“On July 7, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to “ensure ratification” of Sweden’s application to join NATO in Turkey’s parliament, according to NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg.
This deal comes amid additional reports of acquiescence to Turkish demands, including Swedish support for the country’s European Union (E.U.) accession process and the U.S. working to provide Turkey with $20 billion worth of F-16s and 79 modernization kits for existing aircraft.
Joining NATO requires each of its 30 member states to vote in favor of Sweden’s accession, allowing Turkey to hold the process hostage.
“Turkey has a weak hand to play in all of this, but they’ve tried to play it to the point where they can extract the most out of this situation,” says James Ryan, director of research and Middle East programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “I really think there’s an understanding between Biden and Erdogan that it’s a quid pro quo, and probably the Swedish accession will go through and the sale will go through shortly thereafter.”
Since confirming their intention to join NATO over a year ago, Sweden has had to conform to Turkey’s complaints—which include claims that Sweden harbors member of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), issues with anti-Islam protests in Sweden, and the lack of arms exports—to gain its support for joining the alliance.
To accommodate these concerns, Sweden has passed a new stricter anti-terror law, extradited a supporter of the PKK, and reversed a ban on exporting military equipment to Turkey. “Sweden has amended its constitution, changed its laws, significantly expanded its counterterrorism cooperation against the PKK, and resumed arms exports to [Turkey],” said Stoltenberg in a press release.”
“it isn’t a time of plenty in the breadbasket of Europe, and not only because Russia, for now, says it won’t continue the arrangement it made with the United Nations and Turkey that for a year permitted 32 million tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported from the country’s massive southern ports. The present war has stunted Ukraine’s grain industry at every stage, beginning months before harvest time.
Though blessed with an abundance of wheat-friendly chernozem — the Russian term for “black earth” — most Ukrainians fertilize their soil. “There’s a great shortage of nitrogen fertilizers,” says Denis Tkachenko, who helps run a trade association of Odesa region farms including about 12,000 acres. Fertilization means more grain enriched with the proteins enabling wheat to be baked into bread; poorer crops can be sold more cheaply for animal feed.”
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“there are many fewer fields. More than a quarter of Ukraine’s grain country lies east of the Dnieper River, and has been controlled or threatened by Russia since the February 2022 invasion. Even in the relatively safe southwest, the Ukrainian military has commandeered — thereby disabling — a lot of farmland. Tkachenko says that about 3 to 5 percent of the fields in his region were fortified early in the war against a possible Russian sea invasion. Another farmer in the area tells me that a third of his nearly 10,000 acres have been used for trenches, mining and the like.”
“Vox’s platform is founded heavily on nationalism and a return to “tradition” on social issues: The Spanish nation, to hear the party tell it, should prioritize its residents and practices like bullfighting rather than welcoming migrants, should be skeptical of efforts to advance gender equity, and should be actively opposed to LGBTQ rights, including gay marriage. Key stances Vox has championed include claiming that gender violence doesn’t exist, pushing to reverse a trans rights law that just took effect this year, banning abortion, and closing shelters housing foreign minors.”
“Cluster munitions — or dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs), as they’re officially known — are haphazard and notoriously faulty. Once fired, they release dozens of bomblets in the air that spread out and saturate football-field- or city-block-size areas. The direction or targets for those bomblets can’t be controlled, and they don’t always immediately explode, turning into de facto land mines. For those reasons, they are particularly dangerous to civilians during war, but also long after a conflict ends.”