Accent's interview with President of the Baltic Security Foundation, Olevs Nikers.

- Mr. Nikers, 2024 continues with challenges. Two deadly wars are unfolding on. How do the wars in Ukraine and Gaza affect each other?

- Unfortunately, war in Gaza draws more attention from war in Ukraine to other regional conflicts. Communities and politicians can’t keep necessary focus and attention on several crisis simultaneously, which is not contributing towards the faster resolution of both conflicts.

- Middle East is sliding closer to the edge of a wider regional conflict. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been dispatched to the Middle East four times in the more than three months since the October 7 Hamas attack and has made five visits to Israel during those trips. Jordan's King Abdullah urged Blinken to use Washington's influence over Israel to press it for an immediate ceasefire and warned of the "catastrophic repercussions" of Israel's continued military campaign. Except for Lebanon, "Israel is carrying out an unprecedented wave of deadly strikes in Syria targeting cargo trucks, infrastructure and people involved in Iran's weapons lifeline to its proxies in the region," according to Reuters. At the same time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue fighting. Given the above-mentioned, how real is the threat of a wider regional conflict and in this case, in your opinion which countries will be involved in the regional conflict?

- The probability of wider regional conflict remains high. Israel will stand firm in its position and nothing will change the Israel’s course of action until the security situation will be improved and threat level for Israel state lowered remarkably.

- If the U.S. stops military aid to Ukraine, what will be the consequences?

- The war will most likely turn into actual war of attrition. In this case, there will be no means for Ukraine to push back Russian forces in short term, so we are looking on the longer time perspective considering resolution of the war. In this situation time will play in Russia’s favor, hoping that international community will calm down with all the sanctions policy against Russia and will return to the “business as usual” more or less. Ukraine will need more support from European and American partners in order to defeat Russia in battlefield in short term. Otherwise, Russia will continue to pose threat to all its neighbor’s long term, and it will be difficult to avoid major conflict in Europe over the coming 10 years.

- As for the global challenges, given current events in the world, the main challenges of 2024 at this stage are the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. Given the fact that 2024 is an election year in Georgia, and the country was granted EU candidate status in December 2023, on the understanding that Georgia takes the relevant 9 steps, if fulfilled, the way will be opened for Tbilisi to start membership negotiations, in your opinion, what will be the main challenges for Georgia in 2024?

- I think the main issues usually are respect for human rights, justice and securing democratic and transparent free of corruption government. Another aspect is clear trade and finance orientation towards Western hemisphere, and cutting relationship of dependence – for all means with Russia. This is a way for Georgia to align with democratic and free market economy of the European community, which bears certain cost at political and economic level.