Russia
Daughters of Revolution
The personal and political collide in three new books — Julia Ioffe’s “Motherland,” Lea Ypi’s “Indignity” and Olia Hercules’ “Strong Roots” — that use family memoir to illuminate the lives of women in 20th-century Eastern Europe.
Sonic Terror
Russia’s drone strategy has created a nation on permanent, exhausting alert. Every Ukrainian is now an involuntary sound engineer, acutely sensitive to the ambient noise, trying to mentally calculate a threat’s distance from a high-pitched buzz or a faint whistle.
How Estonia Became the Front Line in the New Cold War
Russia is waging a covert war against NATO, with Estonia, a member state that was formerly a Soviet republic, now on the front line. In Tallinn, the fear is that Putin could make the cost of protecting the country too high for its allies to bear.
Putin’s Illegal Conquests Wouldn’t Be the First the White House Has Endorsed
The U.S. denounces Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian land, yet both Republican and Democratic administrations have tolerated illegal conquests by allies, such as Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and occupation of the West Bank. This double standard undermines the case against territorial concessions.
The Farther East One Goes in Europe, the More ‘West’ One Winds Up
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to many unintended consequences, but none so quick and profound as the consolidation of the Nordic and Baltic regions under the NATO umbrella following Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to the alliance in the past two years.
Trump’s Incredible Shrinking Peace Plan
Trump once claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, but is now growing weary of negotiations. Given the underlying resilience of U.S. ties to Europe, that may be a good thing for Ukraine.
The History of Aggression in Asia That Moscow Wants to Erase
Today, Tehran, Pyongyang and Beijing are providing critical support for the Kremlin’s latest war of expansion, while Russia claims its foreign policy rests on a history of opposition to imperialism — but under the tsars, Iran, China and Korea themselves fell prey to its ambitions.