Europe

The Lowy Institute today publishes a review of Australia’s “turbulent term” on the UN Security Council.

Over the past six months, United Nations peacekeeping has come closer to catastrophe than at any time since the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre. The UN mission in South Sudan was caught off-guard when the country imploded last December. The crisis has claimed at least 10,000 lives. More then a million civilians have fled their homes, with 80,000 sheltering in UN compounds 

Read the full Chatham House article UN Peacekeepers: Not perfect but just good enough

At the end of March, with the crisis spreading from Crimea to eastern Ukraine, Kerry instinctively reached out to Lavrov anew. The pair held four hours of inconclusive talks in Paris. Then it was back to Geneva in mid-April for quadrilateral discussions with the European Union and the Ukrainians: Seven hours of negotiating delivered a new set of “Geneva Accords” outlining plans for the pro-Russian separatists occupying government buildings in the east of the country to disarm.

It was no surprise when pro-Russian forces seized eight European military monitors in eastern Ukraine last week. A growing number of international observers have deployed to Ukraine over the past two months, and it was only a matter of time before some were snatched. A United Nations envoy, Robert Serry, had to make a quick exit from Crimea in early March after an encounter with a posse of armed men.

The U.S. has convinced its Western allies to Boot Russia out of the G8, but it needs the cooperation of emerging nations to avoid a new cold-war stalemate.

Read the full Daily Beast article here.