Ashley Cornell, email: [email protected]

BEIRUT/ANKARA, December 2 (Portal) – Syria is resisting Russian efforts to negotiate a summit with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, three sources said on Friday, after more than a decade of bitter enmity since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war.

However, two Turkish sources, including a senior official, denied that Damascus was hesitating and said things were on track for an eventual meeting between the leaders.

Erdogan’s government has backed rebel fighters trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and has accused the Syrian leader of state terrorism and said early in the conflict that peace efforts could not continue under his rule.

Assad says it is Turkey that has supported terrorism, backing a number of militants, including Islamist factions, and launching repeated military incursions into northern Syria. Ankara is preparing another possible operation after blaming Syrian Kurdish fighters for a bombing in Istanbul.

Russia helped Assad turn the tide of the war in his favor and says it wants a political end to the conflict and to bring the two leaders together for talks.

Erdogan has signaled readiness for rapprochement.

A week after shaking hands with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last month, after repeatedly saying he could not meet a leader who came to power in a coup, he said Turkey could “get things moving with Syria.”

“There must be no resentment in politics,” he said in a television discussion at the weekend.

However, three sources with knowledge of Syria’s position on possible talks said Assad had rejected a proposal for Erdogan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Two of the sources said Damascus believes such a meeting could bolster Erdogan ahead of next year’s Turkish elections, especially if it addresses Ankara’s goal of bringing back some of Turkey’s 3.6 million Syrian refugees.

“Why give Erdogan a victory for nothing? There will be no rapprochement before the elections,” said one of the two, adding that Syria had also rejected the idea of ​​a meeting of foreign ministers.

The third source, a diplomat with knowledge of the proposal, said Syria “considers such a meeting useless if it does not bring anything concrete, and what they have been demanding so far is the complete withdrawal of Turkish troops.”

Turkish officials said this week the army would need just days to be ready for a ground incursion into northern Syria, where it has already been conducting artillery and airstrikes.

But the government has also said it is ready for talks with Damascus if they focus on security at the border, where Ankara wants Syrian-Kurdish YPG fighters evicted from the border and refugees moved to “safe zones”. will.

An Assad-Erdogan meeting is possible “in the not too distant future,” said the senior Turkish official.

“Putin is slowly preparing the way for this,” the official said. “It would be the start of a big change in Syria and would have a very positive impact on Turkey. Russia would also benefit from this … as it is overburdened in many areas.”

Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Laila Bassam in Beirut and Orhan Coskun in Ankara; Writing by Dominic Evans, editing by William Maclean and Rosalba O’Brien

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The Pentagon plans to purchase at least 100 examples of this strategic bomber, designed to “evolve” through technological innovations.

The U.S. Army’s new jewel, the B-21 “Raider” bomber, was unveiled in Palmdale, California at one of its manufacturer’s Northrop Grumman sites in an expertly choreographed ceremony opened by the American anthem.

With lots of spotlights and dramatic music, the industrialist lifted the veil on this new high-tech aircraft, of which the Pentagon wants to buy at least 100 copies at almost 700 million dollars each.

“The B-21 ‘Raider’ is the best strategic bomber in more than three decades,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. A sign, he says, that the United States continues to show “ingenuity and innovation.”

Read alsoThe French Armed Forces Minister meets his American counterpart at the Pentagon

The American army does not want to reveal too much information about the capabilities of the B-21, many of which technical characteristics remain classified. But this new model, which must gradually replace the B-1 and B-2 bombers, whose first launches date back to the Cold War, should show significant advances compared to the existing fleet.

Integrate new weapons that do not exist yet

The new plane has “a range that no other long-range bomber can match,” said Lloyd Austin, also asserting that the plane is one of the most durable bombers ever built. Like the US military’s latest designs, including the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, the B-21 will be camouflaged. “Even the most sophisticated air defense systems will have trouble spotting the B-21 in the sky,” Austin said, explaining that the aircraft benefits from 50 years of American expertise in the field.

The plane also has an “open architecture” that should allow “new weapons that haven’t been invented yet” to be easily accommodated, he added. The bomber was “designed for further development,” commented Amy Nelson, an expert at the Brookings Institution, an American think tank based in Washington. In particular, its “open architecture” allows “the future integration of software” capable of improving its performance, especially its autonomy, “so that the aircraft does not quickly become obsolete”.

Fly with no crew on board

“The B-21 is much more sophisticated than its predecessors, really modern,” she added. Unlike the B-2 bomber, the aircraft has a “dual ability”: it can strike with both nuclear missiles and conventional weapons. But it can also “launch long-range and short-range missiles.”

This state-of-the-art bomber can also fly without a crew on board, a feature that was not mentioned when it was presented at Palmdale. An Air Force spokeswoman confirmed to AFP that the plane “is planning this possibility but no decision has been made to fly unmanned.” The first flight of the B-21, the first six of which Northrop Grumman is already working on, is scheduled for 2023.

His nickname “Raider” is inspired by the 1942 Tokyo Air Raid led by Colonel James Doolittle, the first American attack on Japanese soil during World War II, in retaliation for Japanese planes attacking the Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii a year earlier .

The B-21 is set to become a central part of America’s “nuclear triad,” consisting of missiles and bombs that can be launched from land, sea, or air. “The bomber fleet allows the United States flexibility in nuclear deterrence and provides a guarantee in case of problems with the other pillars” of this task force, concludes expert Amy Nelson.

SEE ALSO – War in Ukraine: The French Rafales are the “air police”

A work to tell that as completely as possible dramatic conflict in Ukraine. It will be presented tomorrow 3rd of December to Rome the book War in Ukraine. Causes, Consequences, Backgrounds, published by Sandro Teti Publishers. The publication, edited by Elizabeth Burba, was visited by 13 authors, leading experts on this topic. The result is one polyphonic narration which aims to paint a complete picture of the international crisis.

The book goes into that conflict Ukrainian explore different aspects and offer different levels of reading to understand the country and its internal turmoil. News, history, geopolitics, religion, economics, media: everything is considered to make that clear unsolved knots and bring the various to light responsibility of the unfolding drama. The basis of the narrative is the analysis of the principles historical passages of Ukraine: Prince Oleg and the patriarch filarete, the Cossacks and the Red Guards, the Party of Regions and the Battalion Azov, The Holocaust and Rehabilitation Bandera and other Nazi collaborators the collapse of the USSR, the rise and dominance of Ukrainian oligarchs, the role of Washington, Moscow and Brussels. Until 2014 with euromaidan, the secession of Crimea and the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, since then engaged in an uninterrupted war that lasted eight years and worsened after the Russian intervention of February 24, 2022.

Involved in writing the book: Alberto bradanini, Elizabeth burba, Paul socks, Lucian Fighter, tones Capuozzo, Frank hinges, Mauritius Paper, James forked line, Gianandrea gaiani, Jan Micalessin, Fabio minis, Moni ovadia, humbert Go away.

The ships were identified and filmed at a depth of 150 meters by a submarine equipped with an advanced camera.
On the bottom of the Baltic Sea they find three “ghost” ships that are more than 300 years old

A group of Danish archaeologists have discovered the remains of three nearly 300-year-old ships lying in good condition in the depths of the Baltic Sea, the West Jutland Maritime War Museum in Denmark has reported.

The discovery came during an expedition conducted last October, which also included specialists from the National Museum of the Baltic Sea and the Danish company JD-Contractor, which provided the SIMA seagoing vessel and underwater robots with advanced technology.

According to Maritime War Museum director Gert Normann Andersen, the group, which consisted of 27 expedition members, set out with the idea of ​​studying the remains of shipwrecks, as well as other materials on the bottom of the sea. However, he stressed that they did not expect to find these “ghost” ships so well preserved. “The wreck was almost as good as it was when it sank hundreds of years ago,” he said.

The ships were identified and filmed as the remotely operated underwater vehicle, equipped with an advanced camera, was submerged to a depth of 150 metres. They are also known to be located 46.3 kilometers east of the Swedish island of Gotland, out of reach of modern fishing boats.

Experts believe that two of the ships found are Dutch merchant galleys, while the remaining, the largest of the three, is a Scandinavian ship. In addition, they explained that due to the shape of their hulls, it is possible that these damaged ships date from the 18th and 19th centuries.

David Gregory, a researcher at the National Museum, stated that “the Baltic Sea is among the places believed to harbor the best preserved wooden shipwrecks in the world”. This is due to the very acidic and low-oxygen environmental conditions on the sea floor, which prevent worms and other microorganisms from destroying the wood.

Andersen pointed out that in contrast, “in the North Sea all shipwrecks are broken up in record time” as “worms eat all the wood and wave action and heavy tackle fishing do the rest.

When deciding whether to leave this shipwreck at the site, Gregory said that under both the Danish Museums Act and the European Convention for the Protection of Archaeological Heritage, all discoveries should preferably remain “in situ”. This measure is mainly due to the high costs that would entail their salvage and preservation. The Danish Palaces and Culture Agency estimates that there are around 20,000 shipwrecks in Danish waters.

According to British military experts, invading Russian troops in Ukraine engaged in a disproportionately expensive battle for the city of Bakhmut. The advantage of capturing the city in the Donetsk region of about 70,000 people is not commensurate with the price Moscow is paying for it, according to the Defense Ministry’s daily intelligence update on the war in Ukraine in London today.

Much of Russia’s effort and firepower has been focused on an approximately 15-kilometre sector of a trench front since August, the statement said. The plan is probably to encircle the city. There was little progress in the south.

While taking Bakhmut gave Russia an opportunity to threaten larger urban centers such as the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, it would only be of “limited operational value”, the British added. It is therefore a realistic possibility that the capture of the city has become a political and symbolic goal for the Kremlin.