Ashish Kumar Sen

The United States, successive Afghan governments and the Taliban missed several opportunities to achieve peace over the past couple of decades. Today, under the Taliban government, which is not recognized by a single country, Afghanistan is facing twin economic and humanitarian crises while the marginal gains made on women’s rights have all but evaporated .

Vladimir Putin’s decision to mobilize an additional 300,000 Russians for the war in Ukraine is intended to prolong the conflict and break the West’s will to support Ukraine by stringing out the conflict.

 The dramatic success of recent counteroffensives by Ukrainian forces will be crowned by the recapture of the Crimean peninsula, according to two former commanding generals of US Army Europe.

  Vladimir Putin’s decision to mobilize 300,000 men to reinforce his war in Ukraine and his threat to use nuclear weapons are a desperate gamble.

 Russian troops forced to beat a hasty retreat in Ukraine are leaving behind evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As this body of evidence grows, officials and experts are becoming increasingly convinced that Russia is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.

 Russia’s war in Ukraine has disrupted Africa’s promising recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by raising food and fuel prices, disrupting trade of goods and services, tightening the fiscal space, constraining green transitions and reducing the flow of development finance in the continent, said United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Ahunna Eziakonwa.

 The humanitarian crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine is rapidly turning into a human trafficking one in which women and children, who make up the majority of the refugees fleeing the war, are being exploited, according to the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten. She said there is an urgent need for a “coordinated regional approach” to what she described as “a crisis within a crisis.”

 Kersti Kaljulaid, a former president of Estonia, wants the West to enhance its support for Ukraine, end its dependence on Russian gas, and maintain sanctions on Russia even after Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is over. Speaking at the U.S. Institute of Peace on May 10, Kaljulaid described the ongoing war in Ukraine as one that is between “the free world and the other world, a world of tyranny.” She warned: “If Ukraine loses, we all would have lost.”