Imagining history as a civilizational competition is convenient for the current Russian leadership because it means they can perceive themselves as part of a young civilization and, as such, they don’t need to calculate risks, invest in the economy, or conduct a reasonable foreign policy. Youth is forgiven everything, and …

Elsewhere, Poland continues to talk tough over preventing Ukrainian grain from flooding its market; radicalised Czech pensioners rise up, again; Slovak paediatricians to no longer take on shifts in children’s emergency rooms from next week. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban did not make the international headlines with this year’s speech in …

A dispute about engraving civilians’ names on a monument to deceased fighters in a small Kosovo town highlighted a wider problem: although most people killed in the 1998-99 war were civilians, most war memorials commemorate guerrillas. For more than 20 years, the name of Adem Ahmetaj’s nephew Jeton could be …