Week in Review: Russia Preparing Another Invasion?, China’s ‘Marshall Plan,’ Migrant Crisis Worsens, and Much More

Week in Review: Russia Preparing Another Invasion?, China’s ‘Marshall Plan,’ Migrant Crisis Worsens, and Much More

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images, Chris McGrath/Getty Images, Sean Gallup/Getty Images, PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images

Week in Review: Russia Preparing Another Invasion?, China’s ‘Marshall Plan,’ Migrant Crisis Worsens, and Much More

All you need to know about everything in the news this week

August 13, 2016

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Highlights:

Invading Ukraine

  • Russia is ratcheting up pressure in Ukraine, and it could be planning another attack, according to an article for Daily Beast titled “Is Ukraine Just About to Blow?”
  • “For the better part of a year, the war in Ukraine has been ‘frozen but oven-ready,’ as former nato press officer Ben Nimmo once put it, with regular upticks in violence and provocations not quite leading to full-scale meltdowns.”
  • “That changed over the last week, however, with whispers inside Ukraine and among the foreign press corps that another big clash may be in the final stages of preparation with the locus of unusual activity in, yes, Crimea.”
  • Is this yet another Russian diplomatic chess game or the latest in a strategy of “invade, wait—and invade”?

    • Erdoğan’s visit to Russia

  • For his first foreign trip since the attempted coup on July 15, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Russia on Tuesday and met with President Vladimir Putin.
  • The meeting was part of efforts to rebuild ties shattered by Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane last year.
  • Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Thursday that while his nation will always cooperate with nato first, it may still “seek other options outside nato for defense industry cooperation,” as Reuters reported.

    • China’s ‘Marshall Plan’

  • A new analysis predicts that Beijing’s efforts to resurrect an ancient trading route spanning from Asia to Europe could leave an economic legacy larger than the Marshall Plan.
  • Dubbed “One Belt, One Road,” or the “Silk Super Highway,” this network of railways, highways and ports will stretch from China all the way to Europe. It will connect 4.4 billion people across 60 countries, making up about 40 percent of the global economy.

    • Europe’s worsening migrant crisis

  • Headlines about Europe’s migrant crisis are decreasing, but the crisis itself is getting worse, according to statistics published this week.
  • “Europe’s migrant crisis is at the very least numerically worse than it was last year,” France 24 reported. “More people are arriving and more are dying. But the twist is that, compared with last year, a lot of it is out of sight.”

    • Other news:

  • On Monday, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a letter to United States President Barack Obama asking him to return some $2 billion in frozen assets to Iran. “I passionately advise you not to let the historical defamation and bitter incident be recorded under your name,” he wrote.
  • Writing for Esquire, Don Winslow made the case that decriminalizing marijuana created a heroin epidemic in the United States.

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