Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks on the phone onboard a helicopter in August 2015. Communication has broken down between East and West amid heightened tensions in Ukraine. (Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Reuters)
Brian Stewart, CBC: Cold War-style hotline proposed as tension between East-West rises in Ukraine
NATO chief calls for Cold War-style hotline as fighting escalates with Russian-backed rebels.
You can tell tension has risen to a very serious state of jitters when NATO feels the need for Cold War-style hotlines with Moscow to prevent sudden, armed clashes in eastern Europe.
This is no routine diplomatic caution. Hotlines are set up when parties fear there is a real possibility one side or the other might inadvertently push a tense crisis into an armed clash capable of triggering actual war.
The first one, famously, was set up between Washington and Moscow after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the two superpowers to the brink of thermonuclear war, and was kept in readiness all through the long Cold War.
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WNU Editor: I fail to see how such a "hotline" will alleviate the tensions that now exist between Russia and NATO. The problem is Ukraine, and while that is a conflict that begs for a political solution .... unfortunately .... for the moment all sides are not interested in pursuing such a course of action.
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