... not-so-successful conclusion of the US’ own 20-year military presence in Afghanistan. It also incentivized the community of Western nations to unite once again under the US leadership, disciplining previously not-always compliant European and Asian allies.... ... significantly stronger than it was some four or five years ago, when French President Emmanuel Macron allowed himself to describe NATO as a brain-dead alliance.
After the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, NATO quite unexpectedly acquired two new ...
... possible use of tactical nuclear weapons at some stage of the current conflict.
However, like it was the case during the Cold War, current division of Europe does not mean that there are no common or overlapping interests pursued by the East and the West, by Russia and NATO, or Russia and the European Union. The most evident convergence of interests is in reducing risks of an uncontrolled escalation and the likely costs of the continuous political and military confrontation. In other words, both sides need, firstly,...
... deeper strategic partnership
[11]
. While Chinese diplomats in Europe tend to talk about complex nature of the Ukrainian crisis and while speaking of the record they can even criticize Russia
[12]
, their colleagues working in Russia directly blame NATO for the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis
[13]
. Such Chinese position allows China to continue playing the role of a potential mediator or peacemaker in the conflict and at the same time leads to repeated calls coming from some Western leaders
to step up pressure on Russia
[14]
.
The development of bilateral partnership during the Ukraine crisis
While in the diplomatic arena China was treading carefully and avoided taking sides, China’s real-world activities in relations ...
... bring together both NATO countries and those which did not belong to the alliance, including Russia, into a single community. But since the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a process of politicisation of the OSCE in favour of the interests of Western countries. Russia has increasingly viewed NATO expansion as a security threat. Instruments such as the Russia-NATO Council were unable to absorb the growing contradictions. The lack of effective and equal institutions that would take into account the interests of Russia and integrate it into ...
... April 3-4, effectively shifted the burden of funding Ukraine from the U.S. to European countries. The ministerial also discussed the issues of defense spending and decision-making, which have been complicated by the accession of Finland and Sweden, and NATO’s further enlargement, primarily in the Western Balkans.
Dmitry Danilov, Head of the Department of European Security at the RAS Institute of Europe and MGIMO University Professor, noted that NATO was currently at a crossroads, with little clarity on how to organize the anniversary summit in ...
... Unfortunately, it turned out that the two sides had very different perceptions about very fundamental dimensions of international security and global governance.
In the West, they assumed that the future international system should have at its core primarily Western institutions—like NATO and the European Union—that would gradually expand and absorb former socialist nations of Central and Eastern Europe. The assumption was that the West would define the rules of the game within the new system, while the Rest would have to accept ...
... most of humanity. Those of us who remember have only to recall how NATO, instead of disbanding, ignored Russia’s concerns and attempts at serious dialogue, expanded, and then illegally bombed Belgrade, ignoring the UN. That was not enough, as the West then destroyed Iraq (lying, into the bargain) and Libya, and tried to destroy Syria. Russia kept warning NATO to stop, but the latter had, and still has, no reverse gear, controlled as it is by enormous financial interests.
Greed was, and is, the order of the day. Russia’s attempts to move closer to, and even join, NATO, were cynically rebuffed, just as ...
Working paper № 69 / 2022
Working paper № 69 / 2022
The working paper explores the factors that predetermined the Western switch from divergence to convergence in the 2020s along with the key features of the commenced consolidation within the ranks of the Collective West. Is current Western unity incidental or strategic? Is it transient or long-standing? How much ...
.... The Kiev regime began to kill Russian-speakers, and despite the Minsk agreements, Kiev did not honour them. Moscow felt morally obliged to help its Russians. To cut a long and tortuous story short, there is now a proxy war between NATO and Moscow. NATO has no reverse gear, and the low-quality western ‘leaders’ are simply not up to the job.
Strange though it may seem, it has fallen to the cynical but realistic Henry Kissinger to say what needs to be done: Ukraine must cede territory to Russia for the killing to stop, and to avoid nuclear ...
... illegitimate and of what national leadership should entail.
Andrey Kortunov:
Restoration, Reformation, Revolution? Blueprints for the World Order after the Russia-Ukraine conflict
It would be hard to argue that Ukraine has already emerged as a model of Western-style liberal democracy. But the country is persistently moving in this direction—slowly, inconsistently and with understandable setbacks and inevitable procrastination. Russia, in turn, is not a classical Asian or European authoritarian state,...