Macron Sending Troops to Ukraine ‘Like a Poodle Urinating on Odessa’
Russian Foreign Intelligence Chief Sergey Naryshkin said on Tuesday that thousands of French troops are being prepared for deployment in the Odessa region of Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to put around 2,000 troops in Odessa would only serve as a “human tripwire force” and would be “the equivalent of NATO, like a dog, urinating on Odessa, marking it as NATO’s territory,” Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security expert, told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday. He added that in this analogy, France is like “a poodle.”
On Tuesday, French ground army chief of staff General Pierre Schill said in an op-ed that his forces are ready to respond to “the toughest engagements” and said the country could engage a division of 20,000 troops within 30 days.
“He’s wrong. The French army is most certainly not ready for this,” Sleboda said, commenting on the general’s assertion. “If they were engaged in a high-intensity conflict such as the Kiev regime is engaged in, firing many less artillery shells than Russia, then France would have enough artillery shells for four days of conflict with Russia. Four days,” Sleboda explained.
By comparison, Russia has more than 600,000 troops deployed in the special operation zone, according to both Russian and Western analyses. “There is a likelihood that the French believe that Russia will not fire on these French troops, [because] they are under uniform, out of fear of striking a NATO member, even though of course, NATO’s Article Five would not apply,” Sleboda explained.
Sleboda added that he believes Macron thinks that if French troops are killed by Russia, then that will create more support for the conflict domestically and “help politically mobilize” other European countries to join the fight.
“I think if Macron sent his troops to Odessa, obviously not a force that could be able to engage Russia in a slugfest on the battlefield, but as kind of a human tripwire force. It would be the equivalent of NATO, like a dog, urinating on Odessa, marking it as NATO’s territory,” Sleboda said.
“Of course, with NATO troops officially in uniform dying in Ukraine, that would take us to a whole other level,” he warned.
Sleboda predicted that there will be a “very big information warfare game, the targets of which will be the French people,” and other NATO member states, noting that Finland, the Czech Republic, the Baltics and Canada “have all already suggested that they might” join the French.
Co-host Wilmer Leon asked if Macron could seriously believe a “behind whopping isn’t on the horizon,” Sleboda responded by describing NATO’s “salami-slicing tactics” of incrementalism.
“We now have NATO leaders openly admitting, ‘yeah, we’ve got troops all over Ukraine. They’ve been heavily involved in all operations of combat,’”he said, citing a Spanish newspaper. “Russia has still not taken any retaliatory actions against NATO outside of Ukraine, outside of the parameters of the proxy war. So, I think this is one more escalation they believe they can get through [using] incrementalism.”
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Putin Won’t Be Allowed to ‘Dictate Peace Terms’ in Ukraine – Germany
Germany will not let Russian President Vladimir Putin forcibly alter Ukraine’s borders or impose the terms of peace, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has vowed.
Speaking to lawmakers in Berlin on Wednesday, Scholz insisted Germany “will not accept a dictated peace at the expense of Ukraine.”
“Law is stronger than violence,” the chancellor said, claiming that Putin had sought to violate that principle with the launch of Russia’s military operation against Ukraine in February 2022. “We will not let him get away with this,” he added.
Scholz insisted that Germany’s backing of Ukraine will not decrease, and that expecting otherwise would be a “miscalculation.”
He reiterated his criticism of Putin’s reelection last weekend for a fifth term as president, saying it showed that “Russia is not strong.”
However, as EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell acknowledged in an interview on Wednesday, European allies will be hard-pressed to fill the funding gap if Kiev’s biggest backer, Washington, reduces its support. US President Joe Biden’s administration ran out of funding for Ukraine in January and has struggled to secure congressional approval for over $60 billion in additional military and financial aid.
Read more EU’s Borrell warns of Ukraine funding vacuum if US stops spending
Scholz made his comments ahead of an EU summit scheduled to begin on Thursday in Brussels. Major topics of discussion will include efforts to ramp up aid to Ukraine, as well as the bloc’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. Russian forces have made battlefield gains in recent weeks, and US defense chief Lloyd Austin warned on Tuesday that Ukraine’s very survival will be at risk if the West fails to provide more weapons to Kiev.
Even as he lobbies allies for more Ukraine aid, Scholz has resisted political pressure to provide Kiev with long-range Taurus missiles, saying that such an escalation could draw Germany into a direct conflict with Russia. Speaking at the Bundestag on Wednesday, he told lawmakers that debate within Germany over the Taurus issue is “nothing short of ridiculous.” He added that the controversy isn’t well understood outside of Germany, describing it as “embarrassing for us as a country.”
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UPDATE: Federal Courts & SCOTUS Battle Over Texas Deportation Bill
Alex Jones broke down the battle to secure the U.S. Mexican border on his Wednesday show, a battle which intensified as federal judiciaries and the state of Texas struggle over the illegal alien deportation bill.
“If the Supreme Court hears an emergency motion, a lower appeals court can briefly override it until the Supreme Court has a full hearing,” Jones said. “And so there’s some checks and balances in there, but this is very very rare and I would expect the Supreme Court to override it imminently.”
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UK Firm Fires Russian Over Voting For Putin
London real estate brokerage Egre has fired one of its agents after complaints from a Ukrainian activist, who argued that she should be punished for voting for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The three-day election in Russia saw Putin win 87% of the vote, according to the official tally published on Monday. Russians living abroad were also able to cast their ballots at embassies and consulates, including in the UK.
The queue outside the embassy in London drew the attention of one Nazar Smyk, who lives in the UK and describes himself as a buyer of equipment for the Ukrainian military.
“Not all Russians are oppositionists,” Smyk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “There are also c**ts such as Yulia Vorobyova. She openly votes for Putin while living in London. Do you know what happens to supporters of war?”
A follow-up post showed what Smyk claimed to be screenshots of Vorobyova’s Instagram, in which she purportedly said she was on the way to cast her vote at the embassy despite the pouring rain.
Read more Russian ballerina performance canceled in Seoul
“When Western media think we (Russian people) don’t vote for Putin. Well, we do!” one of the captions from the screenshots said. “Mission accomplished,” another read.
Smyk then posted the address of her employer, with a call to “show Yulia what she needs to be responsible for.”
When Vorobyova made her account private, Smyk called her a “dumb c**t” and said it was too late. “We will f**k you and the company you work for,” he added.
On Tuesday, Smyk posted a letter he received from Egre, revealing that Vorobyova had been dismissed.
“It has recently come to our attention that one of our consultant agents, Yulia, has posted a pro-war message on social media,” the company said. “Yulia is no longer associated with our company.”
Юлія нахуй вилетіла з компанії ?
— Nazar Smyk (@nazar_london) March 19, 2024
ТРО Лондон працює ??? pic.twitter.com/pzfiiaxwvq
Smyk also said he had spoken with Egre’s owner and that “in order to show its pro-European position, the company will donate funds for the humanitarian needs of Ukrainians through the British-Ukrainian fund,” as well as vetting any new hires – presumably to ensure they aren’t Russians with unapproved political beliefs.
After Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies moved to ban Russian officials, plants, animals, artists, and even certain letters of the alphabet, all in an effort to show their support for the government in Kiev.
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Goldman: Office Mortgages Are Living on Borrowed Time
At the start of the week, a lawyer specializing in advisory services for lenders and servicers of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) in the United States told us that the office segment of the commercial real estate market has been surprisingly quiet in the first quarter, despite the countless news headlines about towers being dumped on the market for hefty discounts.
The reason for this recent calm in the CRE space might be explained in a note by Vinay Viswanathan of Goldman Sachs on Tuesday.
Viswanathan explained that the total amount of outstanding commercial mortgages set to mature by year-end has exploded from $658 billion at the start of last year to $929 billion in mid-March.
He said this high amount of debt that has been extended and modified rather than refinanced “helped mitigate a default wave and a sharp pick-up in losses on CRE loan portfolios.” He noted the main driver of this has been the “willingness of lenders and borrowers to modify and extend maturing loans rather than refinancing or forcing a foreclosure.” In other words, the can was simply kicked down the road until after the presidential elections.
Meanwhile, the stresses are building for the office segment as tower loans that have fully paid off at maturity sink below 60%. However, the maturity payoff rate for loans backed by other property types has been near a decade high.
Extend and pretend: About 47% of the non-bank CMBS loan maturities in 2023 were pushed into 2024
The analyst asked how long will the game of musical chairs last:
“While extensions and modifications are not unusual phenomena in the CRE market, particularly during times of rising financial distress and tight lending conditions, the low likelihood that funding costs revert to pre-COVID levels begs the question: how long can this trend continue?”
Viswanathan expects “the wave of modifications to persist in the near term as refinancing stays uneconomical for most commercial real estate borrowers, while foreclosures remain an unappealing proposition for lenders in an illiquid property market.”
Given that swaps traders and economists at Goldman forecast fewer Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts for the full year and put the odds of a June rate cut around 50%, the higher-for-longer theme suggests risks are undoubtedly surging across the CRE space for 2025.
Viswanathan believes “the risk of a negative feedback loop of distressed sales and lower property prices is largely contained to the office sector.”
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DOJ Considering Plea Deal for Julian Assange
The U.S. Department of Justice is considering offering a plea deal to Julian Assange that will potentially see the WikiLeaks founder walk away a free man. On Wednesday, a WSJ report stated: “The U.S. Justice Department […]
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