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The U.S. State Department announced on July 16 that Washington has formed what has been characterized as a regional platform – could one be more vague? – with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan is a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace military program and Afghanistan and Pakistan are members of the military alliance’s Partners Across the Globe. The U.S. of course is the founder and unchallenged master of the bloc.
Pakistan has hosted U.S. military personnel, equipment and spy planes since the beginning of the Cold War, and during that period was known as “America’s most allied ally in Asia.” It is one of the U.S.’s Major non-NATO Allies and was the recipient of $12 billion in U.S. military aid from 2002-2011.
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America’s top envoy in Ukraine, Chargé d’Affaires George Kent, led an American delegation that toured the front line of Ukraine’s war against the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region on July 15.
As the Ukrainian government phrased it, he paid an official visit to the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) zone, that being the designation of the now over-seven-year-war in the east of the country. From 2014, after the U.S.-engineered coup in the nation that provoked the ongoing war, until 2018 what is now the JFO was named the the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO). The American-controlled junta in Kiev branded citizens of the nation who objected to the bloody overthrow of the government of legally-elected, internationally-recognized President Viktor Yanukovych as terrorists and treated them accordingly. As its successor still does.
After Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh: Ukraine To Use Turkish Drones for War in Donbass, Black Sea
Turkish and Ukrainian news sources announced on July 15 that the Ukrainian Naval Forces Command has received the first Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicles from Turkey, a fact confirmed by Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran. Two weeks ago Ukraine deployed one of the Turkish combat drones for the joint U.S.-Ukraine-hosted 32-nation Sea Breeze war games in the Black Sea. The Ukrainian army already possesses Bayraktar TB2s, but now they will enter the navy’s arsenal as well.
Kiev had ordered the drones as well as MILGEM Ada-class anti-submarine warfare corvettes from Turkey late last year. (Guess who the latter will be used against.) The corvettes are the same model as those Turkey is building for Pakistan, its strategic ally in the Ankara-Baku-Islamabad military axis.
NATO Deploys F-35 Combat Aircraft to Baltic Sea for First Time
Buried in a routine report on Italy’s contribution to NATO’s Air Policing for the past 59 years is mention of Italian F-35s currently deployed to the Ämari Air Base in Estonia. That base as well as the Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania and now the Malbork Air Base in Poland are used for around-the-clock air patrols by NATO warplanes.
As far back as 2004 with the Lithuanian base, fighter jets from Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. have flown a variety of advanced multirole combat aircraft near Russia’s borders; Latvia, Lithuania and Poland all border both Russian territory and Belarus.