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Ian Bremmer: Russia is a rogue state
Does Vladimir Putin have any real friends left?
In a Global Stage livestream conversation, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer says that the Russian president is losing China and India, who are telling him they're worried about the war in Ukraine dragging on. Not even the Kazakhs (!) are on his side anymore.
Russia, he adds, has gone in a few months from being China's most important partner on the global stage to Beijing's junior sidekick, and become a rogue state, like Iran but much worse.
It's not just that Putin has nukes — Russia's cyber and espionage power is now pointed at Europe like it hasn't been since the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago.
Watch the full Global Stage livestream from the 77th UN General Assembly here.
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Is the world coming apart? Drama at Davos
After a two-year pandemic hiatus, the World Economic Forum returned Monday to the ski village of Davos in Switzerland, where some 2,000 of the world's most influential leaders gathered this time to talk ... geopolitics.
That's right, for the first time Davos is driven not by business but rather what's happening all over the world — at a time when the general feeling is that globalization is unwinding, GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer said during a Global Stage livestream conversation hosted by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.
Indeed, former Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt observes "Davos cannot escape geopolitics anymore" because "things are coming apart" with Russia's war in Ukraine and the global food crisis it has made worse.
A focus on global politics may be unavoidable, but "it doesn't mean that people are necessarily excited to come to the party," said Microsoft President Brad Smith, who cited food and energy as two of the second- and third-order consequences of the Russian invasion.
The thing is, Bremmer believes, most people are still unaware of what those consequences will be. In his view, we should brace for the impact of two major knock-on effects: NATO and Russia on the brink of something resembling a hot war, and a lot of starvation if the conflict drags on.
The war is also being fought in the virtual world, where many have been surprised by the lack of successful major Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine. According to Smith, that's in part because Microsoft helped the Ukrainians defend and prepare by taking measures like moving the physical servers of government agencies to the cloud.
And then there's online misinformation, which remains a big problem almost everywhere.
Smith said he believes it's hard for governments to unilaterally decide what constitutes fake news, while Bremmer called for an intergovernmental panel to tackle the issue, and Thorning-Schmidt suggested America can learn from Europe's experience with coalition governments so someday Democrats and Republicans can actually agree on what the problem is first, before trying to fix it.
Meanwhile, Russia's war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. What's more, Bremmer increasingly sees it as what he calls a "Goldilocks crisis" — not too small to notice, but not so massive "that you legitimately don't have tools to fix."
We do need something to actually make us "jump out of our skins" to address these crises, as UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens put it.
The longer the Russians keep fighting the Ukrainians, the worse the knock-on effects of the conflict will get in other parts of the world, like global hunger. For Cousens, ending the catastrophic humanitarian crisis we are already in largely depends on whether governments react by cooperating or doing nationalist stuff that ultimately hurts everyone like export controls.
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Watching Russia: cyber threats & disinformation
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses the Ukraine conflict from the cybersecurity perspective:
Unfortunately, the war that Russia started against Ukraine is still ongoing in all its devastation. And so today we focus again on some of the tech related aspects of that completely unjust and unnecessary conflict.
How likely will Russia launch a sweeping cyberattack on the West?
Well, I don't have a crystal ball, but going by with what we've seen in the past with ransomware attacks, hacks, cyberattacks on Ukraine's power grid already years ago, as well as attempts to manipulate the US presidential elections, there are certainly is no lack of will or ability on the Russian side and that makes the absence of new meddling or direct attacks with devastating impact on Western targets, actually quite remarkable. These were feared and predicted, but they have not quite manifested yet.
With disinformation becoming a weapon in the war, how can individuals better protect themselves?
Well, indeed, this information, propaganda, are specialties of the Kremlin, and it is important to be careful about what to trust, especially online. There's been a dramatic change, however, because EU sanctions have been imposed on state propaganda and Russian state media, making those sources inaccessible on both television and the internet for European audiences. But of course, there are other sources of this information, and so critical reading, verifying news by finding multiple sources, or choosing to look at reporting from trusted media or reporters that adhere to good journalistic practices, can be helpful to make sense of what is actually going on amidst an avalanche of information of which disinformation can be a part.