Igor Ivanov, former Russian Foreign Minister (1998–2004), now president of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), offers useful insight into the urgency of President Putin’s proposal for the leaders of the UN Security Council to meet as soon as possible, and the essential condition for such a meeting to succeed in bringing the world back from the brink of global military catastrophe.
As of now, probably “as many as 600 diplomats have been expelled from their host countries” in the ongoing “ambassadorial war” between the West and Russia, he reports in his article, “Time for Diplomacy,” posted on the RIAC site on May 13. Yet, “by all accounts, the world is already at war. Call it what you want: psychological warfare, information warfare, ideological warfare, hybrid warfare, or any other name you care to come up with. The label itself is not important, while the increasingly real risk of military confrontation is.”
Unlike previous times, “today, there is no single country in the world that is capable of winning a regional confrontation, let alone a global war… Today, any serious international crisis, even in a most isolated corner of the planet, could any time emerge as a global catastrophe, much in the same way that a dangerous infectious disease, no matter where it originated, can end up posing a real threat to human existence.”
