News reports suggest that Ukrainian forces are losing ground to Russia in Bakhmut, where the main fighting is now taking place. On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a bill into law that imposes draconian penalties on soldiers for deserting and disobeying military orders, and significantly undermines their right to legal defense.
The crisis of the Zelensky government has been unfolding as top US and NATO officials were touring Kiev and the major European powers involved in the war, in order to prepare the most reckless and significant escalation of the war with Russia to date.
Emmanuel Todd: World War III has already begun
The third world war has already started, according to one of France's leading intellectuals, Emmanuel Todd. Speaking to Le Figaro recently, the anthropologist and historian claimed that, contrary to the prevailing idea that Russia has more to lose than its liberal opponents, the West, too, has entered into an "existential" conflict.
"It's obvious that the [Ukraine] conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and escalated to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war," Todd told the French newspaper. He acknowledged that Vladimir Putin had made a miscalculation at the beginning of the conflict, assuming that Ukraine would roll over at the first sign of aggression, but made clear that Russia has itself exceeded expectations, including those of its own people, who "did not anticipate" that they would be able to withstand economic pressure from NATO.
Todd, the author of After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2001), said that, if Russia "managed to exhaust the European economy, while maintaining Chinese backing, American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for the United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing.
Ukraine War May Be Beginning Of Third World War, Warns Soros
In his annual speech in Davos last year, Billionaire investor George Soros has warned that Russia's invasion of Ukraine may be the beginning of the third world war and that the civilization may not survive this war.
He also said that China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin are tied together in an alliance that has no limits.
Soros said the world must mobilize all resources to bring the war to an early end and the best and perhaps only way to preserve the civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible.
"The invasion may have been the beginning of the third world war and our civilization may not survive it," he said adding that the invasion of Ukraine didn't come out of the blue and Putin had informed Xi about it well in advance.
(Article changed on Jan 25, 2023 at 10:31 PM EST)
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