A closer look at the iconic photo of the three Allied leaders gathered to bring an end to World War II, and shape the map of the coming Cold War.
Tag: russia
Welcome to Monday, where the army seizes power in Myanmar coup, weekend protests rock Russia and it’s revealed that Messi scored really big in Barcelona. We also take a look at Big Brother in China, and how citizens have had enough of the country’s ubiquitous surveillance system. The fragility of American democracy is nothing new […]
Welcome to Wednesday, where global COVID cases exceed 100 million, Biden rings Putin, and space tourism gets ready for launch. We also look at the magnitude (and limitations) of Iran’s presence on the African continent, courtesy of Jeune Afrique. Aristotle to Anti-Vaxxers, internet culture and the decline of reason The virtues that laid the groundwork […]
Welcome to Monday, where AMLO gets COVID, Chinese miners are rescued, and King Kong finds a worthy opponent. Les Echos also takes us to Syria, where coronavirus and a crumbling economy are wreaking havoc in a country already devastated by 10 years of civil war. Viktor Orban, Xi Jinping and a simple question for the […]
Welcome to Monday, where Navalny is arrested upon his return to Moscow, Brazil starts its mass vaccination campaign and there are signs of life from China’s trapped miners. Meanwhile, Le Monde travels to the French port city of Calais to see how high-tech is being used to ease post-Brexit commerce with the UK. SPOTLIGHT: ON […]
A sudden rash of constitutional changes, and the government’s subsequent resignation, looks to be a maneuver for Putin to hold on to power indefinitely.
MOSCOW — In a recent letter to the European Court of Human Rights, the Russian Minister of Justice Aleksandr Konovalov declared that the level of domestic violence in the country is overstated, adding that there is no evidence that women suffer from it more than men. This was a response after the European court citing […]
Welcome to Friday, where the hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian students have been freed, Russia has been banned from the Olympics and French police have made a high-profile arrest in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking probe. We also follow Yemen’s itinerant honey producers as they (and their bees) dodge the stings of the country’s ongoing civil […]
An end to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine doesn’t necessarily seem closer, though at least it’s not farther away.
-OpEd- MOSCOW — Despite the predictions before this past week’s NATO summit of a major split in the alliance, and some awkward moments among its respective leaders, the meeting itself concluded without any real substantive complications. Even traditional anti-globalist clashes we’ve come to expect from these kinds of gatherings were absent. As for Russia, it […]
-Analysis- MINSK — Following the Nov. 17 elections for Belarus” lower house of parliament, independent observers and opposition politicians unanimously rated this campaign as one of the dirtiest in the 25 years of Alexander Lukashenko’s rule. The 65-year-old president of Belarus has once again demonstrated that he is not going to adjust the eastern tilt […]
MOSCOW — For the first time, the U.S. Congress has recognized the mass killings and deportations in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 as genocide. So why now? It doesn’t seem that the United States has anything really to gain from the country of Armenia. Two of the four borders of the country are […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The USA betrayed the Kurds. This was the blunt interpretation from Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the Turkey-Russia agreement on northeast Syria signed earlier this week in Sochi. The Kurds have been the Americans’ most loyal allies in Syria, yet Washington abandoned them. Now Kurdish military units […]
As Trump leads a U.S. retreat from the region, Russia has methodically moved back into a position of influence that it had in Soviet times.
May marked the 25th anniversary of the ceasefire that ended Armenia and Azerbaijan’s war for the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. It wouldn’t take much to reignite fighting.
Opposition to the planned Nord Stream 2 gas project had been limited to Europe. But now the Trump administration is challenging it too — with possible sanctions.
Venezuela’s fate is becoming a strategic stake and source of conflict between Western democracies and increasingly aligned rivals, China and Russia.
WASHINGTON — Next, more of the same, but with more entrenched division, a bitter crossfire of allegations and then, finally, a reckoning in the form of the 2020 presidential election. The long-awaited conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is likely to harden congressional Republicans’ wall of support for President Trump, strengthen Democratic demands to hold Trump to account — and result in little change in public opinion, according to historians and politicians who have studied past national scandals. Mueller’s conclusion — he found no evidence of collusion with Russia but […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — Two newly released reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 election have been nothing short of revelatory. Both studies — one produced by researchers at Oxford University, the other by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge — describe in granular detail how the Russian government tried to sow discord and confusion among American voters. And both conclude that Russia’s campaign included a massive effort to deceive and co-opt African Americans. We now have unassailable confirmation that a foreign power sought to exploit racial tensions in the United States for its own gain. Ever […]
Towards the end of World War II, 800,000 German women and girls were deported to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. A visit to the abandoned camps near the Russian-Finnish border.
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Now It’s Putin Ready To Pivot To Asia
Despite Kremlin denials, Western sanctions are hitting Russia hard, and prompting its president to look elsewhere for new alliances and opportunities.
Alcohol consumption may be down in Russia, but profits are soaring for Sergei Studennikov, whose Krasnoe & Beloe (Red & White) supermarket chain specializes in beer and booze.
Co-working centers with free childcare offer a lifeline to the business women of Moscow.
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Watch: OneShot — Woman In A Bar
For decades, Stanley Greene risked his life to photograph wars and their atrocities. He also loved capturing women’s surrounding mystery, beauty and strength.
A view from Russia on the topic of Russian-American relations: time to keep a low profile.
MOSCOW — Fifty years ago, in May 1968, France was swarmed with such powerful mass protests that the government feared a full-fledged civil war or revolution. This popular unrest became a turning point in the history of modern France, and eventually brought about serious changes in the French state. Vladislav Inozemtsev, a scholar writing for […]
The victory of Les Bleus is a real boost for a nation that has been the repeated target of Islamist terror. Still it is not a magic solution to its many divisions.
MOSCOW — Nicolas Maduro has been reelected as Venezuela’s president for a new six-year term. Alexei Kolesnikov in the Moscow-based independent magazine The New Times looks at international reaction to the election, specifically as it relates to Russia: “Last month’s election of Maduro was clearly flawed and not recognized as legitimate by neither the country’s […]
MOSCOW — On April 13, a Russian court decreed an immediate blocking of the app Telegram across the country. The decision came after the refusal of Telegram to provide Russian security services with access to users’ private messages. The authorities said it was a necessity in the fight against terrorist threats. However, Pavel Durov, founder […]
The Yarmouk Camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus has been the site of a grueling “zero-hour” offensive since last month.
Washington is threatening to use the so-called ‘Magnitsky Act’ to target Chinese officials for sanctions in response to Beijing’s mistreatment of the Uighur Muslim minority in northwestern China.
The former German Chancellor has had a troubling second act in global politics.
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The list is long: the scandal around the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, an unprecedented expulsion of Russian diplomats, sanctions leading to the fall of the ruble and a hit on aluminum giant Rusal, retaliatory sanctions, strikes on Syria and over-the-top rhetoric of official Moscow during and after all-the-above crises. […]
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Syria, How Did It Come To This?
-Analysis- PARIS — The Syrian population continues to endure various armed conflicts. Despite all the attention this war gets from international, political and humanitarian organizations, it is now more than seven years since it began — and Syria is suffering from three open wounds. On April 9, at dawn, the Tayfur air base, located between […]
The bipolar world of yesteryear is gone. In its place is a shifting geopolitical landscape of circumstantial alliances and ascendant authoritarianism.
As parliamentary elections nears, voter frustrations are fueling a campaign in the landlocked, former Soviet republic, to integrate with Romania and the EU.
In a time of Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, Europe represents a democratic ideal alone—respectful of both humanity and the planet. And Europe needs a revival of the Berlin-Paris alliance to make it possible.
-OpEd- BERLIN — It’s a strange state of affairs. Two madmen are leading two of the three greatest world powers: Donald Trump, who has turned his former TV show The Apprentice into a governing method in the White House, and Vladimir Putin, who lets himself be photographed hunting bare-chested, showing off his muscles, who eliminates […]
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Mother Russia And Us, What Now?
The result came as no surprise: Vladimir Putin won yesterday’s Russian presidential election and will serve a fourth term. More importantly for the Kremlin leader, he obtained the comfortable result he was seeking, with 76.6% of the vote, up from 63.3% in the last election six years ago. Yes, nearly two decades after emerging from […]
MOSCOW — Rumor has it that Vladimir Putin is something of a techie. Though the man in charge at the Kremlin has been vague about his economic priorities after the March 18 presidential election, Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister, says that Putin “is obsessively interested in new technologies and the digital economy.” During […]