In his raspy smoker’s voice, the middle-age Ukrainian soldier urged a visitor to hurry through a stretch of muddy trench that traversed an open clearing. Gesturing eastward, he warned of snipers lurking only a few hundred yards away. “We must run until we reach cover,” he said. On the front …

Three hundred and forty kilometers east of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, lies the city of Poltava. At its heart is a semi-circular square with a cast-iron column and nearly two dozen eighteenth-century Swedish cannons captured in the 1709 Battle of Poltava, a decisive encounter in the Great Northern War, waged …

As Moscow signals its apparent readiness for war over Ukraine, the U.S. government seems determined to ignore Russia’s not-so-ridiculous concerns over the military alliances of neighboring states and the prospect of nuclear weapons on its borders. Should Americans worry about our country inserting itself into another war? Ukraine is far …