Worldcrunch
As one of the world’s most ardent supporters of the Ukrainian cause, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson helped steer the Western response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Moscow has been gloating over his fall from grace. The diplomatic cards may (or may not) be shuffled by a switch at 10 Downing Street.
French President Emmanuel Macron is making a point of keeping an open dialogue with Putin, hoping to avoid a world war at all costs. But he needs to get his historical comparisons (and world wars) in order.
English Professor Jacob Edmond takes a look at the creative ways that Russian journalists, writers and artists are turning forced silence into powerful statements.
While there are Moscow backers across Europe and even in the U.S., they mostly remain on the margins. In Italy, however, support for the Kremlin runs surprisingly wide, and deep.
Polish-born French writer Marek Halter, who fled the Nazis to the USSR, has known Vladimir Putin for 30 years. Halter sent the Russian president a long letter on May 18, and later shared a copy of it with Les Echos. In the letter, he lays out the path for Putin to renounce the war without undermining Russia’s standing.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed the rules of diplomacy. As Russia and China show budding unity, the world’s diplomats must look at the effects of Eastern Europe on East Asia — and Taiwan specifically.
Even with no end in sight to the war in Ukraine, Russia may be plotting to destabilize the Balkans by the end of this year. The target? Bosnia and Herzegovina, which may be already close to splitting.
The war in Ukraine is not just being fought on the ground. The battle for dominance increasingly happens on the digital field, where a worldwide network of cyber-soldiers conduct attacks to disrupt Russia’s war effort, from the outside and inside too.
Despite legal threats or worse, a notable minority of Russians, from students to elected officials, are finding ways to oppose the invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, many others have left the country since the war began, creating a brain drain that could last for many years.
The ongoing speculation around the Russian president being suddenly gone from power, because of either illness or death, captures the reality that this is Putin’s war. What could come next is no less troubling.
This final bombing assault on the port city coincides with the beginning of a major land campaign across much of the territory of Donbas. The bloody siege of Mariupol is a sign of how Putin intends to carry out his quest for the entire nation.
Russia’s President Putin may speak of denazifying Ukraine, but his words and actions — from the Mariupol maternity hospital to the atrocities of Bucha to Friday’s missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station — show that he’s taken up the mantle of Europe’s line of fascist dictators. Take a look at those today who still lend him support.
French philosopher Gaspard Koenig’s view on Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and its targeting of civilians leads him to a notion explored by Immanuel Kant, and so mocked by post-modernity.
From Kharkiv to Mariupol, the targets of some of the worst Russian attacks on civilians are largely Russian-speaking cities. It is the worst possible twist to Putin’s bogus claim that his war was to “de-nazify” and prevent “genocide” of Russian speakers.
It went largely unnoticed, but Washington’s refusal to let MiG fighter jets destined for the Ukrainians take off from their base in Germany is a clear message, according to a retired French general: Even if a NATO country is attacked, the U.S. will never send their soldiers to fight on our soil.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has instantly become an international icon of courage in the fight for freedom. This sudden fame is as much a proof of how much is at stake in Ukraine as any one man’s power — and Zelensky is the first to know his limits.
While Kyiv comes under full military attack, less than 500 miles to the north the Russian capital is a surreal mix of normalcy, pockets of protest and the quiet sensation that nothing will ever be the same.
Exclusive: New details emerge of a would-be forced evacuation last week of pro-Russian civilians from the Donetsk and Luhansk territories that Vladimir Putin has used to justify Thursday’s invasion of Ukraine. Locals call the operation a “farce.”
The New Year’s Eve prison exchange between Russia and Ukraine was a rare softening of hostilities in the occupied region in eastern Ukraine. Here’s the story of one of those released.