Recent Posts

Can Mark Rutte save NATO?

It’s been more than five years since Mark Rutte earned the nickname “the Trump whisperer.” It was July 2018 and Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, had ushered everyone but the leaders, ambassadors and a handful of staff out of the room at the military alliance’s headquarters. Minutes earlier, Donald Trump …

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Transnistria Ups the Ante Amid Creeping Pressure From Moldova

An extraordinary parliamentary session in Transnistria was a bid to attract international attention and a signal that the de facto state is ready to escalate. The longer the war in Ukraine continues, the more confident neighboring Moldova’s authorities feel in their long-running conflict with the breakaway state of Transnistria. Moldova …

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Putin’s Six-Year Manifesto Sets Sights Beyond Ukraine

Putin’s state of the nation address should have been a mere pre-election formality, but it left an extremely chilling impression of an unraveling spiral of escalation.As Vladimir Putin prepares to run for re-election in less than three weeks’ time for a fifth presidential term, the Russian leader has not troubled …

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Russo-Ukrainian War: The Deluge

As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. It is now 2/22/2022 +2: two years since Putin’s address on the historic status of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, followed on 2/24/2022 by the commencement of the …

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