New details have emerged in the last few months about the intensive talks, just weeks after the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, that came very close to ending the war in April 2022 with an ambitious peace agreement negotiated in Istanbul, Turkey.
Both the New York Times (15 June) and Foreign Affairs (on 16 April) have carried out major investigations, with access to the draft agreements shared between the two sides and interviews with figures on both sides and in…
Throughout the last six months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ‘repeatedly torpedoed’ the progress of ceasefire talks in the Gaza War – ‘particularly when it came to decisive moments’ – according to Haaretz, the left-liberal Israeli newspaper.
As we go to press, Netanyahu is continuing this pattern, undermining the latest attempted ‘breakthrough’ in the ceasefire talks with impossible demands designed to drive Hamas out of the negotiations.
Netanyahu’s…
Yemen continues to be one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, on the edge of famine, with something close to a frozen war and a feeble peace process which is not getting much international support – but which has just produced a helpful prisoner release.
Britain could be ending arms sales to both Saudi Arabia and Israel for their war crimes. Those would be the most useful ways of supporting the peace process in Yemen and pressing for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza, which is…
In late May, a call for Ukraine-Russia peace talks was made by a group of prominent figures from Finland, France, Germany and Italy. They included Luciana Castellina, former member of the European and Italian parliaments, and Colin Archer, former secretary-general of the International Peace Bureau.
The group called for the issue to be debated during the EU parliamentary elections in early June, and for the next European parliament to ‘convene an exploratory conference involving the…
Hamas stunned the world by agreeing to an Israeli-US-Qatari-Egyptian ceasefire proposal on 6 May. Israel then refused to accept the ceasefire deal it had previously agreed – and immediately launched military attacks on Rafah in the south of Gaza, where over a million Palestinians had fled for safety from other, more devastated parts of the territory.
Earlier, on 30 April, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ‘said he would invade Rafah “with or without a deal,” a vow that…
Pope Francis caught the headlines in March, calling for negotiations to end the Ukraine War. The pope has made dozens of calls for peace talks in this war, but this is the only time that he’s gained significant attention. This was because the language that he used was distorted into an anti-negotiations weapon, with the claim that the pope asked Ukraine to ‘raise the white flag’ of surrender.
The pope didn’t talk about ‘raising the white flag’ in his recorded interview with Swiss…
Ukraine should negotiate an end to its war with Russia, and be prepared to trade ‘peace for land’.
That’s the view of one of Britain’s most senior retired military leaders, a former chief of the defence staff, general David Julian Richards (lord Richards), expressed in a surprising interview with the BBC on 20 February.
Richards follows in the footsteps of US general Mark Milley, who publicly and repeatedly argued along similar lines while still the head of the US armed…
Ukraine should negotiate an end to its war with Russia, and be prepared to trade ‘peace for land’.
That’s the view of one of Britain’s most senior retired military leaders, a former chief of the defence staff, general David Richards (lord Richards), expressed in a surprising interview with the BBC on 20 February. The full transcript of his interview is below. We should point out that we have not found any reporting of this interview, or of Richards’s call for negotiations, in any…
