Emerging Risks

Following the start of Russia’s large-scale military re-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, concerns arose about the role that the Transnistrian region of Moldova could play in the Kremlin’s war plans. The territory has been under Russian military occupation since 1992, with Moscow’s military, security and civilian officials directing, assisting and funding its administration. It has de facto been run …

Few people in the West are aware of how close Russia now is to escalating the war in Ukraine into an all-out nuclear conflict with the West. President Vladimir Putin is backed into a corner. A loss in the war in Ukraine, which is likely if it drags on in a conventional manner, will cause him serious political damage at home. To support him, the Russian media is now openly contemplating the benefits of a nuclear strike against the West. How will this end? It’s difficult to know. But the West needs to start realising that the threat is possible and even likely.

So, there’s a risk now emerging that in the face of military defeat at the conventional level, Russia will use nuclear weapons and plunge the world into a new and uncertain future. It’s a future in which low-yield nuclear weapons become usable in conflicts, certainly in terms of implicit and explicit coercive threats against military intervention—as China might do in a Taiwan crisis. In the worst case, a different perception of the operational utility of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons emerges in comparison to strategic nuclear forces. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the question is whether it can ever be put back in.

The official warns that from Putin's vantage point, though, deep dissatisfaction with the situation in Ukraine and fear of the west turning the tide might actually provoke a nuclear display of some sort—one intended to shock the west and bring a halt to the war. The supply of western arms is also now a serious game changer, resupplying Ukraine while Russia is increasingly constrained. "Escalation is now a true danger," says the senior official.

The Russian president has threatened retaliation if NATO crosses "red lines" in Ukraine. Some experts say those lines have already been crossed.

archived 3 May 2022 12:28:09 UTC

The tone and tempo of threats from the Kremlin has escalated amid claims that Russia is fighting a wider war. It [nuclear war] still seems monstrously unlikely, but no longer unthinkable.

Moscow is recasting its fight with Ukraine as a broader war between Russia and the West, as Kremlin leaders and state propaganda outlets warn Russians that the conflict with its smaller neighbor could spill over into a global clash. The Kremlin and state-controlled media have warned in recent days that the West ultimately seeks to contain—or even destroy—Russia and have threatened retaliation, including the possibility of nuclear strikes.

What a difference a year makes. In the spring of 2021, China was reporting only a few dozen COVID cases each day and celebrating a return to steady economic growth. The United States, meanwhile, reeled from its worst death wave of the pandemic.  Media outlets around the world, from the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda to the New …

India’s accidental missile launch in Pakistan demonstrates the fragility of nuclear deterrence.

Could Mexico under the leadership of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador plunge into the political and economic tailspin which we associate with Venezuela under Hugo Chávez?

The economic war is most unlikely to affect the outcome of the Ukraine War, but it does seem likely to produce outcomes that will prejudice energy security and the climate agenda, while falling

US political scientist Graham Allison on Vladimir Putin and his friendship with Xi Jinping I think if you tried to put it in a single sentence, it is that if Putin is forced to choose between losing on the one hand in Ukraine and escalating the level of destruction, there’s every reason to believe he’ll escalate the level of destruction.

archived 1 May 2022 17:17:28 UTC

The deadlocked war with Ukraine has pushed Russia into an irreconcilable dilemma: it can neither accept reality nor keep denying it. This contradiction can be seen both in the official discourse on the unfolding disaster and the societal response to it. As one example, rampant patriotic mobilization persists alongside the pretense that normal life continues undisturbed. Likewise, there is the …

Joe Biden has chosen a high-risk strategy against Russia in Ukraine without managing, explaining, or perhaps comprehending the dangers.

archived 30 Apr 2022 01:41:24 UTC

Since President Putin invaded Ukraine in February, some 200,000 Russians have fled their country, scattering across western and eastern Europe.Around 30,000 ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin could expand his unprovoked war in Ukraine into other countries like Moldova and Georgia.

... in war game scenarios he had taken part in, which considered what would happen if Russia hit Ukraine with nuclear weapons, the only way of de-escalation was when “clear political off-ramps and lines of communication between Moscow and Washington have remained open. In all the other games, the world is basically destroyed.”

archived 30 Apr 2022 12:49:55 UTC

But even as Russia bludgeons its way into limited gains in the east, it has lost so much already in the conflict with Ukraine.

’Either we lose in Ukraine or the Third World War starts’, says top Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan

Terror group's Gaza chief vows attacks on 'thousands of synagogues' worldwide if police raid Al-Aqsa Mosque; urges West Bank Palestinians, Arab Israelis to commit terror attacks

War with China is very likely, but it is avoidable if we take the threat seriously and act now.

Nina Khrushcheva, an academic, warned the conflict in Ukraine is more dangerous because neither side appears prepared to 'back off'.

Russian TV host and Editor-in-Chief of state broadcaster RT, Margarita Simonyan, said she believed a nuclear strike to be the most 'probable' outcome in the war against Ukraine. One of the Kremlin's highest-profile mouthpieces, she also said that she believed World War III was 'realistic'.

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The leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group has warned that if Israel continues to target Iran’s presence in the region, Tehran could eventually retaliate by striking deep inside Israel