Frigid Consultations / Making the World Safer

Truly, it's amazing the speed with which events can occur; tumultuous, threatening, harmful to national security and the expectations of the international community. It took but several weeks of unrest in Ukraine relating to the country's frail economic position and the need to decide by the government whether it would throw in the nation's lot with the European Union for an economic union, or whether to move closer to the Russian Federation whose president was eager to offer incentives to the then-president of Ukraine to move him in the direction he was heading toward in any event.

The rejection of an economic alliance with a Western influence in favour of re-adjusting itself to an ancient alliance between Ukraine and Russia spurred Ukrainian nationalists to gather noisily, demanding a re-set of their president Viktor Yanukovich, which he was unprepared to accede to. Relations between the protesters and the government deteriorated rapidly with atrocities resulting when protesters were killed by sharp-shooters the government decided to use to teach its detractors a lesson they would certainly never forget.

The Russian-leaning president and his parliament, however, appeared to have forgotten Russia's not-so-distant history in Ukraine, when as part of the Soviet Union, a manufactured famine was concocted by Josef Stalin, withholding life-sustaining grains from the populace resulting in the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasant farmers and urban dwellers who were famished; ultimately succumbing to starvation after trying whatever they could, including familial cannibalism to survive their death march under Soviet communism.

Now, the country has been divided, and Crimea is no longer part of Ukraine, absorbed by fiat into the Russian Federation, to the fury of the current temporary/caretaker government of Ukraine. The upshot of this high-handed, illegal high-jacking of an internal dispute between Ukrainians of differing persuasions ending in the bristling, threatening military occupation of the Crimean peninsula and the incitement by Russian interests to leave Ukraine, has drawn world attention to yet another crisis whose after-effects remain worrisome and quite unknown.

Leading the international gaze to waver from another, prior focus of great importance; that of a theocratic Islamist government which, like Russia, which supports it, holds ambitions to become a regional nuclear power, producing its very own atomic-concussive weapons. Consensus on Iran's future as a nuclear-aspiring nation had been assumed by the United States and Russia to be within the realm of possibility, even though their individual positions did not quite reflect each other's.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, center, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius stand during a ceremony following their talks on Iran's nuclear program, at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Sunday, Nov. 24, 2013 (Photo: AP) 

Now, it seems, given the current climate of alienation and outrage over Russia's illegally entitled claims to sunder the territory of a neighbouring country to fulfill its own aspirations to gather into itself territories that were once in their orbit, the potential for accountable agreement between the two powers has become remote indeed. A senior Russian diplomat claims his country remains dedicated toward working "actively" to reach a deal.

Whereas a former U.S. nuclear negotiator, Gary Samore, stated superpower tensions will have the effect of reassuring Tehran, to give it the impression -- and it is a realistic one under the circumstances -- that it is now free to feel "under much less pressure to make concessions", to satisfy the demands of the West for reassurance that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not undertake to complete its  journey toward nuclear arms production.

In the United Nations Security Council, China generally supports Russia's position in negotiations. Moscow's stance is, however, rejected by the United States, Britain, France and Germany (G5+1). While Moscow and Washington have hitherto been congenially enough capable of bridging differences over Iran's nuclear program, that situation is certain to change, given the context of the most recent international occurrences.

And certainly so in light of the extremely belligerent U.S.-bashing statements issuing from Russian President Vladimir Putin's lips during the ceremony that took place in Moscow with Russia and Crimea signing off on the agreement to consolidate their territories; or, rather Russia absorbing the former Ukraine's Crimean territory.