Turkey’s approval of Finland NATO membership

After several months of delay, on the 30th of March 2023, Turkey’s Parliament voted unanimously to officially allow Finland’s membership into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This event represents a major shift in the international balance of power, with Finland abandoning decades of non-alignment, to become the 31st member of the Western defense alliance (Erlanger, 2023). Thought it should be noted that the membership will only be formalized during the next NATO summit, taking place in July in Lithuania (Gardner, 2023).

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Russia and China praise their close cooperation in Moscow

The Chinese president Xi Jinping arrived on the 20th March 2023 in Russia to talk to President Putin about the Chinese-Russian relations and the war in Ukraine. President Xi stayed for two days and had several official talks. The visit came the day after an arrest warrant was issued for Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court (ICC) (UN News, 2023). This being the case, although neither Russia nor China are members of the Court, this seemed to put Putin under a lot of pressure, in terms of meeting the positive expectations for the outcome of the meetings.

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The Su-25 and the Russia-Belarus Military Cooperation

This Info Flash outlines the necessity to take a closer look at Russian-Belarusian military cooperation. While increased military cooperation between Russia and Belarus can be expected in an ongoing war, this depends on many more factors, and it is rather difficult to estimate its exact form. For the European Union, however, this cooperation poses a significant risk, and even though the involvement of the Belarusian army in the war seems unlikely, many factors at play can change this. The previously reached factors and many more factors are further discussed in this work, with the main research questions focusing on how close is the Belarus-Russian military cooperation and why it poses a threat to the European Union.

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France’s strategic pivot to Europe and its impact on the international fight against terrorism in the Sahel region

This Info Flash outlines the history of Operation Barkhane, offering a general overview of French and European efforts to maintain stability in the Sahel region over the past ten years. The principal causes of France’s disengagement are analysed taking into account external factors, such as the Russian-Ukrainian war at the end of February 2022. Because of the sensibility of this issue, Professor Luca Ranieri, one of the most prominent scholars dealing with security problems in the Sahel region, builds in an interview a critical assessment of Operation Barkhane. Understanding the main weaknesses of this initiative poses extreme usefulness in order to avoid repeating the same errors in the future.

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The Future of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) after February 24th: Implications for Russia’s Hegemony in Post-Soviet Asia

Since February 24th, the world seems to live every minute of the war on Ukraine to its fullest. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has not only sent shockwaves through the rest of Europe but also shattered the widely held belief that the horrors of the Second World War were a thing of the past. Since then, powerful undercurrents of change have been at work in the new understanding of the security challenges of the twenty-first century. Very few in the West were able to predict that Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea would durably transform the entire international system into an increasingly bipolar confrontation between newly emerged military blocs. Even fewer strongly warned against the temptation of thinking that the world was right back on the track of the old Cold War logic.

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