Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Why Eastern Ukraine Could Become Russia’s Next ‘Frozen Conflict’
We’ve been here before. Most of the world just wasn’t paying attention. When Russian-backed separatists seized control of Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions in the early 1990s, it didn’t make international headlines. Likewise, when separatist fighters in Moldova’s Transdniester region took control of that...
A 24-Step Plan to Resolve the Ukraine Crisis
Vladimir Putin may be meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko for peace talks in Belarus on Tuesday, but the conflict between the two countries, and more broadly between Russia and the West, is in fact escalating, with Russia most recently sending aid convoys and apparent military equipment and armored vehicles into Ukrainian...
Russia Is Already Invading Ukraine
On Friday, Russia sent a supply column of more than 200 trucks rumbling into Ukraine and then, the next day, back out again. Since the Ukraine crisis began, Moscow has done many dangerous and deadly things. But this convoy ranks as one of the oddest. Until now, Russia has discreetly supplied the pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine with tanks,...
Is Femen Dying?
Inna Shevchenko, the 24-year-old leader of Femen in France and de-facto commander of the movement as a whole, scrolled through her iPhone messages several weeks ago, as we sat at a sidewalk table outside a café in central Paris. She studied one new message and smiled. “The National Assembly has just invited Femen to come discuss women’s...
The Whole World Is Watching Ferguson
This past weekend, in a tense press conference, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and called for a curfew in Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb where protesters have been clashing violently with law-enforcement officials following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. “This is a test,” Nixon...
Are Ukraine’s Leaders in League With Satanists? On Russian TV, Yes
What do Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and parliament speaker Oleksandr Turchynov have in common with members of a satanic religious sect based in central Ukraine? They are all part of a broad movement to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, according to Russia’s leading state-run broadcaster. The August 17 report on Rossia 24...
How Money Warps U.S. Foreign Policy
On Sunday, when Hillary Clinton used an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg to take pointedly more hawkish stances than President Obama on Syria, Iran, and Gaza, observers chalked it up to her presidential ambitions. As one Democratic operative told Politico, Clinton’s advisors are “good poll readers.” On Tuesday, when Rand Paul declined to...
The Kremlin’s Troll Army
Like many people with access to the Internet and a holster full of gadgets, Vladimir Nesterenko is living a double existence. In real life, the 49-year-old Kiev native is a published author and darling of the Ukrainian counterculture. Online, he’s “Adolfych”—a Russian-speaking mischief-maker who uses his Twitter, Facebook,...
The Way Out of the Ukraine Crisis
MOSCOW—In May, Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a bill of stunning recklessness that seems specifically designed to destroy what remains of relations between the United States and Russia. The legislation’s very name—the “Russian Aggression Prevention Act of...
Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS
President Obama has long-ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the President told me that...
