MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. Hungary is using its veto over aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip for unblocking EU funds; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly boxed in by his allies’ pressure to segue to the end-game in Israel’s Gaza Strip ground operation; and infighting in Kiev waxes as enthusiasm for propping up Ukraine further wanes among its Western patrons. These stories topped Thursday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.
Vedomosti: Hungary using its veto over Ukraine aid as bargaining chip to unblock EU cash
Budapest is prepared to waive its veto on the European Commission’s proposed four-year, 50-bln-euro financial aid package for Ukraine if the EU in turn agrees to unblock its funding package for Hungary. "Hungary’s EU funding and Ukraine’s financing are two separate issues," Balazs Orban, political director for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, told Bloomberg in an interview on the eve of the EU summit in Brussels slated for December 14-15. "But if the EU insists that Ukraine’s financing should come from an amended EU budget, then the two issues become linked," he added.
Hungary’s stance toward Ukraine has not changed, said Kirill Teremetsky, an expert at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University). According to him, Budapest is demanding that Kiev, first and foremost, reform the Ukrainian law on language and education, which Budapest sees as discriminatory and repressive toward the Hungarian minority in western Ukraine. As well, Budapest would like Hungarian companies and individuals to be exempted from potentially being included on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
Budapest understands that the EU is in the midst of an energy and economic crisis over its support for Ukraine, among other things, the expert added. "Under these conditions, the EU’s funds can only be spent either to support new members or the old ones, including Hungary, which has not yet received all the funds it is due from the EU." In his opinion, the negotiations will be a long, hard-fought process, and if Ukraine fails to meet Hungarian demands, Orban’s government will stick to its tough position regarding Kiev’s potential accession to the EU.
There are no objective grounds for holding focused talks on Ukraine joining the European Union, said Denis Denisov, an expert at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. According to him, in addition to Hungary, the German government is also trying to distance itself from this issue. "They realize that accepting Ukraine under the current conditions is fraught with colossal problems, and so only those countries that are in lockstep with US policy, such as the Baltic states, intend to vote for Ukraine’s accession. The western Balkans countries are also standing in line to join the EU, so it would also be impossible to bring Ukraine in while bypassing them," the expert explained.
Denisov added that residents of Europe’s poorer countries are demanding that their governments reconsider the policy of sending aid to Ukraine, and thus the whole discussion around Kiev’s potential accession to the EU boils down to empty talk intended to lift the morale of the Ukrainians.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Netanyahu increasingly boxed in by allies’ pressure for Gaza end-game
The US is putting pressure on Israel concerning a deadline for its ground operation in the Gaza Strip. It is expected that this will become the main subject of talks held on December 14 between US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the Israeli war cabinet. Over recent days, the US side has toughened its rhetoric with regard to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government over their unwillingness to discuss the question of Palestinian statehood. The Persian Gulf states are taking the same approach.
"The message is going to be very clear: We need to see a viable two-state solution plan, a road map that is serious before we talk about the next day and rebuilding the infrastructure of Gaza," Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United Nations Lana Nusseibeh told the Wall Street Journal. "The road map is: the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority and a grouping of countries that have leverage on the both of them sitting around the table and saying, ‘That’s the endgame we’re going to work to. The work starts here. This is the timeline, and it starts now,’" the diplomat elaborated.
In their analysis, experts from the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) noted that Israel should be more attentive to international demands in the humanitarian sphere as well as listen to what its allies are saying. "Ensuring, therefore, that the United States continues to stand steadfastly by Israel means continuing to be attentive to American interests in terms of the humanitarian elements of the conflict - and perhaps especially those interests related to the preferred US solution for Gaza," the researchers said. "Thus far, it is clear that there is frustration among members of the Biden administration at Israel’s unwillingness to engage in serious discussions about ‘the day after,’" the INSS pointed out.
Izvestia: Kiev infighting waxes as support for Ukraine rapidly wanes among Western backers
Russia does not currently see any solid grounds for launching talks with Ukraine because Kiev is not a sovereign player and cannot be a substantive party to such negotiations, but Moscow is not rejecting the possibility of sitting down at the negotiating table entirely, the Russian Foreign Ministry told Izvestia. The Kiev regime may be prodded into negotiating by its Western patrons, but Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is unlikely to agree to go that far. The West is already noticeably cutting its funding for Ukraine while the standoff between Zelensky and Valery Zaluzhny, Ukrainian armed forces commander-in-chief, can only but aggravate the fraught situation even further.
Given the current configuration, Zaluzhny seems like a logical alternative to the incumbent president, with the Western media exposure and spin about the general currently more favorable than that given his civilian superior, erstwhile media darling Zelensky. However, neither he nor Zelensky can be seen as independent and sovereign leaders of a sovereign country, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special envoy for the crimes of the Kiev regime, told Izvestia.
"Both of them are essentially [Western] overseers or enforcers: while Zelensky plays the role of political overseer, Zaluzhny is overseer of the military. Yet whether or not they are anointed to occupy this or that office [in Ukraine] depends on receiving an imprimatur from the outside. Actually, for the Americans this is the traditional arrangement for governing a political colony," Miroshnik noted.
The diplomat said that the system of exercising external governance over a virtual colony by the US involves propping up an alternative figure next to the main "overseer," so that the latter "won’t take things too far and suddenly begin to believe the hype about his own uniqueness [and indispensability]."
However, the prospect of a military coup d’etat in Kiev is thus far not on the horizon, Miroshnik added.
Vedomosti: US Congress plots crusade to slay Chinese Communist Party dragon
The US House of Representatives Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has prepared a "blueprint" of strategic recommendations on the economic standoff between Washington and the CCP. The document stresses that the US bipartisan consensus in which China’s economic development would trigger the democratization of its political system has turned out to be a miscalculation.
While some of the committee’s "blueprint" recommendations may be correct from the point of view of US foreign policy interests, they are simply not feasible in reality, Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University), said. For example, the US cannot compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) because of its protectionist economic policy. Additionally, the process of approving financing for foreign infrastructure projects is far more complex in the US than in China. The situation is further complicated by the lack of specifics on financing these proposals from the federal budget, which is yet to be approved. Singling out the CCP as the main adversary emphasizes the aspiration of some US political circles to fashion not only an economic and military rival out of China, but also an ideological opponent, Suslov concluded.
The published document is largely of a declarative nature, Alexey Davydov, senior researcher at the Center for North American Studies at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, explained. In order for the strategy to become an actual bill, it should be analyzed by a relevant committee and, later, if the initiatives listed require funding, it must be reviewed by the Appropriations Committee. That said, this is a separate process in each chamber, the House and the Senate, the expert stressed, and various difficulties may emerge along the way. For example, congressmen may be unhappy with the amount of requested funds or the distribution of powers. Such specific issues will not be discussed until the federal budget is approved, the expert noted.
Kommersant: Russia pumps up volume on oil supplies to China
According to Kommersant, Russian oil companies are sharply increasing export supplies of the ESPO (Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean) oil blend via the port of Kozmino, from where tankers are transporting it mainly to China. The volumes of oil passing through this Far Eastern port have again topped the historical record in December, amounting to 925,000 barrels per day (bpd).
In the opinion of commodities data and analytics firm Kpler, current record-high export levels out of Kozmino indicate that substantial volumes of carriage by rail are already present in the supply structure. "The ESPO’s tight spot has always been the ESPO-2 pipeline itself," said Viktor Katona of Kpler. "In addition to the Kozmino port, it also serves the needs of Far Eastern oil refineries," he explained.
Current export volumes directly indicate that Transneft’s plans to increase delivery volumes to Kozmino by rail are enjoying success, the analyst said. At the peak, Transneft was planning on delivering up to 7 mln tons of oil by rail per year (140,000 bpd of additional exports), Katona added, while currently about one half of this amount, 50,000-60,000 bpd, is passing through. The port of Kozmino can receive even more oil than the current record-high deliveries, with the export terminal’s nominal limit being 1.1 mln bpd, and so additional deliveries are quite possible, he concluded.
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