Rusia

Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire in the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. Before 2014 Ukraine was a home of some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent of those who declared themselves as the Ukrainians. Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or Belarus as “foreign” but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].

The slow rate of [Ukrainian] progress has also prompted politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to question whether it is worth continuing to support Ukraine’s military effort or instead concentrate their efforts on negotiating a peace settlement between the warring countries.

The war in Ukraine has spurred the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. According to EU border and coastguard agency Frontex, by the end of 2022, 15 million Ukrainian citizens had fled to Europe since the beginning of the war, with roughly 3 million choosing to stay.

The Biden administration has acknowledged neither its responsibility for the pipeline bombing nor the purpose of the sabotage

I do not know much about covert CIA operations—no outsider can—but I do understand that the essential component of all successful missions is total deniability. The American men and women who moved, under cover, in and out of Norway in the months it took to plan and carry out the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea a year ago left no traces—not a hint of the team’s existence—other than the success of their mission.

Discussing the faint mumblings in western capitals about “negotiations” over Ukraine last week, I pointed out how insecure and fragile the collective western strategic ego is, and how little opposition or criticism it can actually tolerate. It struck me that it might be worth expanding on that a bit, since it helps us to understand why the West has gets itself into such shambolic situations, Ukraine of course being the current one. I’ll also try to explain how both fervent admirers of western policy and its bitterest critics are actually part of the same incoherent strategic discourse. It all starts with ethnocentrism

By drawing attention to the crimes that this Nazi’s division committed against Poles like Ambassador to Canada Witold Dzielski did and pushing for his extradition like Minister for Education Przemyslaw Czarnek is attempting, Poland is showing that it wants the whole world to know the dark truth about Ukraine’s “heroes”.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hardly changed the foreign-policy mindset in Berlin. Only a robust, long-term containment strategy can help the West curb Russia’s expansionist ambitions.

Has Russia’s war against Ukraine fundamentally changed the thinking of policymakers in Berlin? Have they really understood that in the future European security must be framed against an aggressive Russia? And that Germany must strengthen its own resilience and defenses across the board because it is in the crosshairs of Russian great-power dreams?

Non-state actors make the perfect saboteurs

So whodunnit? Who destroyed the Nord Stream 2 at three minutes past midnight on September 26, 2021? Explosives set 262 feet below the surface of the Baltic caused a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter Scale. It ripped apart the $11 billion gas pipeline that fed Russian gas directly into Germany and Western Europe and blew up global geopolitics as well.