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UN agency UNRWA urgently suspends aid to Rafah
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UN agency UNRWA urgently suspends aid to Rafah

2 June 2024
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has suspended its operations in Rafah. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the organisation that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, conveyed this information on Saturday evening (1 June) via X. 
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Editorial
Approaching the end game for Armenia-Azerbaijan peace
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Approaching the end game for Armenia-Azerbaijan peace

30 May 2024
Nikol Pashinyan has taken Armenia on a long journey, and brought it close to peace with Azerbaijan. Few if any believed that he could achieve what has been done so far. It is true that Azerbaijani military superiority, the victory in 2020, and the puzzling events of September 2023, which saw the overnight collapse of the Armenian political project in Nagorno-Karabakh and the subsequent exodus of the entire Armenian population from the territory, in many ways pre-determined what is about to follow. But given the entrenched nationalist positions and hard-line narratives that have traditionally characterised Armenia’s political thinking, even these developments were not enough to guarantee peace. The last part of the journey had to be done in the minds of Armenians, and Pashinyan set about doing this with conviction and determination, challenging the narrative of a historical Armenia, that is only the imagination of the nationalist elites and advocating instead, "a real" Armenia with fixed border.
commonspace.eu editorial team
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G7 explores ways to use frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine 
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G7 explores ways to use frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine 

26 May 2024
The G7 will explore ways to use future revenues from frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the G7 and its allies froze around $300 billion in Russian assets. "We are making progress in our discussions on potential avenues to bring forward the extraordinary profits stemming from immobilized Russian sovereign assets to the benefit of Ukraine," the draft statement said. G7 negotiators have been discussing for weeks how best to use these assets, which include major currencies and government bonds held mainly in European vaults. The United States (US) has been urging its G7 partners - Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada - to support a loan that could provide Kyiv with up to $50 billion in the near term. The cautious language of the statement, lacking figures or specifics, underlines the many legal and technical issues that would need to be resolved before such a loan could be issued. A G7 source indicated that there would be no significant changes to the statement before the final version is released later on Saturday (25 May).
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Opinion
Opinion: The anatomy of the current protests in Armenia
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Opinion: The anatomy of the current protests in Armenia

26 May 2024
Armenia is still absorbing the implications of the protests that overwhelmed Yerevan on May 9. On April 19, 2024, the Armenian and Azerbaijani border delimitation and demarcation commissions signed the protocol on the delimitation and demarcation process in the Tavush region of Armenia. That agreement granted Azerbaijan control over a patch of territory along that border that had been officially part of Soviet Azerbaijan but controlled by Armenia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Benyamin Poghosyan
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News
President Joe Biden hails Kenya’s efforts in Haiti
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President Joe Biden hails Kenya’s efforts in Haiti

24 May 2024
US President Joe Biden commended Kenya’s President, William Ruto on Thursday (23 May), congratulating him for his intervention in Haiti. President Ruto's visit to the White House marks the first state visit by an African leader to the United States in over 15 years.
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Opinion
Opinion: Political Uncertainty in Armenia Should Not Disrupt Azerbaijan Normalisation
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Opinion: Political Uncertainty in Armenia Should Not Disrupt Azerbaijan Normalisation

23 May 2024
The Armenian opposition had up to now failed to come up with a leader who could unite it in its quest to overthrow Nikol Pashinyan. "That could change if a new political force led by a charismatic and populist alternative were to emerge. This month, the opposition hoped they have  such an alternative in Bagrat Galstanyan, Archbishop of the Tavush Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, write Onnik Krikorian for commonspace.eu. Leading protests against the recent delimitation and demarcation of the Gazakh-Tavush section of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the cleric managed to rally up to 30,000 people in Yerevan’s Republic Square earlier this month, the largest public gathering since Pashinyan’s own in 2018.
Onnik James Krikorian