"The problem is that the villages are razed. There's no place to hide. If we don't have the air superiority, it's going to be difficult. We're running out of planes, three or four were shot down last week. Then Covid threw a spanner in the works. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru “Most of the developing world in Asia and Africa, including the Middle East, has not viewed the Ukraine war as the kind of definitive, transformational moment in international relations that the West does,” Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, wrote this month. "Picking fights with your neighbours. Dusting off plans to build large artificial islands and fortify them with military installations. Ramping up the pressure on Japan and Taiwan. It's a kind of self-encirclement that Chinese foreign policy has produced," she says. Public don't want a fourth election in seven years - ERG chair Since Russia invaded Ukraine eight months ago, Western governments supportive of Kyiv tend to speak about the war in black-and-white terms with little sympathy for countries hovering between the West and Moscow. The truth is Xi's path to power was far from inevitable. And it's defined as much by his ambition as it is by the party's failure to prevent what they did not want - a repeat of Mao's disastrous one-man rule.