 Conflict is yet again brewing in Europe. There have been allegations and counter allegations as Russia and Ukraine and its western allies have been both alleging that the other side is about to cause a war. There have been even some mobilizations of troops, threats of sanctions and even more severe measures. We'll be talking about all this in Mapping Fortlines. We have with us Prabir Pulkajastha. Prabir, so over the past few days and even weeks for that matter, we've been hearing a lot of news items, some of them in isolation that there are soldiers mobilizing. There have been statements by leaders from Ukraine, leaders from the West, including the US, which is quite far away. But nonetheless, Antly Blinken has been making some statements. The Russians also have been saying warning against a return to the kind of armed confrontation that used to be the norm in Europe in decades past. So could you maybe quickly take us through what is the situation on the ground as far as Russia and Ukraine are concerned? What are the issues that take here? You see, the first thing of course is that the Donbas region, which has declared autonomy from Ukraine. It was not separated from Ukraine. It was promised that there will be under the Minsk Accords, Minsk 2 Accords, if I remember correctly, that there would be an autonomy which would be guaranteed by certain steps that the Ukrainian state would take. Those have not been implemented. And though Russia has talked about it and written to both Germany and France, you know, the guarantors of the Minsk Accords, no steps have been taken by the Western powers of this at all. And the United States from the beginning has been a spoiler, as we know, wanting Ukraine to really expand up to Russia's borders, meaning NATO comes up to Russian borders. It already has come to borders in other parts, but here too. And for Russia, that has been a no-no. A, of course, is Crimea and Sevastopol, the naval port is involved, but also the fact that they do see themselves as protectors of the Russian ethnicity within Ukraine, which is really the Donbas region, and what was really won through a civil war, virtual civil war in that part of the world. That gain should not be lost because both Germany and France took no measures. And Russia did not take also any measure to see that autonomy which is promised in the Minsk Accord is really observed. Now, it's also clear that the United States does not want to play by the Minsk playbook. They are very clear that they would like to come to the borders of Ukraine, the Donbas region autonomy that since Ukraine, the current dispensation or the earlier one does not accept, it would like to dismantle it if it can, that that is something they would back. Why they would back that? Because they want Ukraine to join the NATO, and Ukraine wants to that autonomy of Donbas region not be there. And therefore, they would like to position their troops there also. This is a red line that is there, and this is what Russia has said, that there is a red line they have that if NATO comes to the Donbas region, supports Ukraine to come to the Donbas region, if the army, Ukrainian army enters Donbas, then Russia would protect Donbas. That is the basic framework they have set. And this is where the conflict is because as far as US is concerned, that region belongs to Ukraine, therefore Ukraine presumably has a right to take it back by arms. And the Minsk accord, according to them, US was never a signatory to that and Germany and France do not seem to want to own up to that as well. So therefore, that accord for them is dead. So Russia, if it prevents Ukraine from coming up to the borders, then that would be taken as a gesture of bad faith. It if Russia intervenes, then it can possibly go to war, conflict on the ground with not only Ukrainian troops, but with NATO troops as well. And the disturbing part in all of this are two kinds of threats we see emanating. One is from what a German politician belonging to the Green Party, which is a part of the ruling coalition now, said that we could also use nuclear weapons in a first strike if Russians cross the border. Now threatening nuclear attacks in a first strike, this is extremely dangerous talk because what you're talking about is the destruction of the human civilization that should be done in this kind of way, itself raises the temperature and makes such a possibility even more likely that you can trigger a nuclear war without really intending to. So that is one part of it and the other threat that has come from Blinken and he seems to be the guy who seems to be handling our threats everywhere. And then we have various American emissaries to try and see, cool the waters, whatever it is, try and see that you can calm the issues down a little bit. So Blinken has said that severe financial sanctions which will hurt Russia far beyond what we have done now, aren't they really talking about throwing Russia out of the For instance, the Swift financial system? What are they really talking about when they say all of these things? Is it the interdependence of Europe that after all Russian gas comes to Western Europe that they would like to sanction so that ultimately Western Europe has to buy maybe American fracking gas? We're not clear about what these terms are. But the fact that Blinken is making this kind of threats also is war talk because ultimately financial war is a war. It should not be taken to be something which is not because it's not a kinetic war. Therefore, it is not war. It is also an economic war is also war. So I think this kind of scenarios brings back memories of what we have seen earlier. Brinkmanship of an order which we haven't seen in Europe for a long, long time. So I think that's what is should be of course were concerned for everybody. And this threat of sanctions which the United States holds out. If other countries do not listen to them, I think it's going to be on the agenda for all countries because we in India, for example, we have this 400 issue. And as you know, the Americans have also threatened India with sanctions, particularly if we buy this 400 anti-missile batteries. So if we do that, that will also mean that it's not something only Russia will be facing a problem. All countries would deal with Russia and we have serious economic as well as armaments deals with Russia. We would also be at risk as we were when the United States sanctioned Iran. And our oil supplies were hit. So I think this is something the world has to come to terms with. Does the US have the right to disturb the world in any way it seeks fit? As long as it holds the financial powers, then it believes it can do so. And according to American terminology, set new international rules in place. So basically, still want to be the global number one, even if the other political economic scenario does not square up to that. This is what we seem to be seeing at the moment. So Ukraine is a test case. Just as Taiwan is a test case under the freedom of navigation. On the other side, this is a test case to one side, Ukraine with Russia, and Taiwan with China. So I think these are the two things to watch in the near future. Well, Praveen, actually my second question was regarding that, because the Donbas issue has been around for quite some time. It's not something that began over the past few months. So what is the specific reason for this kind of escalation right now, when considering that Trump is no more there, people are saying that, OK, now it's a different ballgame. But the Democratic administration seems to be even more hawkish in some ways. Well, I think on Russia, as we know, the Democratic Party was always more hawkish than Trump was. Because if you don't forget, they said that Russia helped Trump to win. So from the beginning, they said we are the true opponents of Russians. On the question of China, Trump appeared to have been more hawkish by the economic war it waged on China. Coming back to the Donbas issue, as you know, Donbas is really a fallout of the breakup of the Soviet Union. And the fact that a strong Russian ethnicities, Russian speaking populations in different parts of Eastern Europe, and it was true also for the Baltic states. A lot of them were either disenfranchised and then left, or a lot of them actually left. So all those processes took place. I'm saying left because that's a nice way of putting it. But we know it was semi-coercive, if not coercive. In Ukraine, there is a very large population of that. And as we know, large population of even those who identify themselves as non-Russian speak Russian. In fact, some of the people who have ruled Ukraine were anti-Russia and anti-Russian's ethnicity. But this book, their major language was still Russian. So taken all of that, when the Russian television, radio stations, newspapers are banned, and I'm talking about Ukrainian Russian speakers, I'm not talking about Russia as such, then obviously there is a deeper fracture over there which has been created. And we have also had the rise of really fascist forces, right-wing forces in Ukraine, who swear by essentially those groups which aligned with the Nazis during the Second World War. So that is the internal fracture of Ukraine. But there is a much larger historical issue. And if you take the whole of Eastern Europe, particularly after the fall of Soviet Union, then it breaks up, Yeltsin leads the breakup, signing the pact with Ukraine and Belarus that we don't recognize the Soviet Union anymore, we are dissolving it. And that's how he replaces Gorbachev, becomes the president of Russia, rather than the president of Soviet Union. Now, when that happened, Yeltsin had the belief that all these countries will be partners of Western Europe, and they will be allowed to peacefully integrate themselves into Europe. And his belief was, therefore, the NATO should really not expand any further towards the East, up to Germany, yes, but no further. And all the Eastern European countries, including Russia, would be incorporated in a kind of friendship partnership. I think it was called Progress and Friendship Program, which by which they will be integrated. And they will have a European kind of European larger Europe, if you will, which will then be the part in which Russia will also be recognized. Russia's aspiration has been to be recognized for quite some time, and that goes back 300, 400 years. So if we look at that, the Americans were very much against it from the beginning, and now the internal correspondence has recently been made public by freedom of information. All these documents are now in public domain, and it is very clear, the Americans didn't want that to happen, but it's a very simple reason. They lose their dominance over Europe, and NATO was their instrument of doing that, so they wanted to reconfigure NATO as an instrument of domination of not only Europe, but also rest of the world. In fact, NATO was then going to look out of Europe as well, becoming the main genre arm, if you will, of big capital, global capital, of course, which United States was the key one. And in their view, therefore, Yeltsin had to be bamboozled into accepting the eastward march of NATO. Yeltsin was very upset at one point here, and Clinton had a public spat where he shouted to Clinton, but he was going to be very delicately placed, shall we say, in an election, I think in 1996, and Clinton said, okay, I'll help you win, and that seems to have got over Yeltsin. But the Russian state saw that as a threat as NATO marched right up to its borders and set up missile batteries from Baltics, Romania, Poland, and now it threatens to come up to Ukraine, and that Ukrainian border, it's already in Ukraine. So now it is giving, putting down red lines that if you do this, this is not acceptable. If you don't accept the red lines, what you're really saying, you can put missile batteries which can reach our command centers in Moscow in five minutes. And if you do that, that is something not acceptable to us. And Putin has said our response will then be, of course, hypersonic missiles and so on and so forth. So you get a renewed arms race. You get a hair trigger alert. You're talking of nuclear weapons, the use of nuclear weapons. You're really in a territory which is completely uncharted, except at the height of Cold War, the Cuban War, for example, you know, Cuban blockade, for example. And I think that is a very, very dangerous period to go back to. But we seem to be walking into this with Americans doing it with their eyes wide shut as they say, because they seem to believe all of this will have no consequences. So one side you have Ukraine, other side you have Taiwan, and they seem to be willing to ratchet up pressures against both Russia and China, simultaneously on these two fronts. I really am not clear what is the vision they have or are they walking us into a global Armageddon with their eyes open or eyes shut? Thank you so much for being here. That's all your time for today. Keep watching NewsClick.