Rusia

American and Russian diplomats met in Geneva earlier this week, with numerous items on the agenda—a high-profile showcase of diplomacy designed to head off further escalation between Washington and Moscow.

Russia has continued its saber rattling, making bellicose statements even while negotiations continue apace.

The Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive posture in Europe has garnered pushback, particularly among Nordic countries and the Baltic states, which fear Russian encroachment.

For months, Ukraine has been a central focus for Western foreign policy as Russia has continued its military buildup on the border, reaching 100,000 troops. Moscow has threatened to carry out a military attack and has now issued an ultimatum for the United States to bless a Russian sphere of influence over sovereign democratic countries such as Ukraine. But as consultations between the U.S. and Russia take place throughout the week, the West should bear in mind that Ukraine is only one part of the broader Russian problem. It is about all independent former Soviet states and essentially about the entire European security architecture. The U.S. and NATO cannot go over the heads of independent states and give into Russian demands; instead, they should buy time and invest in long-term European security, while refraining from rhetoric and ultimatums.

The Russian-led ‘peacekeeping’ operation has helped to restore state order, but how will it respond to an escalation of violence?

The outbreak of unrest across Kazakhstan at the beginning of 2022 took international audiences by surprise. The protests, which were triggered by rising fuel prices, quickly morphed into demonstrations across the country against elite corruption and inequality. In the violence that followed, a dozen members of the security forces were killed and hundreds wounded, while approximately 1,000 people have reportedly been injured and public buildings have been burned.

Why the Lessons of History are Ignored

America, Russia and NATO’s Geneva diplomatic talks ended in failure without any formal course of action to avoid military confrontation on Ukraine’s border. Other vital issues include how to treat each other in a futuristic imaginary encounter of common interests. The global community is watching the prelude to a staged drama of unwarranted warfare with profligacy, malevolence and unknown miseries of unthinkable multitudes. All the superpowers – the stage actors of the 21st century have fictitious monsters equipped with innovative sophistry and captivating eloquence to talk about peace, security, human rights, global order and justice. They are master of deception playing on the passion of entrenched and exhausted mankind as if they could stop the emerging pains, horrors and devastations of warmongering to ensure a return to normalization of human affairs. To an inner human analytical eye encompassing proactive sense of global peace and harmony, it does not appear rational to articulate fears and misleading intentions to safeguard human peace and dignity while all the actions speak of a different language of obsessed assertions based on their own despotic national interests. There appears to be mythical contradictions in their claims of superiority and perhaps politically looking for an escape from the obsessed invincibility of superpowers. They claim peace but talk about threats of wars – how to rationalize the irony of human wickedness and inherent deception. Was the same stage drama not enacted during the First and 2nd World Wars killings millions and millions of people across this Planet Earth?

Renowned Russian academic Sergey Karaganov describes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the latest October Valdai Forum[1] as the “first major and strong call for reinventing Russian ideology for Russia and the world.”[2] Indeed, Putin’s speech can be viewed as an ideological manifesto that tries to put Russia back in the center of the world’s political map.

Making parallels with the USSR in the 1930s cannot help explain Putin’s Russia.

In late December, a Russian court ruled to shut down Memorial, an organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of people who perished in communist terror. Memorial was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov and fellow Soviet dissidents at the height of Perestroika in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (free speech) made it possible to talk openly about Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s genocidal crimes.

Relying on NATO and the support of its European allies, the United States has trapped Russia in a geopolitical dilemma since the 1950s and has reduced Moscow’s ability to play an influential role in the international community. In order to break this barrier after the annexation of Crimea, Russia has considered Ukraine as the last piece of the puzzle, which will be completed only by a military attack on this country. Ukraine is currently Putin’s most important geopolitical case, as he sees Kyiv as out of Russia’s orbit and seeking closer ties with the West.