It’s the day of the North-East proxy war all over again. Concrete proof that this is so comes in the form of the latest military aid package approved for Ukraine by the Biden administration running into $60 billion. So substantial is this injection of assistance that it has prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to see […]

The world’s bewilderment over escalating tensions in the Middle East was further aggravated when Iran unleashed an astonishing number of drones and missiles into Israeli territory over the last weekend. The retaliation by Iran has taken the international community by storm but where does the world go from here in terms of conflict resolution and […]

On 19 April, Indians will begin choosing a new parliament for the next five years, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks a third consecutive term. Opinion polls put his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies ahead. They are up against the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (India), which groups more than two dozen opposition […]

In a recent exclusive interview with Newsweek magazine, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi provided a comprehensive overview of his government’s achievements, challenges, and the nation’s trajectory under his leadership. As India approaches a critical juncture with impending elections, Modi’s insights shed light on the complexities of governance amidst global trends and domestic...

Indian HC Santosh Jha yesterday (10) explained how the worldwide Covid-19 epidemic and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict had enhanced the Indo-Lanka ‘relationship.’Addressing the India-Sri Lanka Defence Seminar at the Taj, Jha said: “Like in other areas, we are cooperating closely on security and defence matters. Because of our geography, our security is interlinked and intertw...

Colombo has demonstrated its own brand of strategic autonomy on issues from Russia’s war in Ukraine to China’s global footprint By Michael Kugelman Most South Asian governments tend to have nonaligned foreign policies, balancing their relations with major powers. This maximizes their diplomatic flexibility and ability to operate independently on the world stage, also known as […]

Sri Lanka’s fate compared with that of Sikkim By Shamindra Ferdinando National Freedom Front (NFF) leader and Chairman of the Uththara Lanka Sabhagaya (ULS) Wimal Weerawansa, MP, said that President Ranil Wickremesinghe, SJB leader Sajith Premadasa, MP, and JVP/JJB leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, MP, were pursuing the same strategy to address the economic crisis. Therefore, […]

By Shamindra Ferdinando By the time President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had arrived in Singapore in the second week of July 2022, a few days after fleeing Sri Lanka, he firmly believed that then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was the only person capable of restoring the rule of law in the country. In the chapter titled ‘The […]

No happening in the Gaza of today is bound to trouble profoundly those blessed with a conscience than the sight of multitudes of civilians, including, of course, women and children, rushing to take hold of packets of food and other forms of essential relief that manage to trickle into the ravaged strip of land. Famine […]

Saturday 9th March, 2024 US President Joe Biden has decided to build a temporary port in Gaza to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian civilians trapped in that war-ravaged enclave, where hospitals and schools are being bombed incessantly. He was expected to unveil the planned port project, in his State of the […]

By Neville Ladduwahetty During President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s India visit in July 2023, five Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) were signed by India and Sri Lanka to establish physical connections between the two countries. This was followed more recently by the launch of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – a mechanism that claims to reduce the cost […]

India presented a new perspective to conceptualise its relationship with the West. The perspective is based on emphasizing its distinctions from BRICS co-founders China and Russia. The new approach came through by way of a response to a query, during the recently concluded 60th Munich Security Conference, about India’s freedom to choose between multiple partners […]

President Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Indian Ocean Security Conference in Colombo that the sanctions imposed on Russia over the war in Ukraine had not caused the collapse of the Russian economy, which had just shifted eastwards. The following is the text of the statement issued at the conference (Phase II) organised by the Pathfinder Foundation: […]

In a welcome development in relation to Sri Lanka’s regional policy, some state functionaries of the Ranil Wickremesinghe regime have gone on record as having stated that Sri Lanka would be taking notable cognizance of India’s security concerns, going forward. This is as it should be. None of India’s immediate neighbours could afford to overlook […]