Only nine of Turkey’s original 50-member delegation to NATO remain in place in Brussels following a Sept. 27 mass firing of the country’s top foreign service officials over suspicion of their involvement in this summer’s attempted coup, Reuters reported Wednesday. Some of the 140 total official targeted have concluded that the move is a “witch-hunt” in part motivated by Turkey’s desire to strengthen ties with NATO’s Cold War adversary Russia in the wake of the failed coup. Not all those recalled have returned to Turkey, but those who did have been met with dismissal from their posts and jailing. Those who have failed to return have been faced with the revocation of their passports, the freezing of their bank accounts, and the arrest of their family members residing in Turkey. The US military recently ended family-accompanied deployments to Turkey citing security concerns after the July coup.
A Defense Department team is on the ground in Ukraine assessing what the country needs to protect itself from air, naval, electronic, and cyber warfare threats as Russian troops gather on multiple fronts, a senior Ukrainian defense official told Air Force Magazine, describing an emphasis on what assistance can be…