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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS (IDN) — A Russian news agency quoted on March 2 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s dire warning: If a third world war (WWIII) breaks out, it would involve nuclear weapons—and be destructive.
At a virtual Geneva meeting on disarmament, he also hinted that Ukraine has been seeking nuclear weapons to counter the Russian invasion—a rumour that remains unconfirmed.
Viewpoint by Ramesh Thakur
This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished with their permission.
CANBERRA, Australia (IDN) — There are two competing narratives about Russia’s push into Ukraine. One holds that President Vladimir Putin has adopted Hitler’s playbook over Sudetenland and failing to check his aggression will fall into the trap of the appeasement at Munich in 1938. The alternative holds that Putin is executing the NATO playbook in Kosovo in 1999.
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS (IDN) — Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the current military conflict is that Ukraine may be using mostly Soviet-era weapons against the Russians, including combat helicopters, T-64 battle tanks and AT-6 anti-tank missiles acquired from the former USSR.
But that military scenario is expected to change significantly with increased security assistance and fresh arms supplies both from Europe, and most importantly, from the US, amounting to over a staggering $1.0 billion dollars.
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS (IDN) — The spiraling crisis in Ukraine has an ominous underlying fact: it is a conflict that involves four of the world’s major nuclear powers: the US, Russia, UK and France, with the remaining five, namely China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel on the sidelines as spectators—at least so far.
Mercifully, the nuclear option is not on the negotiating table—but it is still very much in the air.
Viewpoint by Dr Chandra Muzaffar
The writer is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) in Malaysia. This article was issued by CounterCurrents.
SELANGOR, Malaysia (IDN) — The mainstream Western media is almost unanimous in demanding that Russia and Vladimir Putin stop their military operation in Ukraine immediately. This in their opinion is the only solution to the current conflict. However, if one attempts to understand how the current conflict had evolved, one would ask not Russia but the US led Western alliance to bring down the political temperature as a first step.
By C. Todd Lopez
This article was issued by U.S. Department of Defense.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (IDN) — In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced on February 25 activation of the alliance's defense plans, which means also that it can deploy the NATO Defense Force. The U.S. Defense Department now stands ready to provide capabilities to help fill that defense force, if asked to do so, said Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — The truth is this whole Russian-Ukrainian-Western confrontation could be largely solved if the Ukrainian and Western sides wrote on paper that they don’t want to see Ukraine in NATO. This is the key issue for Russia. But it must be written down. Moscow no longer trusts verbal understandings that can be broken, as when the Reagan and Bush (Senior) Administrations gave President Mikhail Gorbachev the distinct impression that the US would not take advantage of the Soviet Union now that the Cold War was over, but it did.
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.
By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY (IDN) — Marking the first visit by a US Secretary of State in 37 years to South Pacific’s major power Fiji, Antony Blinken during his 8-hour stay on February 13 insisted that the US is a Pacific nation and unveiled a raft of new strategies to better engage with the nations across the vast South Pacific Ocean.
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