For Vienna, neutrality is simply good business. It didn’t occur to the Austrian chamber of commerce that hosting a cozy networking event on the outskirts of Moscow might raise eyebrows in some quarters. As record cold gripped the Russian capital in January, the local chapter saw an opportunity to pierce …

Olaf Scholz’s long dithering before sending tanks is symptomatic of a deep-seated mindset that détente won the Cold War, not Reagan’s belligerence. In early January of 1984, an aspiring young West German socialist with a shoulder-length curly mane traveled by train to East Berlin with his comrades for an important …

The day before Vladimir Putin’s long yearly address to parliament Thursday, politicians from Transnistria, a pro-Kremlin breakaway region of Moldova, asked the Russian president to “protect” it against Moldova’s “increased pressure” — and Moscow responded it considers protecting its “compatriots” a priority. It’s a reminder Putin’s ambitions don’t stop at …

Netanyahu is taking Israel’s war on Gaza to a final terrifying stage, promising that total victory is at hand and using 1.5 million Palestinians in Rafah as hostages. If he can’t force them out into Sinai, he wants to take over complete control of the Rafah crossing from Egypt, destroy …

From 29 February to 2 March, there will be an intra-Palestinian meeting in Moscow under the Russian government’s auspices. Officials representing Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and approximately ten other Palestinian factions received invitations and will participate. “Moscow’s goal is to help the various Palestinian forces agree to unite their ranks …

A month after a drone attack killed three American troops at a US military outpost in Jordan’s borderlands with Syria, decisionmakers in DC are still contending with restricted policy options. The strike at the Tower 22 outpost came as instability ripped across the greater Middle East. Within days, the US …

It’s been more than five years since Mark Rutte earned the nickname “the Trump whisperer.” It was July 2018 and Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, had ushered everyone but the leaders, ambassadors and a handful of staff out of the room at the military alliance’s headquarters. Minutes earlier, Donald Trump …

An extraordinary parliamentary session in Transnistria was a bid to attract international attention and a signal that the de facto state is ready to escalate. The longer the war in Ukraine continues, the more confident neighboring Moldova’s authorities feel in their long-running conflict with the breakaway state of Transnistria. Moldova …

Putin’s state of the nation address should have been a mere pre-election formality, but it left an extremely chilling impression of an unraveling spiral of escalation.As Vladimir Putin prepares to run for re-election in less than three weeks’ time for a fifth presidential term, the Russian leader has not troubled …

As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. It is now 2/22/2022 +2: two years since Putin’s address on the historic status of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, followed on 2/24/2022 by the commencement of the …