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By Daryl Kimball
The writer is executive director, Arms Control Association. This editorial is issued in the March 2022 issue of Arms Control Today.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (IDN) — President Vladimir Putin has chosen the path of destruction instead of diplomacy. His months-long build-up of a massive Russian invasion force encircling Ukraine and his decision on February 21 to order Russian soldiers into the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk have set in motion a catastrophic war.
By Aar Jay
NEW YORK (IDN) — "Over the past six months, Russia has steadily built up forces along the frontier as Kyiv, Moscow, and Washington have traded barbs," writes Robert Farley in '1945' on January 3, 2022. Russia’s immediate concerns involve the Ukrainian acquisition and use of Turkish drones along its border regions, along with a general increase in Ukrainian military power, he explained, adding: "Moscow's long-range problem is its inability to reverse the Western orientation that Kyiv has adopted since 2014."
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — You can insult them, call them the “Blob”, “group thinkers”, or even worse. You can challenge their scholarship and their prejudices. You can demonstrate that the policies they advocated for former wars were dead wrong and met failure. You can prove they don’t know their history and that they are prone to over-simplification. But nothing appears to reduce their influence, as the simmering conflict over Ukraine shows.
Viewpoint by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies*
NEW YORK (IDN) — Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen? There are three possible scenarios:
The first is that Russia will suddenly launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
MOSCOW (IDN) — Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to say the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it free of charge as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War).
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) — UN Secretary-General António Guterres has made his "good offices" available for a peaceful solution to the looming "disastrous confrontation over Ukraine between Russia and Western countries of the NATO alliance", pledging he "will remain fully engaged in the hours and days to come" and will "leave no stone unturned" in the search for ways to defuse tensions.
By Somar Wijayadasa*
NEW YORK (IDN) — Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) gained its independence in 1948, but it was only on 19 February 1957 that Mr S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, then Prime Minister of Ceylon established diplomatic relations with the former Soviet Union (now Russia)—a superpower at the time, and today a global power.
It is natural for Russia (the world’s largest country with two-thirds of its territory in Asia) to have a foreign policy with economically pragmatic and geo-strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific region—including Sri Lanka.
Viewpoint by Shastri Ramachandaran *
This article was issued by WION and DNA, and is being re-published with the writer's permission.
NEW DELHI (IDN) — India’s diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this week was another balancing act of a piece with its position on Ukraine in the UN Security Council meeting last week. In both cases, the Government of India made a virtue of not taking a stand by appearing to take a stand.
Arms Control Is Key to the Solution
By Daryl G. Kimball and Oliver Meier
Daryl G. Kimball is the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association. Olivier Meier is a Senior Researcher at the Berlin office of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH).
WASHINGTON, D.C. | HAMBURG (IDN) — A senior group of American, European, and Russian security experts warn that: “The tensions between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO create the potential for a disastrous war that can and must be avoided through serious and deft diplomacy.”
Viewpoint by John Scales Avery*
COPENHAGEN (IDN) — Both Russia's President, Vladimir Putin and its Foreign Secretary, Sergey Laverov, have repeatedly stated that Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine. Logic also tells us that if they had wished to do so, they would have done it long ago. The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a western invention.
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