Political and business leaders began talks on Tuesday at the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
The topics at this year’s meeting are Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, inflation during and after the pandemic, but also generative artificial intelligence (AI), which was high on the list of priority discussions.
“In most scenarios, AI is likely to worsen overall inequality of the workforce, a troubling trend that policymakers must proactively address to prevent the technology from further fueling social tensions,” wrote the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, before the annual meeting of the WEF in Davos.
Financial support to Ukraine is weakening
United States (U.S.) Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to the media about his meeting with the Ukrainian president in Davos on Tuesday.
“We have to make sure that we get additional funding from Congress that President Biden requested, we are working very hard on that. Not providing additional funding for Ukraine would be a real problem,” Blinken explained.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the failure of Western allies to sanction Russia’s nuclear industry. In a special address at the WEF in Davos, Zelenskyy said President Vladimir Putin had shown himself to be a “terrorist” after Russian forces seized Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in 2022.
“It is a clear weakness of the West that the Russian nuclear industry is still not under global sanctions, although Putin is the only terrorist in the world who has taken a nuclear power plant hostage,” Zelenskyy said. Tensions around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant are still present during the war with Russia and Ukraine accusing each other of endangering the safety of the power plant during rocket attacks around the facility. Although the European Union (EU) has largely moved away from Russian fossil fuels, it has had a harder time shaking ties with the country’s civilian nuclear industry, which is a key source of energy for several Eastern European countries.
The conflict in the Middle East – “recipe for global escalation”
The current regional conflict in the Middle East is a “recipe for escalation everywhere in the world” that could affect wider global trade, Qatar’s prime minister said in Davos, Switzerland. Calling for diplomacy over a military solution, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani advised the international community not to focus “only on small conflicts, but to focus on the main conflict in Gaza. And as soon as that is resolved, I believe everything else will be resolved.” “
The war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas has spilled over into neighboring countries, with Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis persistently attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea in recent weeks – and the U.S. and the United Kingdom (UK) retaliating with strikes late last week. Since then, Iran has launched missiles at targets in Iraq and Syria.
The Qatari Prime Minister urged that the conflict situation cannot “remain hostage” to the elections being held in key powers this year and their potential regime change. “We need something that will really make the resolution binding on any side that comes to power,” he said, noting Washington’s ability to bring Israel and Gaza representatives to the table. “[The U.S.] plays a key role in this, a central role, and we think they can bring all the parties together,” al-Thani said. Qatar played a key role in mediating between Israel and Hamas.
