[ZEENEWS.INDIA] US Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
arrived in Brussels Tuesday flying in from a visit to Iraq to attend NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
talks on a krazed killer assault which has sparked global alarm.
With attention already on crises in Ukraine and Syria, the Sunni jihadist offensive in northern Iraq has added to a packed NATO agenda with Afghanistan also a high priority.
His trip to meet Iraqi leaders in Storied Baghdad on Monday, followed by Kurdish officials in the autonomous northern region early Tuesday, had been shrouded in secrecy and unusually the top US diplomat arrived in Belgium on the US military plane he had used for security reasons.
Kerry was due to first have talks with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, before attending a dinner of foreign ministers from the 28-member alliance.
US President Barack Obama
We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us...
announced earlier this month that the US will scale back its troops in Afghanistan to 9,800 before withdrawing them completely by the end of 2016.
That will shape plans by other NATO members who have forces in Afghanistan on how many the troops to leave in the country, with a top US official predicting a total force of around 12,000.
But the formal meetings, which will open Wednesday, are also set to be "very, very focused on the situation in Ukraine," the official told news hounds.
The ministers would also discuss the implementation of new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's peace plan, "the ceasefire efforts, and also efforts to negotiate with eastern players," the official said, asking not to be named.
The White House on Tuesday welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...'s call to his politicians to revoke his authorisation to invade Ukraine.