Ukraine crisis needs resolute arbitration – Tribune India

The role of Turkey, Israel and India in the Ukraine crisis shows the need to expand the ambit of mediation as well as the potential of various levers in the international system to reflect complex geopolitical as well as historical realities.

What further complicated the UNSC dynamics this time around was the fact that, Russia, a P-5 member, is a direct party to the conflict, thus making the discussion on Ukraine practically a futile exercise.

As the international community grapples with the crisis, there are some interesting trend lines to understand the scope of mediation in contemporary peace and security issues.

The state of affairs was so bad that former Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev recently said that when President Boris Yeltsin agreed with President Clinton that Poland can be part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation , he was drunk.

Turkey, the only non-EU NATO ally, has direct stakes in the conflict as it has control over the maritime routes which provide Russia and Ukraine access to Mediterranean sea through Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to Russian ships.

Ukraine was one of the few countries where Yiddish, which was the most popular language among Jews before Hebrew took over after 1948, was the official language in the 1920s.

From the US, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, US Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh and UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, have visited New Delhi.

Since the 1990s, ever since the break-up of Soviet Union, the political elite in both countries have often framed their relations as a continuation of four-decade deep-rooted and multi-layered connections between the body politic of the Soviet Union and India that continued till the Soviet collapse.

In a 1970 paper — The Soviet Union and International Education — Seymour Risen, a specialist in comparative education, stated that as per the 1964-65 data in a UNESCO report, there were about 11,000 from the other communist countries, about 10,000 from Asia, Africa and Latin America, and less than 200 from the West studied in the Soviet Union.

The role of the three countries in the Ukraine crisis demonstrates the need to expand the ambit of mediation on global peace and security issues as well as the potential of various levers in the international system to reflect complex geopolitical and historical realities.

The Tribune, now published from Chandigarh, started publication on February 2, 1881, in Lahore .

The Tribune, the largest selling English daily in North India, publishes news and views without any bias or prejudice of any kind.

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