Eurasia

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, one day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining bulwark of resistance in the province. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin in a televised meeting Monday that Russian forces had taken control …

Following disagreements over stances on Russia, Slovakia intends to ‘mute’ foreign policy cooperation between the Visegrád countries as Bratislava takes over the rotating presidency of the embattled regional bloc. Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland form the Visegrád group, a regional grouping that uniformly fought against the refugee relocation system during …

NATO, idąc do przodu z rozeznaniem zagrożeń, zawsze stawia o dwa kroki za mało. Nie z braku odwagi, ale z wewnętrznej różnicy interesów. Nie przyłączę się do chóru entuzjastów ustaleń madryckiego szczytu NATO. Owszem, nie zapiszę się też do klubu tych, którzy całkowicie lekceważą postanowienia, jakie tam zapadły. Ale mimo …

Most summits bill themselves as “historic” and those who attend invariably talk about “forging a new consensus”. But Nato’s Madrid summit can credibly make such claims, for there is no question that a military alliance that only a few years ago was famously dismissed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, …

Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date. Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of “good intentions.” Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” destroyed anything that could …

Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per …

Will Ukraine Bring Russia the Superpower Status It Seeks? On Saturday, Russia invaded and effectively annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea. In doing so, Russian President Vladimir Putin shrewdly took advantage of the political uncertainty that arose when Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former kleptocratic president, took flight last …

Ali Baqeri, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and lead negotiator in the talks on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, held talks with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov in Moscow. The twitter account of Russia’s diplomatic mission in Vienna said in a post that Baqeri and Ryabkov held a …

For more than four decades, the Iranian regime has been perfecting its strategies for infringing on the sovereignty of foreign nations. It exerts influence and interferes in other countries’ domestic affairs in order to advance its political, revolutionary and ideological interests. This is part of the theocratic establishment’s core principle …

Contrary to Russia’s expectations, the Ukraine war and entailing crises not only did not damage EU-US relations but also improved them to the extent that France proposed “strategic autonomy” for Europe is now consigned to oblivion. As in the Cold War, Russia sought to exploit the rift in transatlantic relations …