‘Strong and unpredictable’: Zelenskyy says those Trump traits can help end war with Russia
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is “strong and unpredictable,” and those qualities can be a decisive factor in his policy approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
However, Zelenskyy said it won’t be possible to end the almost three years of war in one day, as Trump claimed during his election campaign he could do.
“The ‘hot’ stage of the war can end quite quickly, if Trump is strong in his position,” Zelenskyy said in a Ukrainian television interview late Thursday, referring to fighting on the battlefield.
“I believe [Trump] is strong and unpredictable. I would very much like President Trump’s unpredictability to be directed primarily toward the Russian Federation,” Zelenskyy said.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, hasn’t publicly fleshed out his policy on Ukraine but his previous comments have put a question mark over whether the United States will continue to be Ukraine’s biggest — and most important — military backer.
Zelenskyy is eager to guarantee that Washington’s support keeps coming, and he met with Trump in New York even before last November’s U.S. presidential election.
War’s trajectory not in Ukraine’s favour
With the war about to enter its fourth year next month, and with Trump coming to power, the question of how and when Europe’s biggest conflict since the Second World War might end has come to the fore.
Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine and last year capitalized on weaknesses in Ukraine’s defences to slowly advance in eastern areas despite high losses of troops and equipment.
The war’s trajectory is not in Ukraine’s favour. The country is short-handed on the front line and needs continued support from its Western partners.
Trump responded favourably to the possibility raised by French President Emmanuel Macron of Western peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine to oversee an agreement that stops the fighting, Zelenskyy said. He met with Trump and Macron in Paris last month.
“But I raised an issue, saying we didn’t hear what specific countries will join this initiative, and whether the U.S. will be there,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian leader is determined for his country to become a NATO member. The alliance’s 32 member countries say Ukraine will join one day, but not until the war ends.
“The deployment of European troops [to keep the peace in Ukraine] should not rule out Ukraine’s future in NATO,” Zelenskyy said in the television interview.
Zelenskyy described the incursion by Ukrainian forces into Russia’s Kursk border region as a “very strong trump card” in any future peace negotiations.
In a bid to counter glum news from the front line, Ukraine seized part of Kursk last August in what was the first occupation of Russian territory since the Second World War.
But the incursion didn’t significantly change the dynamic of the war, and military analysts say Ukraine has lost some 40 per cent of the land it initially captured.
Nevertheless, Zelenskyy said the achievement impressed countries in Asia, South America and Africa and tarnished Russia’s military reputation.
‘Stabilizing the front was critical’
Zelenskyy also said he wanted to ensure that any U.S. plan on a settlement took account of Ukraine’s views.
“It cannot be otherwise. We are Ukraine and it’s our independence, our land and our future.” He also hoped that Trump’s administration could establish quick contact with Russia. Putin has said Moscow is open to talks, but they must take account of Russia’s gains in the war and its annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
With Russian forces capturing village after village on the eastern front in their fastest advance since the February 2022 invasion, Zelenskyy said stabilizing the front was critical.
“They are putting pressure on our boys, who are exhausted and that is a fact. We will do everything to at least stabilize the front in January,” he said.
Zelenskyy, elected in 2019, repeated that new elections could not be held as long as a wartime state of emergency remained in place but said he would consider running again once conditions permitted.
“I don’t know how this war will end,” he said. “If I can do more than I am able, then I will probably view such a decision [seeking a new term] more positively. For now this is not an objective for me.”
Published at Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:02:34 +0000
How ISIS may have inspired the deadly truck attack in New Orleans
The deadly vehicle attack in New Orleans launched by a man the FBI claims was “100 per cent inspired by ISIS” has sparked questions about the extent of his affiliation with the militant group and adherence to its ideology.
The FBI has said they recovered a flag representing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from the rental vehicle the man used to ram into the New Year’s Day crowd, killing 14 people. They said he had also posted videos to his Facebook account professing his allegiance to the militant group.
“To go to such lengths, to get an ISIS flag, to post these [ISIS related] videos, my sense is that he was actually imbibing ISIS propaganda,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consulting firm.
Clarke says the attacker may also have been going through financial or marital difficulties that could have created cognitive openings for him to become vulnerable to the ISIS ideology.
“And then, at what point is it more about the ideology than the personal grievances?“
The deadly New Orleans truck attack blamed on a former U.S. soldier-turned-ISIS radical is heightening fears the group could be reemerging as a major threat. Police in Canada, the U.S., and around the world have foiled several ISIS-affiliated plots to kill civilians in recent months.
Investigators are looking into any support or inspiration he may have drawn from ISIS. But the incident bore similarities to past ISIS-inspired attacks where individuals used vehicles to plow into crowds.
“When this first went down, without knowing anything about the person responsible … the first thing I thought of was there was a spate of similar attacks in 2016 and 2017 that had various degrees of ISIS inspiration or connection,” said Tom Joscelyn, a senior fellow at Just Security, an online security analysis forum that’s part of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University’s School of Law.
Though the FBI initially said they were seeking any accomplices the attacker may have had, on Thursday, they said they believed that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S.-born citizen from Texas, was the sole person responsible.
Jabbar had posted five videos to his Facebook account in the hours before the attack, the FBI said, including one in which he said he had joined ISIS before this summer.
The agency also said Jabbar had originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned that news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”
Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, says the lethality and complexity of the vehicle ramming attack in New Orleans will be used in ISIS propaganda to radicalize others.
Attacker fits definition of ‘homegrown violent extremist’
Austin Doctor, the director of counterterrorism research initiatives at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE), says Jabbar fits law enforcement’s definition of a “homegrown violent extremist.”
He says that definition includes people who may not be card-carrying members of a terrorist organization, but who might provide support to them or take inspiration from their ideology.
In the case of the New Orleans attack, Doctor says law enforcement seems confident that the attacker was inspired specifically by the Islamic State and conducted the attack believing it to be in support of the group, its mission and its cause.
“What I think is not clear yet from the information that’s currently available is exactly when Jabbar was radicalized to the Islamic State’s ideology,” he said.
Vehicle attack follows ISIS pattern
The New Orleans attacker’s method of using a vehicle does fit a similar pattern of past ISIS-related incidents where individuals have used cars or trucks to kill as many people as possible.
Analysts note that ISIS has called on its followers to use vehicles as weapons, which inspired a series of attacks in a number of cities including Berlin, London, New York and Barcelona, between 2016 and 2017.
One of the deadliest attacks occurred on July 14, 2016, when 86 people were killed by a man who drove a cargo truck at high speed into a crowd gathered to watch Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice.
Two days later, ISIS claimed the attacker, a 31-year-old Tunisian man named Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was one of its “soldiers.”
Analysts like Nathan Sales, a former counterterrorism co-ordinator for the U.S. State Department, say attacks like these are an indication that joining ISIS doesn’t always mean going overseas to fight, something the militant group uses to its advantage when recruiting.
“They said ‘We understand you want to come to Syria and Iraq to fight in the desert and create the caliphate. But you’re valuable at home as well. Carry on jihad, carry out acts of violence at home,’ ” he told CBC News Network.
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Unclear if attacker had direct contact with ISIS
According to NCITE, the number of ISIS supporters in the U.S. is statistically small. But over the last decade, the FBI has consistently said in public remarks that it has more than 1,000 active ISIS investigations in all 50 states.
Typically, in America, there will be about a dozen ISIS-related federal arrests a year, wrote Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty and policy associate with NCITE. But from 2014 to 2016, at the height of ISIS, he noted that there were more than 60 arrests a year.
So far, it’s unclear what, if any, direct contact the attacker in New Orleans may have had with ISIS. But Joscelyn with Just Security noted there doesn’t need to be a physical connection for a person to be inspired by ISIS.
“He may not have been in contact with anybody,” Joscelyn said, noting the New Orleans attack may have been “inspired by the calls of ISIS to do this kind of thing.”
Online recruiters encourage attacks
However, in some past cases, the person responsible has been in touch with a so-called virtual planner of ISIS, Joscelyn said.
“ISIS had these guys who were basically online recruiters who were in contact with aspiring recruits and would-be jihadists, and encourage them to do acts of terrorism in their own home country,” he said.
Nathan Sales, former counterterrorism co-ordinator for the U.S. State Department, discusses the New Orleans attack, its connections to ISIS and how the group is still inspiring people in Western countries to strike.
Sales says the attack is a wake-up call about the threat ISIS still poses domestically.
He says that during the rise of ISIS a decade ago, thousands of Westerners from North America, South America and Europe travelled into Syria to fight for ISIS.
“We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that’s all ancient history. It’s not,” he said. “ISIS is still targeting our youth online. They’re still radicalizing, they’re still recruiting. And we need to stay on top of this.”
Published at Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:41:41 +0000
