Netanyahu, Zelensky To Visit Washington as Iran, Russia Conflicts Overlap

Leaders from Ukraine and Israel are heading to America this week to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and meet with President Trump at Washington. The matching tête-a-têtes will likely focus on the increasing overlap between the wars with Iran and Russia. President Trump ordered a pause on military attacks on Iran after 13 days of relentless bombardment of military installations and Iran’s infrastructure. During that break, Ukraine hit an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea that killed one sailor. Iran responded by summoning Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires at Tehran to convey “Iran’s strong protest over the ‘hostile and criminal act,” Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported.Mr. Zelensky said Saturday that the ship was transporting drones to Russia’s military. The coordination, he contended, goes both ways as Russia assists Iran with satellite surveillance of Gulf states and U.S. military facilities located there. “There is a clear correlation between Russia’s satellite imagery of these sites and Iranian strikes — both before the attacks, in preparation for them, and afterward, to assess the damage inflicted,” he said, noting the timing last week of transmissions and attacks on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait.“None of us in the world should turn a blind eye to one very simple fact: evil always seeks ways to make things worse and spread further. Russia must be stopped,” he said.On Sunday, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, acknowledged the overlap between the two conflicts, calling the Ukrainian and Iranian conflicts a “symbiotic relationship” though he refused to entertain a merging of the wars, saying only that Mr. Trump has “put on notice” both Russia’s and China’s leaders about assisting or coordinating with Iran. “We’ll let Zelensky’s statement just stand on its own but the president’s statement is out there also,” he said. Mr. Waltz fanned out across the Sunday morning news shows to discuss the administration’s pause to give talks “a little bit of room.” He said that while the military takes a breather, he would advise the regime to “take the president very seriously.” “The U.S. military is locked and loaded,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” declining to discuss under what conditions firepower might resume though warning Iran to stop attacking civilian cargo ships from Singapore, Cyprus, Panama, and elsewhere that “have done nothing to Iran.” “You have to ask yourself, is a country winning that has little speedboats running around? I mean these are like the Somali pirates with cruise missiles and drones. These are acts of desperation,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added that Iran’s economy and military are devastated while its country’s inflation rate spikes, its currency tanks, and its foreign currency reserves are depleted. “We’re starting to see the Iranian government even not be able to pay its own workers, and even its own military,” he said.U.S. Central Command announced Saturday that despite the pause on strikes, it is still enforcing a naval blockade and had stopped 12 commercial vessels trying to run the blockade. Mr. Waltz told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that U.S. air and sea superiority has given America “unfettered access over Iran right now.” The words echoed similar comments by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which claimed its Navy has “established complete authority over the Strait of Hormuz” after forcing six ships to anchor in the last 24 hours.While Iran said it is willing to come back to the negotiating table and is still in technical talks with Oman, Mr. Waltz rejected reports that U.S. stockpiles are depleted to the point of not being able to continue its offensive against Iran. He noted that the Trump administration inherited a depleted stockpile from the prior administration while the U.S. military also helped supply Ukraine in its war with Russia over the last four or five years. Mr. Waltz insisted, however, that “the U.S. military has everything that it needs and the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.” Asked about whether leakers would be imprisoned, Mr. Waltz added that he will defer that question to the Department of Justice.As Messrs. Zelensky and Netanyahu prepare to travel to America, Mr. Netanyahu told “Sunday Morning Futures” that the fact that Iran “is shooting at everyone, I mean literally everyone,” means its nuclear weapons program must never be allowed to progress. He said he fully supports Mr. Trump’s efforts to either topple the regime or make it “sufficiently weakened that it knows it has to end its nuclear program and has to change its course.”“If he can do so without returning to intense military fighting, that’s fine. Why not? But one way or the other, they have to end their nuclear program. And with a deal or without a deal, that has to come to an end,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu, Zelensky To Visit Washington as Iran, Russia Conflicts Overlap

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