came as a fresh barrage of Russian missiles targeted Ukraine. Russia has intensified its bombardment of Ukraine in recent weeks.

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https://www.theguardian.com/

At CNN in Washington, Jim Sciutto’s dimly lit office is both man cave and shrine to a foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries. A typewriter he bought on Portobello Road during a decade in London. Photos he took in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

A Vietnamese newspaper account of the time he rode over the South China Sea on a US spy plane. A corked bottle of water from his trip to the north pole in a US nuclear submarine. A fragment of the Black Hawk helicopter destroyed in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. “I’m not sure I should have that,” Sciutto confesses, “but I do.”

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https://www.msn.com/

Hundreds of bright young technologists have landed in California this weekend for a two-day hackathon — a quintessential start-up contest in which teams of coders race to build software. But rather than a posh, snack-laden San Francisco office, they’ll work in a cavernous 6,000 square-foot warehouse in El Segundo, a refinery town southwest of Los Angeles.

And instead of building mobile apps or AI chatbots, competitors will hack together surveillance tools, electronic warfare systems, or drone countermeasures for the front lines in Ukraine — battlefield technology driving a funding frenzy among tech investors.

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https://www.economist.com/

Peace in East Asia hangs to a worrying extent on the outcome of the conflict

When Russia invaded Ukraine it jolted the democracies of East Asia—Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, all allies of America. A trip to Japan suggests to Banyan that, as the conflict in Ukraine enters its third year, its implications for East Asian policymakers grow only starker.

In Europe the talk is of whether Ukraine can hold on despite dwindling American financial support and the spectre of a second Trump presidency. The consequences for peace in Asia would be devastating if Ukraine loses. A win for President Vladimir Putin might embolden China to reshape the regional order on its terms.

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https://www.msn.com/en-ca/

Global nuclear tensions and the threat of World War Three seem to ratchet up by the day. While we’re yet to fully enter a cold war, the air is getting rather chilly. It may soon be time for the world to put its ‘big’ coat on.

For certain parts of the United States, however, it’s the other end of the thermometer that should concern them. Cold wars might be scary, but they’re a cool, blissful peace and a blessed relief to the much hotter alternative of a thermonuclear war.

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https://apnews.com/

China on Sunday announced a 7.2% increase in its defense budget for the coming year, up slightly from last year’s 7.1% rate of increase. That marks the eighth consecutive year of single-digit percentage point increases in what is now the world’s second-largest military budget. The 2023 figure was given as 1.55 trillion yuan ($224 billion), roughly double the figure from 2013.

Along with the world’s biggest standing army, China has the world’s largest navy and recently launched its third aircraft carrier. According to the U.S., it also has the largest aviation force in the Indo-Pacific, with more than half of its fighter planes consisting of fourth or fifth generation models.

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https://www.reuters.com/

MOSCOW, Feb 29 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin told Western countries on Thursday they risked provoking a nuclear war if they sent troops to fight in Ukraine, warning that Moscow had the weapons to strike targets in the West.

The war in Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Putin has previously spoken of the dangers of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, but his nuclear warning on Thursday was one of his most explicit.

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