Putin’s Blunder

Ukraine Will Make Russia Regret This War

The West has underestimated Vladimir Putin again. Time and time again, the aging Russian president has declared that Ukraine is not a real country, that Russia’s historic lands sit in Ukraine, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Western puppet and an illegitimate leader. By November, more than 100,000 Russian troops were surrounding Ukraine on three sides, and soon the White House was issuing increasingly dire warnings of a coming attack. And yet somehow, most in the West shrugged. Many smart and experienced experts were convinced Putin was bluffing. They dismissed his saber rattling as merely a ploy to increase his hand at the negotiating table, where he unsuccessfully sought the right to have a veto over which countries joined NATO. Only at that point did Western countries turn up the pressure on Putin.

The Eurasian Nightmare

Chinese-Russian Convergence and the Future of American Order

The greatest strategic problem the United States faces is the convergence of its two main rivals, China and Russia—countries that don’t always like or trust each other but nonetheless derive great benefits from their simultaneous assaults on the existing international order. And as Moscow and Beijing contest the balance of power at both ends of Eurasia, they are drawing together in ominous ways.

The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency

Russia’s Invasion Could Unleash Forces the Kremlin Can’t Control

Russian forces have struck targets across Ukraine and seized key facilities and swaths of territory. The Ukrainian military is no match for this Russian juggernaut. Although some reports suggest Ukrainian troops have rebuffed attacks in certain parts of the country, it seems more likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will decide just how far Russia goes into Ukraine. As a retired Russian-speaking CIA operations officer who served in Central Asia and managed agency counterinsurgency operations, I did not think Putin would have attacked Ukraine unless he had already devised a reliable end game, given the costs of an intractable conflict. But Putin’s best-laid plans might easily unravel in the face of popular Ukrainian national resistance and an insurgency.

Anti-Liberal Russian Philosopher Dugin: It Is Not Just About ‘Restoring The Territorial Integrity’ Of The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) And Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), It Is About ‘Ukraine’s Liberation’

On February 24, 2022, anti-liberal philosopher Alexander Dugin, in an article titled “It’s All About Ukraine’s Liberation,” stated that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is not only to restore the “territorial integrity” of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR),[1] but is about the “liberation” of the whole of Ukraine. Dugin said that the first goal is the “liberation” of Novorossiya (“New Russia”), the name given in the 18th century to the lands of the Black Sea littoral, incorporated into Russia as a result of wars with the Ottoman Empire. It includes Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev, and Odessa.

Russia Contemplates The Price Of Its Ukraine Policy

Having decided first to recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then mount a special operation to reverse the pro-Western Maidan revolution of 2014, Russia’s leadership realized that there would be consequences to these actions. As the West made it clear from the outset that its response would take the form of imposing severe sanctions rather than a military, the issue of the economic damage that Russia would sustain naturally surfaced. President Vladimir Putin in his address announcing the special operation conceded that Russia’s economy would be affected but claimed that the government had taken measures to cushion the blow.

Live updates: How Russia’s assault on Ukraine affects MidEast

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have an impact beyond Europe. Follow along for the latest updates affecting the Mideast region.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could develop into the largest state-on-state conflict Europe has seen since World War II. But the war’s effects will not be limited to the continent.

The U.N. Refugee Convention Is Under Pressure—and Showing Its Age

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention, one of the signal moral advances in human history. Negotiated in the wake of World War II and initially limited to Europe, the treaty established the first binding legal protections for individuals forced to flee their countries. These rights and responsibilities, which were made universal in the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1967, remain a cornerstone of the global humanitarian regime. The convention is, however, showing its age. Many governments are failing to fulfil their legal obligations under it, and the convention does little to address the plight of internally displaced persons as well as those driven from their nations by more complex dynamics, including criminal violence and climate change.

A Prison Attack and the Death of its Leader: Weighing Up the Islamic State’s Trajectory in Syria

Abstract: On January 20, 2022, the Islamic State launched a complex assault on Hasakah’s Ghwayran prison, a place in which thousands of its fighters had been held since the ‘defeat’ of its territorial caliphate in March 2019. The attack was the first time that the group had directly targeted a major detention facility in Syria since losing its last significant territorial toehold in Syria, notwithstanding the consistent calls for prison breaks that have been uttered by its leaders during the last three years.