This isn’t the time for ambiguity, but clarity: now give them the tools so they can finish the job and free all their territory, including Crimea.
When push comes to shove, what will matter will be whether or not the arrivals stop – or at least that the voters believe that the Prime Minister really wants to halt them and is sparing no effort.
If the system had once been able to accommodate hopes for reform, dividing moderate and radical opponents, now it has dashed them completely. Everyone who’s not with the regime has turned against it.
It at least gives hope that, after the chaos and corruption of the last decade, some limited change and political accountability might at last be possible.
The Middle East had been entering a period of relative calm, but Putin’s aggression in Europe puts it at risk.
As events in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia show, the edifice that Putin has painstakingly put in place is now in the greatest of danger.
We have a legal duty to intervene if chemical weapons are used, and that is a duty we must not fail.
A mini-series on ConHome this week from the author of works about new Russian warfare and Kremlin Ukraine activity.
A mini-series on ConHome this week from the author of works about new Russian warfare and Kremlin Ukraine activity.
And if he is strong and the West weak, why has his Ukraine invasion gone wrong – and why are our governments showing unity and resolution?
In Syria and Libya, the West has had plenty of opportunities to study the Kremlin’s brutal but often effective tactics.
Ministers should do nothing to make a coup less likely as the country’s elites come to terms with the consequences of war.
The situation will fester, which will pose major challenges for statecraft, and for the stability both of Ukraine and of surrounding areas.
Be ready too, for him to surprise by doing less than expected, in the hope that the more skittish members of the Alliance peel off.
Since at least 2008, he has been striving to ‘Make Russia Great Again’ through the old Tsarist gambit of ‘strategic depth.’