RUSSIA –  Russia has appointed Admiral Alexander Moiseyev as acting commander-in-chief of its navy after his predecessor was axed due to repeated hits on the Black Sea Fleet by Ukrainian attacks.

Moiseev, former commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet, was formally engaged in his new role at an official ceremony yesterday, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

He replaces Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov. The 61-year-old had been in the post for nearly five years but was reportedly sacked after the losses of a string of warships.

The appointment of Moiseyev, also 61, marks the biggest shake-up in Russia’s military top brass since the sacking of aerospace force chief Sergey Surovikin last year.

 Born in Kaliningrad, he graduated from a film college in the western Russian enclave, but made his career in the navy, serving on nuclear submarines for more than 29 years.

 Ukrainian forces claim to have destroyed more than two dozen Russian ships since the conflict began in February 2022, In the most recent attack, a military patrol boat was sunk earlier this month.

 The losses have been an embarrassment for Moscow, which has been forced to move ships from the Black Sea Fleet’s historic naval base in occupied Crimea’s Sevastopol east to the port of Novorossiysk.

The maritime military woes come in stark contrast to Russia’s land offensive in east Ukraine, where its forces have advanced in recent months after over a year of deadlocked fighting.

(Al Jazeera)…[+]

ARMENIA  –  Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said his country could face a war with neighbouring Azerbaijan if it does not compromise and return four Azerbaijani villages it has held since the early 1990s. In the video published yesterday, Pashinyan was speaking at a meeting with residents in northern Armenia’s Tavush region, close to a string of deserted Azerbaijani villages that Armenia has controlled since the early 1990s.

 The four villages, which have been uninhabited for more than 30 years, are of strategic value to Armenia as they straddle the main road between Yerevan and the Georgian border.

Azerbaijan has said the return of its lands, which also include several tiny enclaves entirely surrounded by Armenian territory, is a necessary condition for a peace deal to end three decades of conflict over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan’s forces retook last September.

Pashinyan told locals, in the video clip that was circulated by his government, that failure to compromise over the villages could lead to war with Azerbaijan “by the end of the week”, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

“Now we can leave here, let’s go and tell [Azerbaijan] that no, we are not going to do anything. This means that at the end of the week a war will begin,” TASS quoted him as saying.

Armenia suffered a major defeat in September when Azerbaijan’s forces retook Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning offensive, prompting almost all of that region’s estimated 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia.

Though Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised internationally as Azerbaijani territory, the region’s ethnic Armenians have enjoyed de facto independence from Azerbaijan since the war of the early 1990s.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have said they now want to sign a formal peace treaty, but talks have become bogged down in issues including the demarcation of their 1,000km (620 mile) shared border, which remains closed and heavily militarised.

Pashinyan has signalled in recent weeks that he is willing to return Azerbaijani land controlled by Armenia, and suggested rerouting Armenia’s road network to avoid Azerbaijani territory.

Muslim-majority Azerbaijan also continues to control areas internationally recognised as part of Christian-majority Armenia.

 Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said on Sunday his country was “closer than ever” to peace with Armenia, in remarks made after holding talks with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Baku. Stoltenberg held talks yesterday with Pashinyan in Armenia, which is nominally a Russian ally though its relations with Moscow have deteriorated in recent months over what Armenia says is Russia’s failure to protect it from Azerbaijan.

As a result, Armenia has pivoted its foreign policy towards the West, to Russia’s chagrin, with senior officials suggesting it might one day apply for European Union membership.

Speaking at a news conference in Yerevan with Pashinyan, Stoltenberg welcomed what he called Armenia’s solidarity with Ukraine.

Commenting on Stoltenberg’s visit, the Kremlin said the bloc’s efforts to expand there were unlikely to help bring stability.

 In a statement posted yesterday on the Telegram messaging app, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested Armenia’s deepening ties with the West were the reason for it having to make concessions to Azerbaijan.

(Al Jazeera)…[+]

RUSSIA – The polls are now closed across Russia, but the outcome was never in doubt: Russian President Vladimir Putin has secured a fifth term in office through a dubious national plebiscite.

But Russia’s three-day presidential vote was never about democratic procedure. For the Kremlin, a resounding first-round win will give the incumbent a fresh stamp of legitimacy and sends a clear message: Putin’s war on Ukraine has the full backing of his people.

In an address to the Russian people on the eve of the election, Putin urged voters to cast ballots as a show of national unity. “I am convinced that you understand what a difficult period our country is going through now, what difficult challenges we face in almost all spheres,” he said. “And in order to continue to respond to them with dignity and successfully overcome difficulties, we continue to need to be united and self-confident.”

The people of Russia, Putin added: “are one big family!” That’s a message Putin repeated after polls closed. In an appearance with a crowd of youthful campaign activists wearing shirts with a logo reading “Putin Russia Victory,” the Russian president said Russians “are all one team, all [the] Russian citizens that came to the polls to vote.”

But Putin also alluded vaguely to “a lot of tasks ahead of us” following his re-election.
In the run-up to the vote, Putin had been coy about what those tasks might be exactly if he secured a fifth presidential term.

In a generally anodyne interview with government propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, Putin evaded speculation about whether, for instance, a government shake-up might be expected after the election.
Asked if the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin might survive post-election, Putin merely said, “We need to talk about this after the elections, after the votes are counted. It seems to me that now this is simply incorrect. But on the whole, the government is working … quite satisfactorily.”

So far, so yawn. But a bigger question now looms for Russia: What really comes next?
Will there be a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Kremlin ship of state? And what are the actual tasks at hand for a re-elected Putin?

Among Russia-watchers, some speculation has centered on a few big-picture issues. For starters, if the presidential vote is indeed a referendum on Russia’s war, does the election give Putin a free hand to continue in Ukraine as he sees fit?

On that count, Putin does seem to have room for maneuver. The Russian president is projecting confidence about developments on the battlefield, particularly after the fall of the eastern Ukrainian towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka. And with Western dithering about continued aid to Ukraine – particularly in the US Congress, where a crucial aid package to Kyiv remains held up – the election result gives him more rhetorical ammunition.

In his pre-election interview with Kiselyov, Putin trotted out that just that talking point.
“To negotiate now just because they are running out of ammunition is somehow ridiculous on our part,” he said, projecting confidence about Ukraine being on the back foot.

But Russia’s incremental advances in eastern Ukraine have come at horrific human cost. Speculation persists that Putin and his generals may need to launch a fresh round of post-election mobilization to feed troops into the meat grinder.

Following initial Russian setbacks in the attempt to encircle Ukraine from three sides and capture Kyiv, Putin announced a partial mobilization in September 2022. But Russia remains locked in a war of attrition along a 1,000-kilometer front. Some observers believe Putin would have to wait until after the election to take the potentially unpopular step of another big call-up.

And regardless of how Putin addresses his country’s manpower problem, there is another likely item on the agenda. The crackdown on Russia’s domestic opposition – what’s left of it – can continue unabated.

In remarks following the closing of polls across Russia, Putin made an unusual move: He mentioned the unmentionable, the name of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

Putin has long made a habit of not mentioning Navalny, who died last month in a Russian prison north of the Arctic Circle. But in response to a question about Navalny’s death and the exclusion of opposition voices during the election campaign, Putin broke protocol to call Navalny’s death a “sad event,” but dismissed a question about the fairness of the elections by changing the subject, a favorite Putin information tactic. “As for Mr. Navalny, yes he passed away – it is always a sad event,” Putin said. “And there were other cases when people in prisons passed away. Didn’t this happen in the United States? It did, and not once.”

That might suggest Putin thinks he is on safe ground. But whataboutism is not necessarily a sign of confidence.
Predicting Putin’s post-election course of action is a tricky business. The Russian leader has for the short term sanction-proofed his economy; his ammunition factories are outproducing the US and its European allies and the political landscape has been cleared of all competition. But war is always unpredictable. And whatever Putin’s efforts to spin things in his favor, Russia’s longer-term problems – demographic decline, the cost of war and sanctions, and the inherent brittleness of one-man rule – are not likely to disappear before Putin stands for a sixth term in office. (CNN)…[+]

NORTH KOREA – North Korea fired short-range ballistic missiles towards its eastern waters as United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepared to open a democracy summit in neighbouring South Korea, officials have said.

“North Korea fired an unspecified ballistic missile toward the East Sea,” the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday, referring to the body of water also known as the Sea of Japan.

Japan’s Coast Guard, which confirmed the launches, said the objects appeared to have already fallen.

The launches come days after the US and South Korea wrapped up 11 days of so-called Freedom Shield joint military drills.

North Korea has long condemned joint US-South Korea military drills, calling them rehearsals for an invasion.

Pyongyang earlier this month warned that Seoul and Washington would pay a “dear price” for this year’s Freedom Shield drills, which involved twice as many troops as last year.

About 27,000 US soldiers are stationed in South Korea, where the drills took place.
North Korea’s test on Monday was the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations this year, including a missile tipped with a manoeuvrable hypersonic warhead on January 14.
Shortly after the missile launches, Blinken and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol took to the stage at the opening of the Summit for Democracy, which is this year being hosted by South Korea.
Both Blinken and Yoon spoke about how technology could be used to encourage democracy, but also to undermine it.
Blinken’s comments came after the US House of Representatives last week passed a bill that could see the popular social media app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese developer ByteDance, banned.
The democracy summit, an initiative of US President Joe Biden, has attracted criticism in past years due to its selective invitation list, with countries including Thailand and Turkey reportedly excluded.
(Al Jazeera)…[+]

WENCHANG – The combination of the relay satellite Queqiao-2 and the Long March-8 Y3 carrier rocket was vertically transferred on Sunday to the launching area at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province.
The satellite is projected to be launched at an appropriate time within the next few days, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The combination on a removable launch pad was moved out of the vertical test building of the launching site in the morning, and then safely transported to its launching area.
The rocket check, the joint test work and the propellant filling will be carried out before the launch, according to the CNSA.
Queqiao-2, or Magpie Bridge-2, will serve as a relay platform for the fourth phase of China’s lunar exploration program, providing communications services for the Chang’e-4, Chang’e-6, Chang’e-7, and Chang’e-8 missions. (Xinhua)…[+]