Following the US decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, Mary Wareham and Kasia Derlicka-Rosenbauer write that countries that have endorsed their ban have a collective responsibility to end the human suffering caused by these weapons. To protect the convention’s gains and strengthen its impact, they outline three steps that state parties and supportive sates can take.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed critical flaws in the international nuclear realm. Valeriia Hesse writes that to prevent the total erosion of the non-proliferation norm, a realistic and pragmatic approach towards gradual nuclear arms reductions must be pursued. Ahead of the NPT PrepCom, she outlines concrete steps that the international community can take to build a stronger and more resilient nuclear order.
Ahead of the 2023 NPT Preparatory Committee, this policy brief examines how nuclear threats have changed with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, how to define a ‘nuclear threat’, and how NPT member states should react to nuclear threats. It sets out recommendations for how State Parties can strengthen the NPT and the nuclear taboo in the current Review Cycle.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, governments in the former Soviet Union were immediately forced to deal with difficult geopolitical realities. In this report for the ELN, YGLN member Daniel Shapiro uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to show there is increased heterogeneity in geopolitical positioning among post-Soviet states and offers key lessons from this for Western policymakers.
The Russia-Ukraine war has brought an abrupt end to a certain nuclear complacency that has characterised European politics since the Cold War, writes Andrew Futter. The immediate challenge facing governments across the Euro-Atlantic space appears to be maintaining a credible nuclear and conventional deterrence capability and pursuing risk reduction and confidence-building measures.
Alexandra Filippenko explores the reasons why Russian civil society institutions failed to prevent the war in Ukraine and suggests a number of measures that Western democracies may take together with Russian opposition leaders to end the war and establish a lasting peace.