Author: M Barbu

Washington Must Ramp Up Support for Vulnerable Partners—Before It’s Too Late

It is too soon to predict how Russia’s brutal, unjustified war against Ukraine will end. But for now, it is clear that the Russian military has shockingly underperformed in the first phase of the war, whereas the Ukrainian military has punched far above its weight. Other revisionist powers contemplating aggression will be looking closely at Russia’s failings to avoid making the same mistakes, and the countries they threaten will be looking to Ukraine’s example for insight into how to fend off a larger, better-equipped adversary.

How His War Has Erased Russia’s Past—And Endangered Its Future

If a Ukrainian grandmother with pro-Russian views did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her—or at least that is what the Russian government decided in April. At the time, Anna Ivanova inhabited a village near Kharkiv. One day, mistaking a group of arriving Ukrainian soldiers for Russians, she took out an old Soviet flag and waved it vigorously at them to remind them of their shared past and try to deter them from destroying the village. Instead, the Ukrainian forces, outraged at the sight of the hammer-and-sickle, took the flag from her and trampled it.

Putin’s genocidal war on Ukraine may have less to do with empire and far more to do with profits.

Enormous profits.

There has been considerable commentary about Putin’s war motives, from a belief that Ukraine is little more than an insurgent province of Mother Russia to a fear that Ukraine is becoming a satellite of Western democracies. But those motives miss the fact that Putin rules by allowing oligarchs to enrich themselves and — by extension — himself. And like any criminal, he is going where the money is and there is much money buried in the ground of Ukraine.