Image courtesy of Clayton Lenhardt/DVIDS.
This article was originally published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in April 2019.
Military spending may now figure in public conversation about NATO. But the alliance, at 70 years old, still lacks military capabilities strong enough to protect Europe from Russia
Image courtesy of ErikaWittlieb/Pixabay.
This article was originally published by the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) on 28 March 2019.
The relevance of “continuities” in relation to the history of the region and its inhabitants has been evident throughout most of its millenary past, and from a wide range of different angles. For instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE), a literary product of Mesopotamia, encompasses a number of themes and motifs (including, among others, the flood myth adopted in the narrative of Noah’s ark) later included in the Bible and other religious books.
This graphic maps how Russian armed forces’ capabilities relate to their deniability and the deterrence they provide. It also describes how Russia made use of these capabilities in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. To find out what Western planners and strategists have learned from the war in Ukraine, read Niklas Masuhr’s addition to the CSS Analyses in Security Policy series here.
Image courtesy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
This analysis1 was originally published by the Elcano Royal Institute on 26 March 2019.
Since 2013 China has clearly called for the creation of a new security architecture in Asia. The May 2015 white paper on China’s military strategy explicitly advocates promoting ‘the establishment of a regional framework for security and cooperation’. This call was reaffirmed in October 2016 and detailed further in China’s white paper, published in January 2017, on security cooperation in Asia-Pacific. Since then, Chinese officials have repeatedly declared, one way or another, that the region needs to be restructured. On 16 February 2019, at the 55th Munich Security Conference, Politburo member Yang Jiechi declared that ‘China supports security dialogue among the Asia-Pacific countries and efforts to explore a regional security vision and architecture that fits the reality of this region’. 2
Image courtesy of OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 3 July 2019.
It’s rare to hear firsthand accounts of daily life amid the conflict in Donbass. But we do have a few. The photographer Paula Bronstein captured the broken bodies and tormented souls of elderly people. The documentary filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont shot the war through the eyes of a 10-year-old orphan boy living in a small village with “The Distant Barking of Dogs.” My colleague Ioulia Shukan, a French sociologist, keeps a blog on ordinary citizens affected by the war in Eastern Ukraine. She recounted the everyday life of three female villagers in the grey zone, their fear of shells and their cohabitation with soldiers. She also told the story of a young family that left the little Ukrainian town of Marinka — where there is still no heating and no drinking water — for the separatist-held city of Donetsk to escape immediate danger and precarious conditions. These Ukrainians’ stories highlight not only the human cost of the ongoing war, but also the perils of the Ukrainian government — and its Western partners — ignoring that cost.
