The defining characteristic of Albania’s brutal communist regime was its morbid fixation with borders – and the memory of that claustrophobic world helps explains why, today, so many Albanians want to escape. Icrossed Albania’s borders on a cold day of January 1991, for the first time of my life. It …

More than two dozen Serbian women remain trapped in refugee camps in Syria, waiting so far in vain to be repatriated by the Serbian state. Whispered messages via banned mobile phones provide a chilling glimpse of their day-to-day plight.

In a dramatic spectacle on February 15, the Russian State Duma adopted a nonbinding resolution urging President Vladimir Putin to recognize the separatist-claimed parts of eastern Ukraine as independent states. Coming amid international alarm bells about the major concentration of Russian military forces along the border with Ukraine and in …