The nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine’s words inspired Raphael Lemkin, the drafter of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Burning books is not the same as burning bodies…but when one intervenes … against mass destruction of churches and books one arrives just in time to prevent the burning…
This essay is written to distance proper understanding of the Russian war against Ukraine from any false equivalence that this is a conflict between two belligerents, whose perspectives deserve equal recognition as a prelude to a negotiated outcome. Attempts to explore alternative avenues to peace, and identify differentiated messages and appropriate envoys and institutions should…
Western forecasters predicted that Russia’s economy would collapse after unprecedented sanctions were imposed on Moscow as a result of the conflict in Ukraine. However, the Russian statistics office (ROSSTAT), recently reported that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the first half of the year fell by only 0.4%. According to official data, capital expenditures…
The pandemic crisis and the Russo-Ukrainian war have shown that European societies are extremely vulnerable. It is important to recognize this. Only in this way will the EU be able to introduce aimed at the sustainability of Europe integration and the resilience (that is, the capacity to absorb shocks and stress) of the European citizens,…
The war in Ukraine threw into stark relief the new patterns of geopolitics: On the one hand, there is the revived West, led by the USA, which began to wind down foreign military actions around 2010. On the other, there is certainly China, still without a strong international following, but making common cause with a…
Energy, mostly in the form of fossil fuels, drives everything we do. Nearly all aspects of 21st-century life, from commuting to work to waging a war, depending on the consumption of energy, make the latter arguably the most valuable tradable commodity in the human world. Consequently, the more one controls the energy supply, the more…
The year of 2020 has ushered the start of a new era, one that many expected to be one of achievement, economic growth, and development on a global scale. However, today we can in fact say that this new era that began is being marked by political and economic crises and uncertainties. Since the COVID-19…
By Tapio Kanninen and Georgios Kostakos* After the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on 24 February 2022, the world was horrified at the prospect of a new major war in Europe. Condemnation for the invasion rightly goes to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. An overblown Western reaction, though, may have dangerous consequences for the…
As the war in Ukraine approaches the one-month mark – (the Russian invasion started on 24 February 2022) – and in view of the escalating destruction and human suffering, plus the potential for a wider confrontation and even nuclear war, the need to put an end to it becomes ever more urgent. This article looks…
The images of residential blocks hit by Russian missiles or artillery fire in Kiev, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities brought back memories of similar scenes from cities in Syria some years ago. Initially, it was news that something like that had happened. Then it became a commonplace, the lines of who did it – the…
