Biden to Huddle with National Security Council Sunday on Ukraine

U.S. President Joe Biden will meet with the National Security Council on Sunday, the White House announced Saturday as it reaffirmed that “Russia could launch an attack against Ukraine at any time,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Psaki said Biden was briefed Saturday on Vice President Kamala Harris’ meetings at the Munich Security Conference. Harris met Saturday with Western leaders, among them NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over military drills Saturday as shelling escalated in eastern Ukraine.

Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported more than 1,500 cease-fire violations in east Ukraine on Saturday, the highest single-day number this year.

Russia’s defense ministry said Saturday’s exercises, which the Kremlin says were previously planned to check readiness, involved practice submarine launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, with Putin and the president of Belarus looking on.

‘Poised to strike’

Saturday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the more than 150,000 Russian troops that have massed at Ukraine’s border “are now poised to strike,” as he spoke with reporters in Lithuania, where Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called for an increased U.S. troop presence.

At the Munich Security Conference, Harris warned that Russia’s plan was already unfolding.

“There is a playbook of Russian aggression, and this playbook is too familiar to us all. Russia will plead ignorance and innocence. It will create false pretext for invasion, and it will amass troops and fire power in plain sight,” said Harris, who added a Russian invasion would trigger sanctions that include far-reaching financial sanctions and export controls.

She also said the U.S. would bolster NATO’s eastern flank as another deterrent to a Russian military invasion.

Speaking at the conference earlier Saturday, Stoltenberg said Russia, in threatening Ukraine, “will get more NATO” instead of the smaller NATO footprint Putin says he is seeking.

Stoltenberg also said he has sent a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov calling for a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council to avert a conflict in Ukraine. Stoltenberg told the Munich Security Conference that there is no evidence that Russia has withdrawn any of its troops from Ukraine’s borders and there is a real risk of conflict.

“We are extremely concerned because we see that they continue to build up, they continue to prepare. And we have never in Europe seen since the end of the Cold War, such a large concentration of combat-ready troops,” Stoltenberg said.

Ukraine’s Zelenskiy met on the sidelines with Harris, as he sought to rally more military and financial support from Western allies.

As he addressed the audience of high-level officials and security experts from around the world, Zelenskiy pushed back against U.S. predictions of an imminent Russian invasion, declaring “We do not think we need to panic,” Agence France-Presse reported.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, however, told the BBC that evidence points to Russia planning “the biggest war in Europe since 1945.”

Fresh attacks

Ukraine’s military accused separatists in two breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine – the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics – of carrying out a new wave of attacks Saturday.

The separatists, who also accused Ukraine’s military of carrying out new attacks Saturday, signed mass military mobilization decrees. The head of one of the territories urged all able-bodied men to take up arms against what he claimed is Kyiv’s aggression. The regions have also begun evacuating some civilians from border areas.

Biden said the move was a result of Russian misinformation, saying that it “defies basic logic” that people in Ukraine would “choose this moment” to engage in combat with more than 150,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Ukraine’s military said two of its soldiers were killed Saturday in shelling from pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, according to AFP, after initially reporting one fatality.

Should Moscow invade Ukraine, it will be critical for the United States to convince the world that Russia is the aggressor and that it did so unprovoked, Max Bergmann, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told VOA.

“This was a master class from the Biden administration in how to win an information war with Russia,” Bergmann said. “The Biden administration has read the Kremlin playbook and they are exposing Russian disinformation as they come across it.”

However, Biden is still offering Putin a de-escalation off-ramp, saying that diplomacy is “always a possibility.” He said, based on the “significant intelligence capability” of the U.S., he has reason to believe Putin will still consider the diplomatic option.

Diplomatic channels

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to meet in person with Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, on Feb. 24.

In the event of an invasion, Western allies must resolve differences over the timing and severity of sanctions against Moscow. For example, the initial package likely will not include banning Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, system used by 200 countries for international financial transfers.

“We have other severe measures we can take that our allies and partners are ready to take in lockstep with us, and that don’t have the same spillover effects,” said Daleep Singh, the deputy national security adviser for international economics, who spoke to reporters during Friday’s White House briefing. “But we always will monitor these options and we’ll revise our judgments as time goes on.”

Singh said U.S. measures are not designed to reduce Russia’s ability to supply energy to the world but that it would be “a strategic mistake” for Putin to retaliate against Western sanctions by cutting back energy supplies to Europe.

“Two-thirds of Russia’s exports and half of its budget revenues come from oil and gas, and if Putin were to weaponize his energy supply, it will only accelerate the diversification of the world away from Russian energy consumption,” he said.

Singh added Moscow would be unable to replace technology imports from other countries, including China, if Washington also were to impose tough export controls that it has threatened.

Russian officials have denied they plan to invade Ukraine, but diplomatic talks with Western officials have led to a standoff. Russia has demanded that the U.S. and its allies reject Ukraine’s bid for membership in NATO.

The West has rejected that as a nonstarter but has said it is willing to negotiate with Moscow over missile deployment and troop exercises in Eastern European countries closest to Russia.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.

'Cartagena How Are We Going': Mayor and Council are in a tailspin according to the survey - Other Cities - Colombia

Cartagena how are we doing revealed the results of the survey ´My voice, my city’, in which the perception of citizens about the daily life during the pandemic.

53 percent of those surveyed feel that things are not going the right way, and citizens are dissatisfied with living in the stone corralito.

Still, the city maintains a decent level of pride.

(Also: What is behind the winter tragedy that left 15 dead in Risaralda?)

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Bad the mayor and the council

50 percent of those surveyed perceive William Dau’s administration as bad in the last year. And 80 percent of Cartagena perceives the management of the city council as bad

Pessimism in the city is directly related to public management of the current administration.

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“50 percent of those surveyed perceive the administration of William Dau as bad, in the last year. And 80 percent of Cartagenans perceive the management of the city council as bad,” said Eliana Salas, director of ‘Cartagena How are we doing’.

The city’s current issues such as education, health, safety, mobility and public services are perceived at critical levels.

The feeling of insecurity rose

“70 percent of those surveyed feel that there is insecurity in their own neighborhood. And 80 percent of those surveyed feel unsafe in Cartagena in general,” adds Salas.

Unemployment

57 percent of those surveyed said that in the last year they lost their job, and 70 percent of these respondents still do not get their job back

The economic situation presented a decline. “57 percent of those surveyed said that in the last year they lost their jobs, and 70 percent of those surveyed have not yet recovered their jobs,” says Salas.

The perception of poverty is also very high. 53 percent of Cartagena feel poor, that is, one out of every two Cartagena feels that he lives in poverty.

(You may be interested: This is the map of the areas at risk to carry out an electoral campaign)

53 percent of those surveyed stated that at least one member of their household did not consume any of the three daily meals, due to lack of resources.

Cartagena

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UN Security Council Discusses Latest North Korea Missile Launch

Nine U.N. Security Council members condemned North Korea’s January 30 launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile Friday, saying it was “a significant escalation” in Pyongyang’s recent violations of council resolutions and was intended to further destabilize the region.

“We condemn this unlawful action in the strongest terms,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters after a 90-minute closed-door meeting of the 15-nation council. She spoke on behalf of and flanked by her council counterparts from Albania, Brazil, Britain, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.

The launch, which took place on Sunday local time, was North Korea’s longest-range missile test in more than four years.

“It also marks a new and troubling record — the nine ballistic missiles launched in January is the largest number of launches the DPRK has conducted in a single month in the history of its WMD and ballistic missile programs,” Thomas-Greenfield said. DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name.

North Korea is forbidden to conduct such launches under the provisions of several Security Council resolutions.

The council last met on January 20 to discuss the launch activity without a united public stance.

FILE – U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield speaks to reporters during a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York, March 1, 2021.

“The cost of the council’s ongoing silence is too high,” the U.S. envoy said on behalf of the group of nine council members. “It will embolden the DPRK to further defy the international community, to normalize its violations of Security Council resolutions, to further destabilize the region, and to continue to threaten international peace and security. This is an outcome that we should not accept.”

China’s U.N. ambassador told reporters on his way into Friday’s meeting that the solution “lies in dialogue” among the direct parties to the issue.

He appeared to put the responsibility on Washington to coax North Korea to the negotiating table, saying it has the key to solving the situation in its hands.

“They should come up with more attractive and more practical, more flexible approaches, policies and actions, and in accommodating the concerns of DPRK,” Ambassador Zhang Jun said of the United States. “We have all seen what happened in Singapore. We have all seen what happened in Hanoi. And we have seen suspension of the nuclear test, and we have seen suspension of the launch of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles].”

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held two summits, one in Singapore in 2018 and another in Vietnam the following year. They did not lead to denuclearization, but tensions cooled between the two nations, with Kim pausing his country’s nuclear and long-range missile tests.

The Biden administration has urged Pyongyang to meet without preconditions.

“We stand ready to engage in dialogue, and we will not waver in our pursuit of regional peace and stability and the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula consistent with relevant Security Council resolutions,” Thomas-Greenfield reiterated Friday.

China’s envoy urged the parties and the council to be prudent in both their actions and their words to avoid a full escalation.

FILE – Zhang Jun, permanent representative of China to the United Nations, speaks during a meeting of the Security Council, Sept. 23, 2021, in New York.

“We have seen a vicious circle: confrontation, condemnation, sanctions, and then coming back to confrontation, condemnation and sanctions again,” Zhang said. “So what will be the end?”

He said China’s “freeze for freeze” proposal remains on the table. That would have Pyongyang freeze its nuclear activity in exchange for partial sanctions relief.

Thomas-Greenfield said that would reward North Korea for bad behavior.

Earlier this week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned Sunday’s ICBM launch.

“This is a breaking of the DPRK’s announced moratorium in 2018 on launches of this nature and a clear violation of Security Council resolutions,” Guterres’ spokesman said.

He urged Pyongyang to cease any “further counterproductive actions” and seek a diplomatic solution.