Category: 2. World

In the lead-up to the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this month, things did not look good for Ukraine. Characterizations of the summit oscillated between a “new Yalta,” in which the U.S. president might agree to the Kremlin’s demands for a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, and a “new Munich,” in which Trump would throw Ukraine under the bus and withdraw U.S. support for the country’s defense. In other words, expectations in Ukraine and among Kyiv’s allies were low.

Yet the summit didn’t end in a major disaster for Ukraine. Trump didn’t negotiate with Putin on Kyiv’s behalf; he didn’t agree to start normalizing relations with Russia before the war in Ukraine was resolved; and on August 18, he received Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a phalanx of European leaders at the White House, where they collectively managed to throw the diplomatic ball back into Putin’s court. “This was very much a day of team Europe and team U.S. together supporting Ukraine,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said afterward.

But although Putin now knows that his aspirational Plan A, in which Trump would simply impose a deal on Kyiv written in Moscow, is unlikely to materialize, he has shifted to his more workable Plan B, in which Trump will lose patience and significantly reduce U.S. assistance to Ukraine. In the Kremlin’s calculus, this still counts as winning, and Putin’s diplomatic strategy is still following the three-pronged approach that my co-authors and I outlined in Foreign Affairs a few months ago. Moscow is holding the U.S. president’s attention, forestalling a new round of painful U.S. sanctions, and keeping the fighting going.

This is because, in the Kremlin’s assessment, time is on Russia’s side. Moscow has the upper hand on the battlefield: it has maintained a significant numerical advantage in personnel and equipment, and despite mounting casualties, it has continued to gradually gnaw through the fortified lines in the Donbas. Moreover, Russia is catching up in drone warfare, denying Ukraine its competitive edge. Moscow doesn’t want a cease-fire to stop the war right now—unless, of course, all of its political demands are simply met.

Russia is playing Trump for time. But despite the country’s confidence, it’s not clear that Putin has a realistic contingency plan should Kyiv prove able to hold on, as it has for the past three years. If, for example, the EU speeds up delivery of ammunition and drones from existing stock and extends a financial lifeline to Kyiv by confiscating the $250 billion worth of frozen Russian assets sitting in its banks, the Kremlin may not achieve its strategic goal of Ukraine’s subjugation. Despite putting Russia’s economy and society on a war footing, Putin may need more than just time to win.

FROM PLAN A TO PLAN B

Early engagements with the second Trump administration seemed encouraging for Moscow’s Plan A. Trump appointed his friend Steve Witkoff as a special envoy for negotiations with Russia, and Witkoff visited Moscow several times and spent hours talking to Putin. Between Trump’s inauguration in January and the summer, the U.S. and Russian presidents had three lengthy phone calls, and Putin’s talking points clearly made an impact on his U.S. counterpart, as painfully evidenced in Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28.

Moreover, Moscow has been trying to compartmentalize the relationship with the United States, as was clear during the first high-level meeting between the Russians and Trump’s national security team on February 18. The Kremlin suggested seeking peace in Ukraine in tandem with a broader normalization of U.S.-Russian ties, which would include reopening the consulates in both countries (which have been closed since 2017), restarting arms control talks, and boosting mutual trade and investment.

By summer, however, it had become apparent that the Kremlin’s charm offensive was faltering. Zelensky, with a lot of counseling from European leaders, had managed to patch up the relationship with Trump by signing a mineral deal that provided the United States with preferential access to Ukraine’s natural resources, particularly rare-earth minerals. In return, the White House has continued Kyiv’s access to U.S. military assistance, including American intelligence and the ability to purchase U.S. weapons with European money. And on July 14, speaking alongside Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, Trump threatened “very severe tariffs” if Russia didn’t agree to an unconditional cease-fire.

In the Kremlin’s assessment, time is on Russia’s side.

The threat of further economic coercion had teeth. In 2024, Russia exported a meager $3 billion in goods to the United States, so even triple-digit tariffs would not seriously affect the Kremlin’s budget. But Trump has imposed a 25 percent punitive tariff on Indian goods for purchasing Russian oil—a tariff that will likely further increase the discounts that Russian oil sellers need to provide to Indian buyers, reducing the profitability of the oil trade for the Kremlin.

The decrease in oil and gas revenues is already affecting the war economy: some of the Russian regions that previously offered lavish payouts for military recruits are reducing sign-up bonuses because funds are drying up. The most visible sign of this is the country’s ballooning budget deficit. At the beginning of this year, the Kremlin’s plan was to have a budget deficit of just 0.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Yet in June, the Kremlin had to increase that to 1.8 percent of GDP. It will overshoot even this target; in the first seven months of this year, the budget deficit already amounted to 2.2 percent of GDP.

More U.S. sanctions could also prove damaging. The United States, for instance, has not yet blacklisted Russian energy giants, such as Rosneft and Lukoil, but such a move would put significant pressure on the Kremlin’s cash flow. As Alexandra Prokopenko wrote in Foreign Affairs in January, the Russian economy has enough steam to support Putin’s war machine for another 18 to 24 months, but the situation is worsening.

This reality presented the Kremlin with a dilemma of whether to continue the hard-nosed course, ignoring Trump’s threats—or try to assuage him. In the end, the Kremlin decided it was better to initiate a meeting between the presidents and get Trump and Putin’s personal relationship back on track. The Kremlin invited Witkoff to come to Moscow, where he was presented with a semblance of an acceptable deal on August 7. The Russians also suggested a meeting with Trump, which was hastily organized in Alaska. The usual Russian mantra that leaders’ summits must be carefully prepared—a justification that the Kremlin uses to explain Putin’s reluctance to meet with Zelensky—was tellingly abandoned.

THE DEAL MIRAGE

After a three-hour conversation between Putin and Trump, the Alaskan summit’s scheduled working lunch was canceled and the press conference downgraded to official remarks by each president. This was a clear signal that Russia’s attempts to compartmentalize the Ukrainian war and to normalize ties in other areas had failed. But that was the only notable underperformance by Putin’s team.

On the core issue, Putin achieved his key goal for the meeting: he convinced Trump that the White House’s peacemaking efforts should be focused on reaching a comprehensive resolution to end the war, not an unconditional cease-fire, and that the fighting could continue in the meantime. Despite Trump’s previous claims, as well as urging by European leaders and Zelensky before the summit, the White House has imposed no punitive measures on Russia over the Kremlin’s refusal to agree to a cease-fire.

How did Putin succeed? He matched Trump’s performative diplomacy with performative negotiations, essentially tricking the Trump administration into believing that he was making serious concessions. According to Trump and various U.S. officials, such as Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance, Putin signaled in Alaska that he was ready to climb down from some of his maximalist demands—demands that were absurd to begin with.

Instead of demanding the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the four regions to which Moscow lays claim, the Kremlin is now asking Kyiv to surrender only the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Moscow will accept the current line of contact. Putin apparently suggested that he is also willing to trade other parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies, including pockets of the Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions.

These land swaps would see Kyiv surrender a land mass nearly ten times as large as what Russia is prepared to give back. Moreover, the quarter of the Donetsk region that Ukraine still controls, including the strategic cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, is the most fortified part of the country and has been turned into a massive network of defense installations since its recapture in 2014 from Russian-backed separatists. For Zelensky, surrendering this territory is all but impossible for both political and military reasons. All available polling shows that Ukrainian society will not accept the country’s territory’s being traded; and from the military perspective, surrendering western Donbas would amount to giving the invader the key to all of northern and central Ukraine. (There are no major fortification lines beyond the “fortress belt” that Putin wants Kyiv to abandon.)

Nevertheless, after the summit, Trump accepted the logic of “land swaps” offered by Putin, although he said that the decision would be Zelensky’s to make.

GUARANTEES WITHOUT SECURITY

Another key issue discussed in Alaska was postwar security guarantees for Ukraine. Witkoff told Fox News that “epic progress” had been made during the summit. According to him, Putin agreed for the first time to the concept of security guarantees for Ukraine, and the result could be even stronger than NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause—without actual NATO membership for Kyiv.

Moreover, according to Witkoff, Russia agreed to enact a law that it would not take any more land from Ukraine after a peace deal or “go after any other European countries.” These promises were greeted as “groundbreaking” by Trump’s team, and the U.S. president presented them as a major achievement during his August 18 meeting at the White House with Zelensky and a group of European leaders.

For a moment, there was optimism that a security guarantee could be hammered out. Capitalizing on the vague language of the Russian proposal, Europeans jumped on the opportunity to present a plan of their own: the deployment of a European “reassurance force” in Ukraine after the war, to which ten EU countries would potentially contribute troops, while Trump promised vague “air support” from the United States without elaborating on what that could mean in practice.

A genuine peace agreement remains as elusive as ever.

But on August 20, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov poured cold water on the plan. According to him, Moscow’s idea for a security guarantee is not a set of bilateral commitments between Ukraine and the U.S. and European governments with formulations similar to Article 5, but rather a consensus-based agreement guaranteed by the UN Security Council’s five permanent members—with the Kremlin holding veto power. Essentially, he wants the fox to help guard the henhouse. Moreover, Moscow insists on seriously limiting the Ukrainian armed forces—both in numbers and equipment—as well as their ability to cooperate with foreign partners in arms procurement, intelligence sharing, weapons design, and training.

The “epic progress” turned out to be strikingly similar to the positions Russia held in the talks that took place in Istanbul in the first two months after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ultimately collapsed. As first described in Foreign Affairs by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, those negotiations ended with no agreement in part because of Moscow’s and Kyiv’s inability to bridge the very same gap over security guarantees. For Putin, ending Ukraine’s security partnership with the West remains a core goal. But from Kyiv’s vantage point, the size of its army and ability to maintain ties to NATO’s militaries are a prerequisite for retaining sovereignty and thus nonnegotiable.

Moreover, Ukraine has reasons to believe that its negotiating position is stronger than it was in 2022. Unlike three years ago, European countries are finally ready to provide the security guarantees Kyiv seeks—or at least they now say so. Even more important, the depth of cooperation between Ukraine and NATO now far outstrips the level Putin worried about before the war, precisely because of Russia’s invasion. The alliance is intimately involved in building and testing weapons with Ukraine, training its army, and supplying it with intelligence and arms, including ones that can strike deep inside Russian territory. It is unimaginable that Kyiv would abandon this partnership voluntarily. Despite Trump’s wish to organize a meeting between Putin and Zelensky as well as a trilateral summit to seal the deal, a genuine peace agreement remains as elusive as ever.

SOLDIERING ON

It’s impossible to predict how Trump will deal with the chasm between Russia’s positions and what is acceptable to Ukraine. But while Putin stalls, it is clear that Europe is busy developing plans of its own. Europe’s Plan A consists of carefully pushing Trump to accept the fact that it’s the Kremlin that is obstructing his peace efforts and that only pressure can incentivize Putin to engage in compromise. If this plan succeeds, Putin’s procrastinating could backfire, with Trump at last hitting Russia with more sanctions. The Europeans are also planning to continue to pay for American weapons for Ukraine. In the week after the Alaskan summit, the Pentagon approved the sale to Ukraine of $850 million worth of equipment, including 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition air-launched missiles with a range of 150 to 280 miles.

But if the Europeans’ Plan A fails—if Trump doesn’t blame Putin, or if he merely loses interest—they are developing their own Plan B. At the very least, they plan to maintain current levels of military support to Ukraine and increase the sanctions pressure on Russia (although the EU’s sanctions toolkit is far less powerful than Washington’s). If key European countries agree to step up the pressure, they could also share more of their existing military equipment stock with Ukraine, temporarily reducing the combat readiness of their own forces but keeping Ukraine in the fight at this crucial juncture. They could also provide a long-term financial lifeline to Kyiv by seizing the nearly $250 billion in state Russian assets frozen in the EU, allowing the purchase of U.S. weapons without reaching deeper into European taxpayers’ pockets. In theory, if the United States keeps providing intelligence, doesn’t drop the sanctions, and allows the EU to buy weapons for Ukraine, Europeans can self-organize and play a critical role in sustaining Ukraine’s defense effort to the very moment when Putin’s war machine may run out of offensive steam some 18 to 24 months down the road.

Europe’s Plan B probably will not deter the Kremlin: given Putin’s demonstrated ability to stomach pain and keep plugging away at an elusive victory, the Russian leader may instruct his generals and economic team to simply carry on. His government can navigate the deterioration in public finances by cutting expenditures on education, health care, and infrastructure, as it has throughout the war. Putin is also prepared to tap into the deep well of Russian manpower by force if the financial incentives dry up further. In July, the Kremlin launched digital draft notices to push more Russian men into the army; the moment a future recruit receives an electronic notification that he has been called up, Russia’s borders are closed to him and there are various penalties for not serving. The Kremlin is obviously preparing money and troops for a protracted war in which its only strategy is to outlast Ukraine militarily and economically.

Yet the eventuality for which the Kremlin does not appear to have a plan is that Russia will be unable to translate its massive advantage in manpower and materiel into a decisive breakthrough—as has been the case since the war began. A plan, in other words, for the possibility that Ukraine’s defense lines don’t crumble after all.

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Iran directed at least two attacks against Australia’s Jewish community, the domestic spy agency has determined, prompting the Albanese government to expel Tehran’s ambassador to Canberra from Australia.

The prime minister announced on Tuesday that the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (Asio) had “credible intelligence” to determine the Iranian government was behind the attacks against the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne and Lewis’s Continental Kitchen in Bondi in Sydney.

The Asio director-general, Mike Burgess, said the attacks had been ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), working through a “layer cake of cut-outs” – paid intermediaries acting in Australia.

The IRGC will be listed as a terrorist organisation, with new laws to be considered by federal parliament.

Iran’s ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, has been designated “persona non grata” by the Australian government and Australia’s embassy in Tehran will suspend operations. Iranian diplomats posted to Australia were not involved, Burgess said.

The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, reportedly said the allegations were “completely baseless” and warned that “any inappropriate diplomatic action will be answered in kind”.

In comments reported in Iranian news outlet Iran International, Baghaei claimed the sanctions were driven by domestic political pressure in Australia.

“Millions have protested in Australia against the genocide in Gaza,” he said. “This move against Iran, which is a move against diplomacy, appears to be compensation for the limited criticism Australia has directed at [Israel].”

Six diplomatic staff posted to Iran were moved to a third country before the announcement was made.

“These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil,” Albanese said.

“They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community. It is totally unacceptable.”

Albanese said told the lower house in question time on Tuesday that it was the “most serious response” any Australian government had given, adding “we don’t expel an ambassador lightly”.

Burgess said his agency was investigating other incidents for possible Iranian government involvement but did not believe Iran was involved in every act of antisemitism in Australia.

“It goes without saying that Iran’s actions are unacceptable. They put lives at risk, they terrified the community and they tore at our social fabric. Iran and its proxies lit the matches and fanned the flames,” he said.

“This was directed by the IRGC through a series of overseas cut-outs, facilitators, to coordinators that found their way to tasking Australians.”

Burgess said the alleged perpetrators were paid to make the attacks, and that it was aimed at “at messing with social cohesion”.

Speaking on ABC’s 7.30 program, Albanese said Asio had “clear evidence” linking individuals in the IRGC to what he described as acts of “foreign violence” against Australia.

When pressed on whether the government would seek to sanction those individuals, Albanese said: “We’ll take whatever action is appropriate.

“We speak about foreign interference. This is another level. This is foreign action and foreign violence being committed against Australians, funded and using criminal elements here,” he said.

The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said Iran’s actions warranted the first removal of a foreign ambassador to Canberra since the postwar period.

“That is why we have declared Iran’s ambassador to Australia persona non grata, as well as three other Iranian officials, and they will have seven days to leave the country,” Wong said.

Israel’s embassy welcomes Canberra decision

The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, said the Coalition was, in unison with the government, “disgusted to learn of the serious and chilling foreign interference which has been perpetrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran on Australian soil”.

“These acts of egregious foreign interference are brazen attempts to cleave apart our social cohesion,” she said.

Changes to the federal criminal code will be required to list the IRGC as a terror group, because the current legal regime for official designation only considers non-state groups.

Guardian Australia has contacted the Iranian embassy in Canberra.

Israel’s embassy in Canberra welcomed the decision, saying it was warranted.

“This is a step we have long advocated for … A strong and important move,” a spokesperson said.

In January, the Australian Federal Police commissioner, Reece Kershaw, told political leaders police were investigating whether criminals were being paid by foreign agitators based in the Middle East to whip up antisemitic hatred in Australia.

The Adass Israel synagogue was set ablaze in December, an incident the prime minister immediately labelled as an act of antisemitism.

The synagogue incident was among the first in a months-long wave of attacks against Australia’s Jewish community. In January, federal police said they were probing whether the attacks could be linked by a group of paid actors, or “criminals for hire”, rather than ideologically motivated offenders.

Two men have been arrested in relation to the synagogue fire bombing. In July, the AFP deputy commissioner for national security, Krissy Barrett, said the investigation was not contained to Australia, and that the AFP was “working closely” with Five Eyes and international partners.

The Iranian regime has previously been accused of engaging criminal gangs to carry out attacks overseas.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the Albanese government’s decision to support a UN resolution calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza was to blame for the December synagogue attack.

“It is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia,” he wrote on X.

• Dar urges immediate ceasefire, humanitarian access, UNRWA support, Gaza reconstruction
• Terms ‘Greater Israel’ plan a direct threat to regional peace

KARACHI: Deputy Prime Minister and Fore­ign Minister Ishaq Dar addressed the Organisa­tion of Islamic Coopera­tion (OIC) on Monday with a call to action, presenting seven “urgent and essential steps” for the international community and Muslim nations to halt the Israel’s war in Gaza and secure enduring peace in Palestine.

Mr Dar outlined the plan for both the OIC and the global community to follow to resolve the crisis. The points include an immediate, permanent, and unconditional ceasefire, unfettered and sustained humanitarian access for all civilians, reinforced international support for the UN relief agency UNRWA.

Further points include an end to forced displacement and illegal settlements, implementation of the OIC’s reconstruction plan for Gaza, a revival of the two-state solution process in line with international law, accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ishaq Dar also warned that Israeli Prime Minis­ter Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks supporting a “Gr­­eater Israel” threaten reg­ional peace. Addressing an extraordinary meeting of the OIC-CFM, Mr Dar said Israel’s recent provocative statements encapsulate a “growing disdain and absolute contempt” for the international order.

The condemnation follows a report from AFP earlier this month in which Netanyahu, when asked by an i24NEWS interviewer if he subscribed to a vision for a “Greater Israel,” reportedly replied, “absolutely,” adding, “If you ask me what I think, we’re there.”

These remarks drew widespread condemnation from the international community. Last week, Israel’s defence minister appro­ved a plan to conquer Gaza City, while Tel Aviv approved a controversial plan to build an Israeli settlement which would sev­er the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem.

“The brazen audacity of the so-called Israeli cabinet, in unveiling its ominous plan to extend Israel’s full military control over Gaza, as well as the Israeli prime minister’s recent allusion to the creation of a ‘Greater Israel’, provides an insight into Israel’s annexationist and rogue mindset,” Mr Dar told the council.

He said that Pakistan fully endorsed and joined a statement issued by 31 Arab-Islamic countries and the secretaries-general of the OIC, the League of Arab States, and the Gulf Cooperation Council condemning Netanyahu’s comments.

“His [Netanyahu’s] statement constitutes a direct threat to Arab national security, to the sovereignty of states, and to regional and international peace and security,” Mr Dar said.

Quoting PM Shehbaz Sharif, Mr Dar identified the conflict’s origin. “The root cause of this ongoing tragedy is Israel’s prolonged, illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. As long as this occupation endures, peace will remain elusive,” he said.

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2025

CUA LO: Typhoon Kajiki brought torrential rains to Vietnam’s north central coast on Monday, felling trees and flooding homes, despite wind speeds tapering off from earlier in the day.

As of 0900 GMT, Kajiki was on the coast of Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces, with wind speed easing to 118-133 kph from as strong as 166 kph, according to the country’s weather agency.

“It’s terrifying,” said Dang Xuan Phuong, a 48-year-old resident of Cua Lo, a tourism town in Nghe An province directly hit by the storm. “When I look down from the higher floors I could see waves as tall as 2 metres, and the water has flooded the roads around us,” Phuong said.

State media reports said power in several areas in Ha Tinh province had been cut off, roofs were blown out and floating fishing farms were washed away. Vietnam had earlier shut airports, closed schools, and begun mass evacuations as it prepared for the most powerful storm so far this year.

The government warned earlier of “an extremely dangerous fast-moving storm,” adding that Kajiki would bring heavy rains, flooding and landslides. With a long coastline facing the South China Sea, Vietnam is prone to storms that are often deadly and trigger dangerous flooding and mudslides.

The weather agency said rainfall could reach 500 millimetres from Monday afternoon until the end of Tuesday in several parts of northern Vietnam. The Vietnamese government said earlier on Monday about 30,000 people had been evacuated from coastal areas. More than 16,500 soldiers and 107,000 paramilitary personnel had been mobilised to help with the evacuation and stand by for search and rescue.

Two airports in Thanh Hoa and Quang Binh provinces were closed, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam. Vietnam Airlines and Vietjet cancelled dozens of flights to and from the area on Sunday and Monday.

Kajiki skirted the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island on Sunday as it moved toward Vietnam, forcing Sanya City on the island to close businesses and public transport on Sunday.z

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2025

However, this is not the number of jets he said were shot down earlier. Last month, the Republican said five planes were downed during the conflict as “two serious nuclear countries” hit each other.

Like last time, this time too, Trump did not specify which country shot down how many jets. His fresh remarks on the subject come weeks after Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh confirmed that India shot down five Pakistani fighter jets during Operation Sindoor, the military action targeting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The Air Chief Marshal had said that the jets were shot down by the S-400 air defence systems, and called it the largest ever recorded surface-to-air kill.

Apart from the five jets, one large Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) or early warning aircraft was also destroyed, he had said.

‘Was going to be a nuclear war’

Further, repeating his claim of brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan and “stopping” a nuclear war, Donald Trump said on Monday, “The war with India and Pakistan was the next level that was going to be a nuclear war… They already shot down 7 jets – that was raging.”

He again linked the truce between the two bordering nations to trade, saying he gave both countries 24 hours to settle the fight, threatening the US would withhold trade if they didn’t stop. “I said, ‘You want to trade? We are not doing any trade or anything with you if you keep fighting, you’ve got 24 hours to settle it’. They said, ‘Well, there’s no more war going on. ‘ I used that on numerous occasions. I used trade and whatever I had to use…” the Republican said.

Trump’s remarks on the India-Pak conflict are the latest in a series of such claims repeated multiple times, ever since the two countries reached an agreement on cessation of hostilities on May 10.

The truce was declared days after the launch of Operation Sindoor, launched to avenge the killing of 26 civilians in a terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22.

New Delhi has rejected Trump’s mediation claim several times in the past, asserting that ceasefire was reached after a call from Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) to their Indian counterpart. India maintains that the agreement was reached bilaterally, with no third-party intervention.

COLOMBO, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) — The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has continued to grow and expand over the past 24 years, reflecting inclusiveness as well as appeal and vitality, said Yasiru Ranaraja, a Sri Lankan international affairs expert and the founding director of the Belt and Road Initiative Sri Lanka, told Xinhua recently.

Ranaraja said the SCO, the world’s largest regional organization in terms of landmass and population, provides a reliable platform for promoting equal dialogue and solidarity in addressing regional issues. It also helps member states combat terrorism and boost economic growth, “which is crucial to strengthening regional security,” he added.

“We see out of SCO many countries want to join it as dialogue partners and members of the issue, which demonstrates the recognition of the organization by the international community,” Ranaraja noted.

According to him, the SCO offers a valuable platform for cooperation among Global South countries. At a time when the world is facing challenges such as geopolitical conflicts and protectionism, the SCO embodies “a fairer and more inclusive vision of regional governance.”

Sri Lanka is a dialogue partner of the SCO. Ranaraja said the country is seeking deeper engagement with the organization, especially in areas such as security, counterterrorism, supply chains, and port cooperation.

Sri Lanka attaches great importance to port development and hopes to align itself with regional trade integration efforts under the SCO, he said. Establishing a regional port cooperation platform will significantly reduce the country’s port operation and transshipment costs, while enhancing the competitiveness of regional trade, he added.■