ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

The West is turning a blind eye to the current humanitarian crisis in east Ukraine, a political analyst tells Press TV as thousands of people are reportedly fleeing their homes amid Kiev’s military operations. “The international response [to the humanitarian crisis] has been a total failure, and it appears to me that it has been very organized because these attacks on the civilians to get them to run have been perpetrated primarily to try to create its mass punishment again,” Jim W. Dean, an editor and columnist with Veterans Today, said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday. He added that the West and media’s silence regarding the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine are considered as an approval for having “terror used as a weapon against east Ukrainian people for them to achieve some geopolitical goal that they have.” The analyst also noted that the shelling by the Ukraine army is “nothing more than a terror weapon to get people to flee.” On Friday, the Office of the United ...

China has investigated more than 25,000 people for corruption in the first half of 2014 amid a nationwide crackdown on graft, state media reports. The investigation of major corruption cases has increased by nearly 14 percent over the corresponding period last year, China’s official Xinhua news agency said on Friday. Approximately 85 percent of the cases involved bribes of over USD 8,000 or embezzlement of at least twice that amount, the news agency said, citing the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP). “The SPP will set up a leading … [task] group to retrieve bribery funds from overseas, enhance its supervision over major cases, and build a database of information about fugitive officials,” the news agency said. The statement comes as the Chinese government embarks on a wide-scale campaign against deep-rooted graft since President Xi Jinping kicked off an anti-corruption campaign two years ago. Since then, several high-profile lawmakers have been expelled from the ruling Com...

Recall what we said earlier today: the proxy Ukraine war just like that in Syria preceding it, "is all about energy." Recall also the following chart showing Ukraine's shale gas deposits, keeping in mind that the Dnieper-Donets basin which lies in the hotly contested eastern part of the nation and where as everyone knows by now a bloody civil war is raging, is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked shale gas in place. Finally, recall our story from May that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, just joined the board of the largest Ukraine gas producer Burisma Holdings. From the press release : R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of ...

The Pentagon and American intelligence agencies are developing plans that would enable the Obama administration to provide specific locations of surface-to-air missiles controlled by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine so the Ukrainian government could target them for destruction, American officials said. But the proposal has not yet been debated in the White House, a senior administration official said. It is unclear whether President Obama , who has already approved limited intelligence sharing with Ukraine, will agree to give more precise information about potential military targets, a step that would involve the United States more deeply in the conflict. Already, the question of what kind of intelligence support to give the Ukrainian government has become part of a larger debate within the administration about how directly to confront President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and how big a role Washington should take in trying to stop Russia’s rapid delivery of powerful we...

WASHINGTON — Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency ’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history. The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet. Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the r...