Editor's Note: From many perspectives, the world is in danger of being drawn into long-term trouble right before our eyes. Greater risk of outbreak of new conflicts bubbles amid a lingering pandemic, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and the plague of soaring inflation and an energy crisis. Against this complex backdrop, what will 2023 look like? Who should we look toward as the anchor of stability in the world? Global Times reporters Yu Jincui and Xing Xiaojing recently interviewed Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, over these pressing issues. This is the fourth piece of the Global Times series － "Looking for an anchor of stability in 2023."

GT: What's the black swan event in 2022 in your eyes?

Ritter: The Russian-Ukraine conflict is the black swan event of 2022. I think when we looked at 2021 moving into 2022, there was a lot of talk about the potential of Russian military action against Ukraine. But I believe that many in the West did not think that Russia would actually go through with it. They believed the consequences of a Russian military operation against Ukraine would be so severe and disastrous for Russia that Russia would be deterred from doing this. This is why the greatest emphasis that the West placed on trying to deter Russia wasn't military, but economic, the threat of economic sanctions.

Arguing in favor of sending tanks to Kiev, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said EU countries were fighting a war against Russia. US and EU officials have previously gone out of their way to claim they were not a party to the conflict in Ukraine.

Baerbock, during a debate at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on Tuesday said:

"And therefore I've said already in the last days - yes, we have to do more to defend Ukraine. Yes, we have to do more also on tanks. But the most important and the crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe, because we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other."

While Chancellor Olaf Scholz has insisted that Germany ought to support Ukraine but avoid direct confrontation with Russia, his coalition partner Baerbock has taken a more hawkish position. According to German media, her Greens Party has been in favor of sending Leopard 2 tanks to Kiev, and eventually managed to pressure Scholz into agreeing. Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht, who was reluctant to send tanks to Ukraine, was pushed to resign.

Türkiye has called off a three-way meeting with Sweden and Finland, leaving the two Nordic nations' plans to join NATO in limbo, Turkish state broadcaster TRT reported on Tuesday. Relations between Ankara and Stockholm took a nosedive over the weekend, following a sanctioned Koran-burning protest outside the Turkish embassy in the Swedish capital.

TRT's report, citing anonymous Turkish diplomatic sources, claimed that the meeting, scheduled for next month in Brussels, has been postponed at Ankara's request.

A source in the Turkish presidency stressed that the decision was not a cancellation, but rather a deferment, with no specified time frame. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office declined to comment offically, when approached by the media.

On Monday, the Turkish head of state made it clear that Sweden "will not receive any support from us with regard to NATO" due to Stockholm's failure to show respect to the "faith of the Republic of Türkiye or the Muslims."

His remarks came after Swedish authorities allowed an anti-Islam stunt to go ahead in front of the Turkish diplomatic mission in Stockholm on Saturday. Far-right Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan burned a copy of the Muslim holy book during the event.

A former senior FBI counterintelligence official who reportedly was involved in the Trump-Russia probe was arrested and charged over his own alleged ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch amid the war in Ukraine.

Charles McGonigal, the former special agent in charge of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division in New York who retired in 2018, is charged with violating U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. He was charged alongside Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen and a Russian interpreter for courts and government offices, through a five-count indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court Monday.

McGonigal and Shestakov both were arrested Saturday. The indictment is a rare move by federal prosecutors to bring charges against a former senior FBI official before a federal grand jury.

Though not referenced in or related to the indictment, McGonigal, while serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., was one of the first bureau officials to learn of allegations that George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser for former President Donald Trump, boasted that he knew Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, launching the investigation into alleged Russian election interference known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane, Business Insider previously reported. Fox News is told that as a senior counterintelligence official at the time, he likely was briefed on Crossfire Hurricane at the time the investigation was launched.

The Russian firm is a "vice squad" pitted against American gangsters, Yevgeny Prigozhin told RT

The Wagner Group scares the US because it is willing to stand up to American bullying around the world, the private military company's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed on Monday, answering a question from RT.

Washington said last week that it would designate the Russian PMC as an international criminal organization, accusing it of "widespread atrocities and human rights abuses."

"Unlike America's paramilitary forces," Prigozhin said in a written response to RT, "the Wagner PMC eliminates only enemies of peace and commits no crimes. Of course, if you employ double standards, you can dig up dirt on anyone."

The US is finalizing plans to send approximately 30 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, two US officials familiar with the deliberations told CNN.

The Biden administration announcement to send the US-made tanks could come as early as this week, CNN reported earlier Tuesday. The timing around the actual delivery of the tanks is still unclear and it normally takes several months to train troops to use the tanks effectively, officials said.

The US will also send a small number of recovery vehicles, one of the officials said. Recovery vehicles are tracked vehicles used to assist in the repair of tanks on the battlefield or the removal from the battlefield for service and maintenance in a different location.

The pending announcement appears to break a diplomatic logjam with Germany about the provision of tanks to Ukraine. German officials had openly stated that they would only send their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine if the US sent the M-1 Abrams tank, a system US officials had repeatedly stated was overly complex and difficult to maintain.

The US decision to provide Abrams tanks to Ukraine is an abrupt about-face from its stated position, one that allows Germany to send its tanks and to clear the way for the approval of other European countries to send in more of the German-made Leopard 2 tanks as well.

The German government announced on Wednesday it will send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, following weeks of diplomatic pressure to make the move.

As the war in Ukraine approaches its one-year anniversary one of the few things that have remained constant is the Polish governments firm backing of the regime in Kiev. Along with the three Baltic states, Warsaw has exhibited a radical zeal for rejecting any form of compromise with Moscow, choosing instead to pursue a policy of further weapons shipments to Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia at any cost. This was confirmed in a recent report by the Polish edition of German "Die Welt". Based on discussions with Polish diplomatic sources that wanted to remain anonymous, "every day, Polish politicians say what the representatives of Germany or France usually do not dare to say, and thus formulate one of the goals of the war, that Russia must be unconditionally weakened as far as possible."

Foreign Affairs, a highly influential US magazine - effectively a US empire house journal - has published an article detailing how sanctions are quickly losing their efficiency as a weapon in Washington's global arsenal.

Published by the Council on Foreign Relations NGO, Foreign Affairs provides space for officials within the US military industrial complex to communicate with one another on matters they believe to be of the utmost significance. Therefore, it is important to pay attention when the magazine makes major pronouncements on any issue.

It recently published an appraisal of US sanctions - the conclusion being that they are increasingly ineffective, have prompted Beijing and Moscow to create alternative global financial structures to insulate themselves and others from punitive actions, and that Washington and its acolytes will no longer be able to force countries to do their bidding, let alone destroy dissenting states, through such measures in the very near future.

What is the price of a Yale professor? If you wanted to buy one lock, stock, and barrel, depending on what you want to use one (or two) for, the cost could be pretty steep. More often than not, today's Ivy League know-it-all types seem like soap salespeople. Whoever supplies the grant money gets the squeaky brain grease.

Take the current superheated Russophobia as an example. Many of the western world's most successful and respected professors publish "research" that looks more like tabloid journalism. It's the trend. Or, I should say, outlandish analysis is now acceptable in any form as long as the desired "truth" is presented. A recent study at Foreign Policy entitled "The World Economy No Longer Needs Russia," is just dumb from the title to the summary. Yes, I just said Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfel, and Steven Tian are both obtuse with reality. Or else they feel confident that we are. Let's take their high-profile genius analysis from the start, just to show you what I mean.

First, the two Yale scholars claim that Russia Vladimir Putin has been holding the global economy hostage until the world services his whims. It's a lie, of course. It was not Russia that blew up the Nordstream pipelines, and Putin has said gas is often available for all who will buy it. How can the Russian president possibly hold Europe or America, hostage, when both countries have the gun to their heads? These Ivy League chums of Biden are ridiculous. The authors spew about Europe's utter dependence on Russian natural resources, then bound off into never never land with this:

"Now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of Putin's invasion, it is apparent that Russia has permanently forfeited its erstwhile economic might in the global marketplace."

Take note. It's "Putin's invasion," but no mention that America and the Europeans lied about the Minsk accords to create a Ukrainian NATO base under the Russians' noses. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France/s François Hollande just told the world the peace deal was a sham to give Ukraine time to rearm. The sinister nature of the whole Euromaidan affair, the eight years of hammering the separate eastern republics with artillery, and Joe Biden's insane "all-in policy" for arming Ukraine to death, it's like watching a lunatic asylum set loose in Washington.

American aid to Ukraine has eclipsed the annual expenditure of "endless" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the protracted war between Ukraine and Russia continues unabated, congressional lawmakers and President Joe Biden have appropriated $110 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine.

Some pro-Ukraine advocates have contended that the costs of aiding Ukraine's fight with Russia amounts to "peanuts" in "grand strategy terms."

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the noninterventionist Quincy Institute, disputed the narrative from these pro-aid analysts.