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A Ryanair plane from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to Belarus for several hours on Sunday, with activists saying it was done to arrest a dissident journalist on board. EU leaders are due to discuss their response to what the union's executive called a "hijacking" and the US state department said was "a shocking act". Belarus scrambled a fighter jet to force the plane to land in Minsk, claiming a bomb threat. Police came and took Roman Protasevich away when passengers disembarked.
In recent weeks,
Russia has been increasing its military presence on their border with Ukraine, leading many to worry the country might be preparing for conflict. So in this video we explain the context or Russian Ukrainian conflict and discuss if Russia's readying for war.
. The conflict involves many international players, and each of them pursues its national interest. What is the current balance of power? Can the fighting in Donbas escalate into a full-blown war?
, Volga-Donskoy soudokhodniy kanal imeni V. I. Lenina, abbreviated ВДСК, VDSK) is a broad ship
at their closest points. Opened in 1952, its length is 101 km (63 mi), 45 km (28 mi) of which is through
.
. Together with the lower Volga and the lower Don, the canal provides the
.
2014
Strategic Importance of the Caspian Sea - Strat > .
Russia's Endgame?
Russia does not have a good press in the west. But what's under the slogans? What is the imperative for Russia?
00:00 Intro
00:59 A state of constant vulnerability
05:00 The end of the unipolar world
08:00 The interior problem
11:10 A place at the table
14:30 Outro
The
Protocol on the results of consultations of the
Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, or commonly known as the
Minsk Protocol, is an agreement to halt the
war in the Donbas region of
Ukraine, signed by representatives of that country, the
Russian Federation, the
Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the
Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), and the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on
5 September 2014. It was signed after extensive talks in
Minsk,
Belarus, under the auspices of the OSCE. The agreement, which followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the
Donbas, implemented an immediate
ceasefire. It failed to stop fighting in Donbas, and was thus followed with a new package of measures, called
Minsk II, which was agreed to on
12 February 2015. This too failed to stop the fighting, but the Minsk agreements remain the basis for any future resolution to the conflict, as agreed at the
Normandy Format meeting.
The
Normandy Format talks (
Format Normandie) involve the representatives of four countries,
Germany,
Russia,
Ukraine and
France, who met informally during the
2014 D-Day celebration in Normandy, and who aim to resolve the
war in Donbas. It has been also known as the Normandy contact group.
The group was created on June 6, 2014, when leaders from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine met on the
margins of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day allied landings in Normandy. It operates mainly through
telephone calls between the leaders and their respective ministers of foreign affairs. The Normandy Format has sometimes been expanded to include
Belarus,
Italy and the
United Kingdom.
Negotiations and talks were stalled from 2016 until autumn 2019.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his May 2019 inaugural address made peace talks with Russia his top priority. He reaffirmed that priority in July that year when he invited via
YouTube his co-equal to a dialogue with the words:
Let's discuss who Crimea belongs to and who isn't in the Donbas region.
On
18 July, a "comprehensive" cease-fire was agreed with arbitration by the
Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine.
The revelation in
late September 2019 of a phone call between
DJT and Zelenskiy in which the latter described the
support of France and Germany as lukewarm damaged Zelenskiy's image in Europe. On 10 October, Zelenskiy repeated his statement in a public news conference. On 21 September, "continuing bickering" had been cited as causing "a political tug-of-war" over the preliminaries to negotiations, as they had been ever since the Normandy Format meeting in 2016 at Berlin, but the 9 September agreement between French President
Emmanuel Macron and Russian President
Vladimir Putin to reconvene quadripartite talks was duly remembered, and the decision to hold new talks was cemented at a joint Franco-German leaders meeting on 16 October.
The
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the
OSCE conference in
Budapest,
Hungary on
5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of
Belarus,
Kazakhstan and
Ukraine to the
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the
Russian Federation, the
United Kingdom, and the
United States.
China and
France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.
The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the
territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
As a result,
between 1994 and 1996,
Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Until then, Ukraine had the world's
third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile, of which Ukraine had physical, if not operational, control. Their use was dependent on Russian-controlled electronic
Permissive Action Links and the Russian command and control system.
In
2009, Russia and the United States released a joint statement that the memorandum's security assurances would still be respected after the expiration of the
START Treaty.
After the
annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the
US, Canada, the
UK, along with
other countries, stated that
Russian involvement was a breach of its obligations to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum, which was transmitted to the United Nations under the signature of
Sergei Lavrov and others, and in
violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. On
4 March 2014, the Russian president
Vladimir Putin replied to a question on the violation of Budapest Memorandum, describing current
Ukrainian situation as a revolution "a new state arises, but with this state and in respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents." Russia stated that it had never been under obligation to "force any part of Ukraine's civilian population to stay in Ukraine against its will." Russia tried to suggest that the US was in violation of the Budapest Memorandum and described the
Euromaidan as a US-instigated coup.