by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies [Photo credit: canada talks israel palestine - Life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment.] On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies As it did last year, the 2023 United Nations General Assembly has been debating what role the United Nations and its members should play in the crisis in Ukraine. The United States and its allies still insist that the UN Charter requires countries to take Ukraine’s side in the conflict, “for as long as it takes” to restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 internationally recognized borders. They [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation. Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies When Japan invited the leaders of Brazil, India and Indonesia to attend the G7 summit in Hiroshima, there were glimmers of hope that it might be a forum for these rising economic powers from the Global South to discuss their advocacy for peace in Ukraine with the wealthy Western G7 countries that are militarily allied with Ukraine and have so far remained deaf to [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Photo: Half a million tons of methane rise from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. Photo credit: Swedish Coast Guard With the Ukraine war now reaching its one-year mark on February 24, the Russians have not achieved a military victory but neither has the West achieved its goals on the economic front. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its European allies vowed to [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just issued its 2023 Doomsday Clock statement, calling this “a time of unprecedented danger.” It has advanced the hands of the clock to 90 seconds to midnight, meaning that the world is closer to global catastrophe than ever before, mainly because the conflict in Ukraine has gravely increased the risk of nuclear war. This scientific assessment should [...]
The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic “Security Dilemma” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Photo: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meets in Lodz, Poland, on December 1, 2022. Photo credit: OSCE On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a [...]
by Nicholas Davies On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretaries Blinken and Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion. The top priority of Russian [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than has so far disfigured Ukraine. As [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies https://www.codepink.org/the_high_stakes_of_the_us_russia_confrontation_over_ukraine A report in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces, after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-15 Minsk Accords. The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which [...]
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies People have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country - and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops. Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury [...]
