In Ukraine, separatist leaders rejected the Russian president’s call for postponing the referendum. This is a high-risk game for them – not only if Putin’s call for a delay was genuine, but also in light of the most recent opinion polls.
Despite increasingly aggressive rhetoric, there has not yet been a military escalation over Crimea and Ukraine, but as Putin takes the lead – where does this leave relations between Russia and the West?
Signed by the P5 + Germany and mediated by the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, the deal achieved with Iran on the latter’s nuclear programme has important implications for regional and international security dynamics that go well beyond nuclear weapons.
As Russia and the United States, and their respective allies, lock horns at the G20 and in the UN Security Council and perhaps eventually find a face-saving way out of their self-inflicted paralysis, the dynamic of the Syrian civil war has long taken a direction that will see neither of them as a winner.
President Obama’s decision to start arming the Syrian rebels, and Russia continued involvement in selling arms to the Assad regime, has meant that the ongoing conflict in Syria is the major theme for discussion at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland