Vladimir Putin
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Trump's History with Russia Set the Stage for Zelensky Blowup March 07, 2025
As his White House meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart devolved into a stunning blowup, President Donald Trump leaned on a familiar refrain to explain his unique kinship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin....
Was it Inevitable? A Short History of the War on Ukraine February 24, 2025
The long read: To understand the tragedy of this war, it is worth going back beyond the last few weeks and months, and even beyond Vladimir Putin, writes Keith Gessen...
Kasparov: We Cannot Forget the Lessons of History With Putin April 10, 2024
Garry Kasparov is famous both for his 20-year reign as the world’s best chess player and for Putin’s recent declaration that he’s a terrorist. However, Kasparov deserves even more recognition for a prediction he made over two decades ago in The Wall ...
How Putin Keeps Trying to Prove Might February 22, 2023
The Wagner Group is Russia’s main Private Military Contractor (PMC), a new term for the age-old concept of mercenary bands. Wagner had thousands on its payroll, sending them wherever Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader wanted them. Many of its members ha...
What's Hiding in Putin's Family History? January 25, 2023
“Who is Mr. Putin?” This question, first posed in 1999, remains unanswered. Married? Children? Even basic information on Russia’s president is a state secret. Kremlin propaganda trumpets Vladimir’s humble origins, but offers meager details. For examp...
Photos Tell Story of Second Chechen War December 12, 2022
Twenty years ago, as Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin launched a military operation in Chechnya that would come to define his rule and haunt it.1. A man waving a separatist Chechen flag in Grozny, the region’s capital, in 1995. Many buil...
Truth About the Battle of Stalingrad December 07, 2022
Most Russians need no convincing that the Red Army’s grueling victory at Stalingrad was the most important event of World War II. Many Western historians concur that it was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, which means its significan...
Russians Stole Potemkin's Bones. Here's Why October 28, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine — With Ukrainian forces bearing down on the occupied port city of Kherson this week, the Kremlin’s puppet rulers dispatched a team to an 18th-century stone cathedral on a special mission — to steal the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandro...
WW II Conscription a Window Into Russian Plans October 03, 2022
Russian president Vladimir Putin has yet to call for universal conscription, although he recently announced mobilisation of 300,000 reservists. The reason why the Kremlin has not introduced a wider policy may lie in the history of conscription and it...
Will Putin's Map Lead to Another Russian Breakup? September 27, 2022
Acclaimed historian Antony Beevor is out with a new book. “Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921” is a comprehensive look at this earthshaking event that would have political and social implications on the world for the rest of the 20th century...
Is Putin a Modern King Pyrrhus? September 19, 2022
Putin: King Pyrrhus of Moscow?: Over at Geopolitical Monitor, Julian McBride wonders whether Vladimir Putin has come to a “Pyrrhus of Epirus moment.”Maybe so.What McBride is really asking is whether Putin has frittered away his nation’s human and mat...
Putin Keeps Pulling From WW II Playbook With Purge September 16, 2022
Even as the Ukrainian military in September 2022 retook some territory lost to the Russian invasion, Moscow has been quietly fortifying the land it holds, which it intends to keep. Russian forces still control about 20% of Ukraine, and the Kremlin st...
Gorbachev's Legacy Nothing if Not Contradictory September 01, 2022
Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his legacy, complex. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Russia for destroying the Soviet Union and disma...
Russia's Abuse of 'Denazification' July 18, 2022
Oleg Morozov, a member of the Russian parliament and an ally of President Vladimir Putin’s, made what sounded much like a threat in May 2022.Poland should be “in first place in the queue for denazification after Ukraine,” he said.Just days earlier, p...
Russian Leaders Have Habit of Going 1 War Too Far June 30, 2022
t is not yet clear how the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War will end. What is clear, though, is that Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 intervention did not achieve the quick, low-cost victory that many (including Putin himself) appear to have anticipated. Af...
Putin the Paranoid April 18, 2022
They’re all out to get me, everyone in the West. I’ve always suspected that. I’ve had a target on my back. And in ending his speech in Warsaw, Joe Biden confirmed it. “For God’s sake,” the U.S. President declared, “this man cannot remain in power.” S...
West's Appeasement Policy Failed Once, and Will Again April 18, 2022
The world is now reeling in shock, witnessing widespread evidence of massive atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. In the recently liberated town of Bucha near Kyiv, the advancing Ukrainian army discovered mass graves, the bodies of fema...
Hitler's Plans Didn't Bother These Media Moguls April 12, 2022
As the dictator sent his occupying forces across a neighboring country’s borders, the international press was outraged. Most of it was, anyway. One major American outlet’s reaction was, in essence: There’s nothing to see here. “After all,” it said of...
War Criminals Rarely Punished April 11, 2022
This past week, as Ukrainian forces retook the town of Bucha to find its streets littered with the bodies of bound and shot civilians, and as rockets rained on a train station packed with fleeing families, killing dozens, two words were on the lips o...
Could Russia Have Been Part of Post-Cold War Peace? April 04, 2022
How West Botched Putin's March to War in Ukraine April 04, 2022
In early November, months before the war began, CIA Director William Burns visited Moscow to deliver a warning: The U.S. believed Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing to invade Ukraine. If he went ahead, he would face crippling sanctions fr...
10 Dictators Who 'Gave Up' Power March 31, 2022
Dictatorships. This type of government has no parliament with teeth, or a judiciary with bite. It's a one-branch show run at the top by a dictator and his trusted yes-men. Corruption via overly complicated legislation runs rampant. Opposition parties...
Putin's Evolution From Statesman to Bully March 31, 2022
PARIS — Speaking in what he called “the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant,” picked up during his time as a K.G.B. officer in Dresden, President Vladimir V. Putin addressed the German Parliament on Sept. 25, 2001. “Russia is a friendly European na...
This Time, Biden's Right: Putin Can't Remain in Power March 30, 2022
The Wild Beasts Are RealChina’s Economic Achilles’ HeelIs Biden Setting Us Up to Lose a War We Never Really Joined?Biden’s ‘Regime Change’ BlunderRussia Is ScrewedNR PLUS WORLDBiden Had It Right the First TimeBy ROBERT ZUBRINMarch 29, 2022 6:30 AMSha...
World War II Beginning of End of Imperialism March 29, 2022
Nearly 80 years have passed since the end of World War II, but popular and scholarly interest in history’s deadliest conflict shows no sign of abating. Studies of the war roll off the presses at a rapid rate; films, documentaries and podcasts on the ...
