Today, on August 21, many countries around the world are marking the International Day of Remembrance and Commemoration of the Victims of Terrorism. The event was established by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, UNN reports.
In a broad sense, terrorism is the use or threat of violence to achieve a political, religious or ideological goal. It consists in the deliberate, purposeful use of terror through hostage-taking, murder, torture, intimidation of the population and authorities, and other criminal acts to achieve certain goals.
Terrorism in the world "flourished" in the second half of the twentieth century. It still remains a dangerous phenomenon that the world's leading countries are still unable to find an effective response to.
The sad rating of countries with the highest level of terrorist threat in 2023 was headed by Burkina Faso, Israel, and Mali.
As a result of terrorist attacks, 8,352 people died last year, including almost two thousand in Burkina Faso.
Unfortunately, so far, these statistics do not take into account the civilian Ukrainians who were killed and injured as a result of full-scale russian aggression.
State terrorism is the conduct of special operations by law enforcement and military structures on the territories of other states. And the full-scale aggression of the russian federation fully fits this definition.
According to the UN, since February 24, 2022, about 11,000 Ukrainians have died at the hands of the occupiers, including more than 500 children.
Currently, only Ukraine, Lithuania and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly have recognized russia as a terrorist state. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Slovakia, the European Parliament and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly have recognized russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
At the very least, an important political step would be for the United States to recognize Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
So far, the U.S. list includes russia's allies: Syria, Iran, Cuba, and the DPRK.