ISIS in Europe, the future of Ukraine and the migrant crisis in the interview with Mateusz Piskorski, PhD in political science and a co-founder of the European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis.

Q: How would you assess the current situation in Ukraine considering what Yulia Tymoshenko said recently. She believes that if nothing changes, the current government may be overthrown by the very citizens of Ukraine. I need to remind that uncontrollable access to weapons in Ukraine poses a real threat in this respect.

A: Currently Ukraine cannot be treated in terms of the State but only as an area that is controlled by organized crime groups. It is clearly seen that even in the western part of Ukraine local governments are financed by oligarchs who are in control of the situation, not the police. Currently Ukraine does not meet the definition of the State.

Lawmakers in the European Parliament have slammed the latest EU deal with Turkey under which member states are paying another US$3.35 billion to Ankara in a one-for-one migrant swap, which the United Nations has branded "deeply concerning."

Under the deal brokered on Monday, the EU would pay another tranche of money to help Turkey deal with its refugee crisis in return for a series of measures that includes the EU sending "irregular migrants" from Greece back to Turkey, in return for the EU taking in Syrian refugees in Turkey on a one-for-one basis, which many believe goes against international law.

Belgian serial pedophile Marc Dutroux, who has been convicted of sexually abusing and killing several girls, was planning first to kidnap many children and then create an "underground city where good, harmony and security would prevail," the murderer's lawyer told local media.

Belgian weekly magazine Soir Mag spoke to the pedophile's lawyer, who led his case between 1996 and 2003. Julien Pierre revealed shocking details of the conversations with the convicted murderer.

"Do you realize that no one has ever asked why I chose that house, that region?" Dutroux once reportedly asked his lawyer. "My idea was to carry out mass kidnappings of children and then to create, in a mine shaft, a sort of underground city where good, harmony and security would prevail."

Dutroux, now 59, kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six girls aged from eight to 19 back in 1995-1996. He reportedly chained his victims to their beds in a dungeon of his house. It was later revealed that his wife, Michelle Martin, knew all about his activities.

Both have a long history of convictions. In late 1980s, both Dutroux and Martin were arrested for abducting and raping five girls. However, they were later released for good behavior.

Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, both eight at the time of the abduction, were the first victims of the murderer. He repeatedly raped the girls and shot pornographic videos of the abuse. Then he also kidnapped 17-year-old An Marchal and 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks, whom he soon buried alive under a shack next to his house.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has provided the White House with a detailed plan for expansive military operations throughout Libya.

The proposal was presented by Carter to President Barack Obama's top national security advisers on February 22. Drawn up by the Pentagon's Africa Command and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the operation would reportedly involve airstrikes on 30 to 40 targets determined to belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Citing anonymous government officials, the Times reported that once the plan is approved by Obama, warplanes will launch attacks on alleged ISIS training camps, command centers and munitions depots while also providing air cover to various US-backed militias, which include Islamist elements similar to ISIS.

Turkish estimates suppose Turkey will bear the loss of between $2.3 and $8.3 billion in direct costs in 2016 alone
Less than four months after Russian sanctions in the wake of Erdogan's ambush of Russian Su-24 in Syria things aren't looking so great for the Turkish bottom line. Here is the Turkish daily Hürriyet with the roundup of the costs:

Turkish exports to Russia are down 40% since the heydays of 2013:

Russia's share in Turkish exports was increasing until 2008; it decreased during the crisis but caught up again.

In 2013, it reached $7 billion, 4.6 percent of Turkey's total exports. In 2014, it had fallen to 3.8 percent and $5.9 billion.

In 2015 it went down to 2.5 percent at $3.9 billion.

Overall during this period, Turkish exports to Russia dropped almost 40 percent.

In April 2014 I first visited Syria, going to Homs and Latakia, in addition to Damascus. On each of my three subsequent trips to Syria, speaking moderate colloquial Arabic, I have been able to interact one-on-one with Syrians there, whether in markets, taxis, on the streets or in areas I visited.

In Latakia, many of the the over 1 million Internally Displaced Persons from Idlib, Aleppo and surrounding areas who are being housed and supported by the Syrian government spoke of the same heinous kidnappings, beheadings, and other crimes that most media currently only associate with Da'esh (ISIS), but which were perpetrated (with Turkish support) by the so-called FSA and other terrorist factions.

A man from Harem, near the Turkish border, spoke of being kidnapped by FSA terrorists and of the decapitations of Harem residents, with their heads sent home in boxes.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to believe that he can call the shots in his dealings with the EU because Brussels needs Ankara if it wants to tackle the refugee crisis, Germany's N-TV television news channel asserted, calling Erdogan's strategy "a bitter game of political blackmail."

The media outlet compared Erdogan's behavior to that of a shopper at a supermarket. The Turkish president, according to N-TV, has constantly been asking for more, but failed to deliver much.

Some of his demands and initiatives include additional $3.3 billion in aid, building a new refugee city in Syria, asking Germany to take refugees directly from Turkey, carte blanche to deal with the Kurds, as well as the facilitation of trade and visa requirements with the EU.

© AP/ Mhamed Sheikh Norus

Deadliest strike in America's drone war calls into question how US defines "combatants"

US airstrikes targeting what the Pentagon is calling an al-Shabaab training facility in Somalia killed over 150 people on Saturday. In an announcement Monday, the Pentagon classified the dead as "militant fighters" who were allegedly preparing a large-scale attack against US and African diplomatic personnel.

International human rights groups quickly contested the Pentagon's official narrative, however, asking how a strike killing in excess of 150 people could be anything but the product of widespread collateral damage.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism scoffed at US assertions calling the death toll from the strike "unprecedented." The Saturday strike was the deadliest single US counterterrorism action since the group began monitoring drone strike reports in 2010.

The Pentagon countered that not only were the dead only al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, but also that the "fighters" were scheduled to carry out an imminent attack against US interests.

Controversial drone program likely resulting in massive, unreported civilian deaths

The US drone program, a lynchpin in America's global war on terrorism, has faced widening condemnation by the international community in recent years. Legal experts argue that the strikes cannot be legal without a proper congressional war authorization or the presence of ongoing hostilities, or a "hot war," within the targeted territories.

More concerning to human rights advocates, however, are reports in recent years that many of those killed in drone strikes are civilians, who are then reported by White House officials as having been combatants. One report on Nevada-based drone operators observed that they "often do not know who they are killing, they are making a guess."

Furthermore, investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other advocacy groups, who are backtracking news reports on drone strikes to the locations, indicated they have found startlingly different results than those suggested by the White House.

Repeatedly, when traced to the scene of strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya, family members and witnesses on the ground decry the attacks as collateral damage, and claim that their slain family members were civilians.

Washington defines away collateral damage by use of "kill-boxes"

The death misreporting may be legal sleight-of-hand, as anyone who is present in a so-called "kill-box" is a legitimate target. Kill boxes are areas defined as small geographic spaces of hostility in which those present are automatically defined as a combatant.

This notion of a kill box made sense in conventional wars - civilians had notice and would stay away from battlefields. Today, however, a kill zone is defined as a perimeter around a high-level target or targets that actually moves with the target. In effect, US lawyers have simply defined away collateral damage.

Translated from Le Figaro article June 21, 2015

The French Ambassador to Moscow until 2013, Jean de Gliniasty deems that the Europeans should have "given" Sevastopol to Crimea and that Crimea "was always Russian." Jean de Gliniasty is mad, very mad. Encountered between sessions at the St Petersburg forum, the former French Ambassador to Moscow, who makes no secret of his pro-Russian views, expatiates against the mistakes of European and French diplomacy on the Ukrainian file.

"It's five years of effort, wasted," regrets the man who represented the interests of France in Moscow from May 2009 to October 2013, leaving the Russian capital at the time of the large-scale demonstrations of the Maidan that led to the regime change, then to the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass.

During those five years he was a tireless advocate for French companies in Russia, who who responded with appreciation, as he minimized the tightening imposed by Vladimir Putin on civil society on his return to the Kremlin in 2012--views that were sometimes criticized at the Quai d'Orsay. "It was not complicated," he said, "it was necessary to give Sevastopol to Russia and guarantee the status of the Russian language in the Crimea." And the opinion of Kiev in all this? "But Crimea has never belonged to Ukraine, it has always been Russian," replies Jean de Gliniasty, neglecting the fact* that the peninsula was a gift* from Nikita Khrushchev to Ukraine in 1954. (*A typical Le Figaro editorial snip, to which the translator responds "neglecting the fact that Krushchev's gift was contrary to the constitution, which required a vote.")

According to the former diplomat, this official return of Sevastopol to the Russian fold would have been accomplished at the latest at the end of the lease of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea - stationed in the port of Crimea - which was to expire in 2042.

The projects that could have been embarked on when Moscow began to oppose the signing of a Ukraine association agreement with the European Union, have been thwarted by the ignorance of history on the European side, and especially by American actions, analyzes Jean de Gliniasty. "They put themselves in the hands of the Americans," said the diplomat with regret.

Last Thursday, in a speech delivered at the University of Utah, Mitt Romney blindsided Donald Trump in what amounted to a scathing indictment of the billionaire's ability to lead the country.

"If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished," Romney said, in an apparent effort to play party elder. "If Donald Trump's plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession," Romney continues, hitting Trump on the economy. "A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America."

We covered the story exhaustively, and for those who would enjoy a review of the verbal melee, see here, here, and here.

More important than what Romney said (after all, it's not as though he's the first person to essentially call Trump a demagogic lunatic who has no business being President) was what his speech represented: all-out panic on the part of the GOP establishment.