An­na-Lisa Paul

The Russ­ian in­va­sion of Ukraine is be­ing re­ferred to by ex­perts around the world as the be­gin­ning of World War III – and marks the start of a new chap­ter in the eight-year-long war which has al­ready claimed thou­sands of lives.

Ukraine has been fight­ing the war against the Russ­ian-backed sep­a­ratists in the coun­try’s east­ern Don­bas area since 2014.

Ad­dress­ing the in­va­sion on Thurs­day, In­ter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty chair­man Pro­fes­sor Andy Knight said, “I think there is a good pos­si­bil­i­ty here that we are on the cusp of World War III.”

Say­ing the state­ment had not been of­fered up light­ly, he said there could be con­se­quences for the Caribbean and world pow­ers in the west­ern hemi­sphere need­ed to pay par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to this lat­est con­flict.

Not sur­prised by the mil­i­tary ac­tion em­ployed by Rus­sia dur­ing the ear­ly hours of yes­ter­day, Knight said the build-up had been ev­i­dent in the last two weeks or so.

He said while Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin was very much in­ter­est­ed in re­claim­ing the glo­ry days of the So­vi­et Union and sees this in­va­sion as one way of get­ting it back, “Un­for­tu­nate­ly, what he is do­ing is vi­o­lat­ing in­ter­na­tion­al law.”

De­clar­ing the move by Russ­ian forces to be a vi­o­la­tion of Ar­ti­cle 27 of the Unit­ed Na­tions Char­ter, Knight said the dis­re­gard shown can be in­ter­pret­ed as a chal­lenge at the very foun­da­tion of the Unit­ed Na­tions (UN).

The pur­pos­es of the Unit­ed Na­tions as set forth in the Char­ter are to main­tain in­ter­na­tion­al peace and se­cu­ri­ty; and to de­vel­op friend­ly re­la­tions among na­tions, based on re­spect for the prin­ci­ple of equal rights and self-de­ter­mi­na­tion of peo­ples.

Rus­sia is the cur­rent chair of the UN Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, which, the pro­fes­sor said, made the sit­u­a­tion “kind of awk­ward.”

“This is some­thing we have to watch very close­ly be­cause if Rus­sia is al­lowed to get away with this, it means that oth­er coun­tries will try to do the same and that’s the end of world or­der as we know it,” warned Knight.

Urg­ing west­ern ter­ri­to­ries to pay at­ten­tion to the de­vel­op­ing sit­u­a­tion, he said be­cause we live in such a glob­alised era, any event like this could have a ma­jor im­pact on the Caribbean.

As the US turns its at­ten­tion to the un­fold­ing con­flict, Knight said at­ten­tion would prob­a­bly be di­vert­ed from the re­gion and as his­to­ry has shown be­fore, a lot of in­vest­ments and se­cu­ri­ties pre­vi­ous­ly dried up, as was seen in pre­vi­ous wars.

He said this will now open the door for Chi­na.

“Chi­na is try­ing its best to demon­strate that it can be­come as pow­er­ful as the US in many cat­e­gories,” he said.

“I think this opens up an op­por­tu­ni­ty for Chi­na if the US is not pay­ing at­ten­tion to this re­gion.”

With Rus­sia and Venezuela al­ready al­lies – Knight ad­vised, “Any cri­sis like this that in­volves Rus­sia, should be con­cern­ing for Caribbean coun­tries.”

Look­ing at cur­rent mi­gra­tion pat­terns in Venezeu­la, he spec­u­lat­ed that this prob­lem can on­ly get worse as the Russ­ian/Ukraine cri­sis un­folds.

Knight said, “I think we should be con­cerned as well about the oil and gas prices that will prob­a­bly es­ca­late now be­cause of this cri­sis.”

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