Expert: US and NATO could have prevented Ukrainian crisis
The US and NATO could have prevented the Ukrainian crisis if they had accepted Russia’s security proposals and allowed Ukraine to remain a buffer zone – as stated by the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute at Hiroshima City University, Motofumi Asai, RIA Novosti reports
“The US and NATO are the main culprits of the Ukrainian crisis. The main reason for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is the irrational promotion of NATO expansion to the east. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict could have been avoided if the United States and NATO accepted Russia’s security proposals and guaranteed that Ukraine would continue to be Russia’s strategic buffer zone,” Motofumi Asai said during an online seminar by the Taihe think tank on the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on the situation in East Asia.
He added that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine also shows that the western media still have the ‘overwhelming dominance’ over international public opinion, and China faces a difficult task to break this influence.
In his turn, Liu Jiangyong, Professor at the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, believes that ‘the Russian-Ukrainian conflict could have been prevented, but the fact that it would eventually break out was inevitable’.
“Ukraine in this conflict is not a chess player, but a pawn or a ‘thrown pawn’,” said the Professor.
According to him, the ‘Russian-Ukrainian conflict has the characteristics of a geopolitical proxy war and at the same time a hybrid war, which includes the military and diplomatic spheres, public opinion, economics, finance, technology, psychology and other areas’.
“The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has two implications for peace and security in East Asia. Firstly, politicians of all countries must abandon ‘realistic power politics’ and traditional outdated geostrategic thinking. Secondly, East Asia must prevent the security crisis and disasters caused by ‘violent multilateralism’ and form a new concept of common, universal, shared and sustainable security,” he added.
