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French President Emmanuel Macron.

Reuters

What We’re Watching: A big day for Macron, Taiwan’s friend list, Russia droning on

A tense France waits

It’s a big day for French President Emmanuel Macron. After months of protests, strikes, and piling up trash, the National Assembly is set to decide on whether – and how – to vote on the president’s very unpopular pension reform plan, which would raise the national retirement age by two years to 64. (For a reminder of what’s at stake with this reform, why Macron says it is necessary, and why two-thirds of French despise it, see our explainer here.)

With only a slim majority in the lower house, Macron’s bloc needs support from at least some center-right lawmakers from Les Republicains to see this through, but it is still unclear if he’ll have the numbers, particularly since some of his own coalition members say they won't back the bill.

Macron now faces a very tough choice: call for a vote and risk losing the fight over his biggest domestic priority, which would see him turned into a lame duck president for the remainder of his five-year term. Or trigger a constitutional loophole that would rush the bill through without a vote but risk setting the streets on fire. If he chooses the latter, unions warn, his government will pay a hefty price...

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A motorist rides past a hoarding decorated with flowers to welcome G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi, India, March 1, 2023.

REUTERS/Amit Dave

What We’re Watching: Tense G-20 talks in India, Finland’s fence-building, China’s economic activity, Chicago’s mayoral runoff

An awkward G-20 summit in Delhi

When G-20 foreign ministers met in New Delhi on Thursday, it was, as expected, an awkward affair. While India, the current G-20 chair, had hoped that the bloc would focus on issues of importance to the Global South, like climate change and the global food crisis, the agenda was disrupted by US-Russia bickering over the war in Ukraine, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called "unprovoked and unjustified war", while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blamed the West for not doing enough to extend a deal to allow Ukrainian grain exports that will soon expire. Of course, focusing on anything else was going to be a tall order when the top diplomats of the US, China, and Russia were all in the same room. (President Biden and Xi Jinping last met at the G-20 summit in Bali in November, though there was no bilateral meeting between the US and Russia.) In a sign of how fractured Washington's relationship remains with these two states, Blinken on Wednesday again urged Beijing not to send lethal weapons to Russia and canned China’s peace plan for Ukraine. As for US-Russia relations … need we say more? India, which has gone to painstaking lengths to maintain its neutral status over the past year, says it thinks the group can get stuff done. But at a meeting last month of G-20 financial heads, the group couldn’t even agree on a joint statement.

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GZERO Media

The Graphic Truth: The US-Russia nuclear race

President Vladimir Putin made yet more headlines this week when he announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms control treaty, which binds Russia and the United States to limit their strategic nuclear stockpiles. While US-Russia relations have been at rock bottom for some time, this was another indication of how bad things have gotten between the two nuclear heavyweights. We take a look at the US and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles since 1945.

Episode 6: Economic weapons & fallout of the new Cold War

Transcript

Listen: In 1985, after four decades of standoff between the world's biggest superpowers, US President Ronald Reagan had a private conversation with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan asked him, "What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?"

"No doubt about it," Gorbachev responded.

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Russia-Ukraine War: How We Got Here | Quick Take | GZERO Media

Russia-Ukraine war: How we got here

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and happy Monday to you all. Plenty going on. Of course, still very much focused first and foremost, on the war in Ukraine, the Russians continuing to fight, shifting the battle ground primarily to the southeast around Donbas but of course, engaging in bombing and artillery all over the country and negotiations frankly nowhere close to resolution.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about how we got here, why this happened. And it goes without saying, but still needs to be said that of course, the direct responsibility for this invasion is on President Putin 100%. There was no justification, you could not remotely claim that Ukraine's government needed to be denazified. There was no act of genocide being committed against Russians on the ground in the occupied territories. This was all fake and Putin is responsible for the atrocities on the ground for the damage to the Ukrainian economy, for the incredible loss of life we see happening across the country, including to his own forces. He's responsible for all of that.

But how did we get here? Why did it happen? And if you want to have that conversation, you can't just talk about Russia, you have to talk about the West. And I think it's worth spending a little time on that.

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Russian Hackers' Arrests Timing Likely Just Coincidence, Says Ukraine Analyst | GZERO World

Russian hackers' arrests timing likely just coincidence, says Ukraine analyst

Russia recently arrested 14 hackers from REvil, a ransomware gang involved in last year's cyberattack against the Colonial Pipeline in the US.

Some think it was a gesture by Vladimir Putin to deescalate tensions with the US over Ukraine. But analyst Alina Polyakova tells Ian Bremmer she doesn't buy it.

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Podcast: Ukraine crisis: the signals pointing to Russian invasion

Listen:Tensions in Ukraine are high as Russia builds up its military capacity along the border. Cyberattacks on Kyiv have also increased. Can the US and NATO do anything to deescalate the situation, or will Putin decide to invade?

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What would a Russian invasion of Ukraine actually look like?

No one knows whether Russian President Vladimir Putin plans on invading Ukraine. But the president of the United States sure seems to think this is a real possibility, saying Wednesday that Putin will likely "move in" in the near term. Biden, prone to political gaffes, was then forced to awkwardly walk back comments that Russia would face milder consequences from the West in the event of a "minor incursion."

The timing of this blunder is... not great. It comes just as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepares to meet his Russian counterpart on Friday in hopes of lowering the temperature after recent diplomatic efforts in Geneva were deemed a failure by Moscow.

Indeed, with the Kremlin having amassed at least 100,000 troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides, the growing threat is impossible to ignore. So what would a Russian military offensive into Ukraine actually look like, and how might the West respond?

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