“Yes, the US embassy has notified our ministry about this,” a Turkish foreign ministry source told Sputnik on Wednesday, regarding reports of the cancellation.

It was reported late last week that Washington would be deploying the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Donald Cook to the region, shortly after the USS Monterey and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower transited the Bosphorus Strait and conducted “multi-domain” NATO operations in the Black Sea.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko previously issued a statement to Sputnik stating that the increase of NATO activity and presence in the Black Sea could complicate regional security.

Washington’s decision to cancel its scheduled deployment comes hours after a squadron of warships from the Russian Black Sea Fleet took to the waters to conduct artillery fire exercises.

​Some 15 ships from the Caspian Flotilla were reportedly used in the drills.

The increase in NATO activity since US President Joe Biden took office coincides with increased tensions in eastern Ukraine between Donbass and Kiev.

Russia, a guarantor of the 2015 Minsk Package of Measures, has urged Ukraine to respect the ceasefire terms of the agreement.

While Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby has said US activity in the area is “not anything new,”  Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has argued that the US and NATO are “deliberately turning Ukraine into a powder keg.”

The Russian official added that, if escalation occurred, “the responsibility for the consequences of such an escalation will lay entirely at the feet of Kiev and its Western curators.”

There are real fears that the US-led NATO military alliance and Russia may become embroiled in a wider war. There seems little doubt that the Western-backed regime in Kiev is intent on escalating the seven-year war in Eastern Ukraine for its perceived advantage by getting NATO powers involved.

In recent weeks there has been a constant campaign of artillery shelling by Ukrainian forces under Kiev’s command against civilians centers in the breakaway eastern region. The latter is mainly populated by ethnic Russians who repudiated the Western-backed coup d’état in February 2014 which brought the current Kiev regime to power. The regime launched a military offensive against the eastern Donbass which has continued for seven years, albeit a low-intensity campaign of hostility.

The ethnic Russian separatists have succeeded all the while in holding back the Kiev forces with admirable courage and tough military defenses. Russia denies it is involved in on-the-ground military support for the separatists but Moscow does provide political and humanitarian backing for the people who have been under merciless siege by Kiev’s forces, many of whom comprise Neo-Nazi militia who despise Russian culture just as their genocidal forbears did during the Second World War and the Third Reich’s Final Solution.

Now with Turkey getting involved in the war, the conflict is set to escalate.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy was hosted in Istanbul last weekend by Turk leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan vowed to support Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”.

© AFP 2021 / SERGEI SUPINSKY

Erdogan, Zelensky Confirm ‘Strategic Partnership’ Between Turkey and Ukraine After Istanbul Meeting

This rhetorical intervention by Turkey in the Ukraine war has been accompanied by an increase in supplies of warships and drones to the Kiev regime.

© REUTERS / MURAT CETINMUHURDAR/PPO

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan meets with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Istanbul, Turkey, April 10, 2021

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was prompted to warn against moves by NATO powers, including Turkey, which are fomenting a more militaristic stance by Kiev. Under the 2015 Minsk peace accord, the Kiev regime is obligated to grant autonomy to the Eastern region. This has never been implemented and it seems evident that Kiev is moving to outright reject Minsk by ramping up the military campaign.

The intervention by Turkey is reminiscent of the war last year between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory. It was the supply of drones and other military equipment by Turkey which gave Azerbaijan a decisive upper hand. That conflict on Russia’s southern border was also a cause for alarm in Moscow over its security. It was only through Moscow’s judicious mediation that the four-month war was eventually tamped down.

It seems that Turkey’s Erdogan is flexing his muscles again to expand his influence over the Black Sea and Caucasus regions, this time by supplying “game-changing” drone technology to the Ukrainian forces under Kiev’s command.

It is obvious that Turkey’s latest involvement in the Ukraine conflict has caused Russia much consternation. After all, Russia has at times hailed friendly relations with Ankara, and vice versa. Yet here is Ankara trying to make gain at the expense of potential Russian pain.

Only recently, Russia further extended the sale of its S-400 advanced air defence system to Turkey. That strategically important deal provoked anger in Washington and other NATO members. But Erdogan snubbed Western objections and went ahead with the S-400 purchase.

© AP PHOTO / TURKISH DEFENCE MINISTRY

In this Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2019 file photo, a truck carrying parts of the S-400 air defense systems, exits a Russian transport aircraft after landing at Murted military airport outside Ankara, Turkey.

The mercurial Turkish president has been riling up European leaders over issues to do with Islam, migration, and human rights. Last week, there appeared to be a calculated insult by Ankara when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was shunted to take a backseat during a summit.

Wily and irascible, Erdogan has a knack for wrong-footing a lot of world leaders and appears to harbor grudges. It may be safely surmised that the Turkish leader never really forgave Russia for its military intervention in Syria at the end of 2015 which turned the tables on Ankara’s criminal ambitions for eliciting regime change in Damascus.

Turkey’s incendiary intervention in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict last year seems to have been calculated revenge.

© REUTERS / AZIZ KARIMOV

Turkey Cannot Be Guarantor of Nagorno-Karabakh Settlement, Ex-US Special Envoy Says

So, too, is Erdogan’s power play in the Ukraine. If that war flares up, then Moscow will be put under immense pressure to protect ethnic Russians in Donbass coming under fire. If Russia makes that move then the Western media will portray it as “Russian aggression” against Ukraine. The latter has already got Washington and NATO’s support. The upshot could be a catastrophic escalation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is renowned for his ability at geopolitical chess playing. But what happens when you play chess with someone like Erdogan who is a ruthless backstabber?

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

There is compelling evidence to speculate that what is now being attempted by the US in Syria, with its occupation of a large swathe of territory in the north west of the country, is a re-run of the Balkanisation of Yugoslavia in the 1990s — a sovereign state broken up and dismembered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in service to the unipolar world that had just come into being as a result.

The break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a state born out of the carnage of the Second World War, was stark evidence that for hawks within the US political and military establishment the Cold War had not ended it had been won – won by dint of America’s divinely chosen position as the “indispensable nation”, a credo first articulated by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during an NBC interview in 1998.

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Thus triumphalism abounded within the corridors of power in the land of the free, which cheered on by its willing vassals — such as Tony Blair’s UK government, and various eastern European satellites harbouring unresolved anti-Russian animus — produced an intoxication with overwhelming military power and strength, encapsulated in the eastward expansion of NATO.

© AP Photo/ Ariel Schalit

‘What We Are Seeing is the Collapse of the Attempt to Destroy Syria’ – Analyst

The unending wars and military interventions that have been embarked by the US and its allies since the 1990s, rather than push the frontiers of democracy, have produced nothing but human misery, chaos, and instability. And on a scale hitherto absent.Syria is only the latest country and society to experience the tender mercies of Washington’s self-ordained role as the world’s policeman. It does so not with the objective of maintaining the world as a safe place or democracy or human rights, as tirelessly claimed, but so that global corporations are able to function and prosper and exploit the world’s human and natural resources unimpeded. They call it free market economics. A much more accurate name is’ disruptive unfettered capitalism’, an economic model which is no respecter of borders or cultures, no respecter of even the concept of the nation state.

The presence of US military forces in Syria is illegal. This is a fact that no amount of obfuscation or dissembling can elide. It poses a threat to the security and stability not only of Syria but the entire region. The idea that the presence of US military forces in the country, or anywhere else in the Middle East for that matter, is necessary to bolster security and stability, this is an exercise in peddling fiction. Just ask the people of Iraq or Libya, two countries laid waste by Washington and its allies, if you do not believe me.

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Adding to the pot of instability and US-inspired mayhem in the Middle East is the news that the gargantuan US military budget for 2019 is to include $300 million for the training and equipping of the SDF, Washington’s proxy ground force in Syria, in addition to $250 million to fund the ‘border security force’ in the country that’s been mooted. By way of a reminder, as with the SDF the planned border security force will largely comprise Syrian Kurds attached to the YPG. All this, it’s worth recalling, is being undertaken in clear violation of Syria’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is the very epitome of might is right, redolent of that which sustained the Roman Empire.

The seeming willingness of the Trump administration to rupture its alliance and relationship with fellow NATO member, Turkey, with its commitment to arming and training the Kurds across Ankara’s southern border is remarkable, not to mention inexplicable. President Erdogan’s government has made no bones about the fact it considers it a threat to Turkey’s security, and has pledged to act accordingly. Indeed with its Operation Olive Branch military campaign against the YPG in Afrin, northern Syria, currently underway, involving ground forces deploying across the border in the process, the Erdogan government is making good on this pledge.

The fact is that along with Israel, Turkey is now exploiting the crisis and conflict in Syria to violate its sovereignty with wilful abandon.

It requires neither an abiding love or Russia nor a burning hatred of America to understand the necessity of a world in which no one nation is able or inclined to arrogate to itself the right to exercise global hegemony. Empires are doomed by virtue of the very premise upon which they exist, which is that nations and peoples can be dominated and subjugated by other nations. They cannot. Or at least they cannot over a sustained period.

If history teaches us anything it is that those who seek to dominate only succeed in sowing dragon’s teeth, inviting blowback and backlash. The monster that is Salafi-jihadism and the ensuing spate of terrorist attacks across the world in recent years leaves no doubt of it.

© Sputnik/ Mikhail Alayeddin

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The need to check the untrammelled power of Washington is self-evident. Since the Soviet Union was consigned to history in the early 1990s, the US has rampaged across the world like an out of control juggernaut of death and destruction. It has done so regardless of the administration or president occupying the White House.In Donald Trump, a man for whom subtlety is an alien concept, we have ourselves a US president who cannot seem to make up his mind whether he is a recurring character in the Sopranos or the elected leader of the world largest economy and nuclear power.

With his presidency, the sheer reckless, aggressive and capricious character of it, the time has come to pose the question: Who will save us from America?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.