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.
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.
The Biden administration eased restrictions on aid groups working with the Syrian government in November.
The United Nations has extended authorization to deliver aid from Turkey into Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province for another six months.
Bab al-Hawa is the last Syrian border crossing authorized for direct aid deliveries into parts of the country not controlled by the Syrian government. UN authorizations for cross-border aid into other opposition areas have all lapsed amid Russia’s insistence that aid be directed through Damascus.
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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his senior aides have repeatedly claimed that Western powers broke promises they made not to expand NATO as the Soviet Union collapsed.
In his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow in December, Putin accused NATO of deceiving Russia by giving assurances in the 1990s that it would not expand “an inch to the East” — promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification, the Russian leader said.
The Russian demands, which effectively require NATO to commit suicide, are so obviously outrageous and unmeetable that Western analysts are split over interpreting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives. Some say he is using the impossible list of demands as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Others think he is playing a weak hand to try to divide the West and reorder Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor.
The United States and its EU partners stepped up warnings of major consequences if Russia invades Ukraine as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to Washington on January 5 for a meeting dominated by upcoming talks with Russia.
