Eurasia

By weaponising gas exports, Putin is digging the grave of Russia’s economy. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin escalated the geo-economic war between his country and the West by suspending gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria, citing the two countries’ refusal to pay in Russian roubles. The move, decried by …

European energy providers open Russian rouble accounts for gas, challenging bloc’s united front against Moscow. As Poles and Bulgarians worry their cookers and heaters will run dry, the rest of Europe is scrambling to respond after Vladimir Putin’s latest chess move over the Ukraine conflict – cutting off the gas …

After failing to capture the capital Kyiv and northern Ukraine, Russia now focuses on completing its conquest of the south. It took several cruise missiles to destroy a bridge that linked southwestern Ukraine with Romania – and stood hundreds of kilometres away from the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war. …

Western leaders shrugged it off when, in 2016, Erdoğan said in plain language that Turkey did not need to join the European Union “at all costs” and could instead become part of a security bloc dominated by China, Russia and Central Asian nations. Erdoğan’s popularity, since he came to power …

Will Russia Seek to Disrupt Helsinki’s NATO Bid? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the 30-year post-Cold War order in Europe. Among its most significant and unexpected geopolitical effects is that Finland, long a nonaligned country, will likely soon join NATO, probably followed by its similarly nonaligned neighbor, Sweden. Finland …

Nationalism, Russian Imperialism, and the Quest to Define Ukraine’s History Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as …

America Can’t Support Democracy Only When It’s Convenient “The invasion of Ukraine is a paradigm shift on the scale of 9/11,” British Foreign Minister Liz Truss told an audience in Washington on March 10. “How we respond today will set the pattern for this new era.” Truss’s comments capture the …

While the meaning and practice of “colonialism” hardly needs to be described, the meaning of “neo-colonialism” is far less understood. This is because neo-colonialism is much less evident to the eye, unless, that is, one cares to look for it. Let us begin our search with the dictionary definition of …

South Africa and other countries that have abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations General Assembly in response to the war in Ukraine face intense international criticism. In South Africa, the domestic criticism has been extraordinarily shrill, and often clearly racialized. It is frequently assumed that abstention means …

When the US became involved in both world wars in the 20th century, all sides knew the outcome would be in favor of US allies. However, they had no idea of the length nor could they guess that the terms of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919 would be the …