Section: European Voice (EU)
Europe’s dangerous creation myth
Europeans are paying a price for believing in their own myth. With the furies of Brexit and the future of the European Union up for debate, proponents of the European project are burdened with a creation story that bears little resemblance to historical fact. Whether they are friends or enemies of the EU, Europeans believe in the fable of the...
Estonia joins the far-right club
TALLINN — Europe’s populist wave has hit Estonia — hard. In a national election in March, the Conservative People’s Party — a far-right upstart that says it wants to protect an “indigenous Estonian” population under threat — won 19 seats in the country’s 101-seat parliament, nearly tripling its share from the last election, in...
How Jared Kushner sought advice from a ‘pro-Kremlin’ Russian
Jared Kushner needed help. It was March 2016 and Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, was steamrolling to the Republican presidential nomination. But the businessman-candidate was taking heat for his campaign’s lack of foreign policy expertise, something Kushner was trying to remedy. That’s when he found a Russian willing to...
What Putin could lose in Ukraine
MOSCOW — Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s landslide victory in last week’s presidential election in Ukraine has been interpreted by some as a big win for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The comedian is a Russian speaker and lived and worked in Moscow for six years. He’s also inexpert as a statesman — his only experience in politics is...
Ukrainian president-elect Zelenskiy rejects Putin’s passport offer
Ukraine’s President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy has rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to give passports to Ukrainians, instead saying Russians could gain Ukrainian passports. “We know perfectly well what a Russian passport provides,” Zelenskiy wrote in a Facebook post late Saturday, “the right to be arrested for a...
Putin mulls widening Russian passports plan in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday Moscow is considering fast-tracking Russian citizenship for all Ukrainians, not only those living the war-torn parts of eastern Ukraine. Putin made his comments during a press conference at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Russian state news agency TASS reported. This comes days after Putin signed...
Trump: People ‘have to get their shots’ amid measles crisis
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday implored Americans to get vaccinated amid a massive measles outbreak, in a departure from his past skepticism about vaccines. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump weighed in for the first time on the growing crisis that has seen 695 measles cases in 2019, the worst outbreak since the disease...
EU slams Russia for ‘another attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty’
The European Union condemned Vladimir Putin’s decision to fast-track Russian citizenship for people living in parts of eastern Ukraine. “The signature by President Putin of a decree entitling, inter alia, people who permanently reside in certain areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions to apply for Russian citizenship in a...
Ukraine’s new president just won the first ever successful virtual campaign
KIEV — Volodymyr Zelensky, who was elected president of Ukraine by a landslide on Sunday, is probably the least prepared individual to head a democracy in world history. Until this weekend, his main experience in politics was playing a schoolteacher who becomes the president in a satirical television program. He ran with no party affiliation....
6 takeaways from Ukraine’s presidential vote
KIEV — Ukraine’s presidential election proved sometimes it’s reality that mirrors fiction when Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who played the president on a TV show, won in a landslide victory. But the vote also shed light on how cultural and political dynamics have evolved in the country over the five years since a pro-Western revolution shook...
