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The duty to be confident

The Ukraine war is entering children’s rooms and classrooms. What can schools do?

by Carl Bossard,* Stans, Switzerland

(28 March 2022) Images are powerful. Teachers are particularly aware of this when talking to their pupils these days. Children and young people are directly confronted with the Ukraine conflict via YouTube, Tiktok and other social networks. Often they are on their own. They bring what they have seen into the classrooms. “Is war also coming to us?” they ask and want to know: “why is there such fighting?” At home, they often get no answers to their questions. Teachers and educators are the only contact persons for some children.

Economic Sanctions Kill

by Alfred de Zayas,* Geneva

(28 March 2022) AdZ. This article draws on the research of other scholars including Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot and encourages further research by UN agencies including UNICEF, WHO, FAO to quantify the concrete harm done by economic sanctions, in particular the nexus between sanctions and famine, sanctions and scarcity of medicines (the ECWAS study on Syria is very revealing) and suggests that because of the tens of thousands of deaths caused by sanctions world-wide, they should be considered under article 7 of the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity.

"The policy of the USA has always been to prevent Germany and Russia from cooperating more closely"

Historical, political and economic contexts of the war in Ukraine

Interview with Jacques Baud*

(15 March 2022) Zeitgeschehen im Fokus: Mr Baud, you know the region where there is war now. What conclusions have you drawn from the last few days, and how could it have come to this?

Neutrality has nothing to do with heartlessness and lack of solidarity

(13 March 2022) Edit. Ambiguously and contrary to the country's good tradition, the Federal Council endorsed on February 28, 2022, the EU's far-reaching sanctions against Russia. Switzerland is neither a member of the EU nor of NATO, nor is it part of any alliance with Ukraine or Russia. The Federal Council was expected to find a diplomatically balanced and Swiss solution.

"Unfortunately, NATO is not better than Putin!"

by Jürgen Todenhöfer, Germany*

(13 March 2022) Putin is waging war against Ukraine in violation of international law. There is no excuse for this. Nor does NATO's systematic encirclement of Russia over many years justify the killing of innocent Ukrainian civilians. War is always sh ...

“We need a European security architecture …”

(13 March 2022)

First peace through compromise,
then humanitarian assistance,
then reconciliation
– We only have this one planet!