Malaysian Flight 17 was presumably mistaken for a military plane and shot down by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border. The blatant disrespect for the dead – images of pro-Russian separatists picking through the wreckage and passenger belongings, drunkenly and belligerently barring international investigators from the scene – have shocked the world. Tragically, “the insurrection has escalated into an air war and become more dependent on Russian weaponry because Ukraine has been slowly winning the battle on the ground against the separatists that begun in April,” writes David R. Cameron, political science professor at Yale. Distributing sophisticated weapons to the untrained inevitably has dire consequences. Nations who intervene in such ways cannot evade responsibility. Cameron urges the European Union to join the United States in imposing tough sanctions on Russia. Leadership entails understanding and acting upon such sweeping concerns among citizens, and global leadership expands such empathy to those living anywhere in the world in the effort to preserve human dignity and peace. – YaleGlobal
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/global-casualty-escalating-local-war?utm_source=YaleGlobal+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2167aa71c1-Newsletter9_14_2010&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2c91bd5e92-2167aa71c1-207757317
