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Exactly 1,535 days of war is what it took for Russian President Putin to publicly refer to his Ukrainian counterpart by his last name. Within these long, bloody, and—for the Kremlin—not exactly successful 1,535 days, the Ukrainian leader was everything but a man with a first and last name to Putin: most often dubbed a…
- Denis Mancevic
- Editorials
- Russia and the former Soviet Union
History teaches us that wars impoverish nations, exhaust societies, and cause irreparable damage to the social fabric. But Putin’s regime offers an exception—through a model of extensive financing for an ever-growing number of voluntary contract recruits, the Kremlin has established a pathological social engineering system in which the market clearly defines the price of a…
- Denis Mancevic
- Editorials
- International relations and diplomacy
To paraphrase the American essayist H. L. Mencken, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Every populist is acutely aware of this, carefully and gradually erasing the final, yet crucial, part of the equation from public consciousness. What remains are only fast, simple, and entirely wrong solutions that…
In just over a week, we will enter the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. Mentally, for the average Homo sovieticus, this war has already crossed the symbolic threshold separating a so-called “special military operation” (SMO) from a “real war”—one comparable to World War II, which in Russian textbooks began in 1941 and ended…
“Russia is obliged to do something horrible to restore her credibility. It is very sad that we have to use such kind of arguments. But we have not choice. Only brutality, force, mass destruction and cruelty do matter in Trumplike world. Either you hit first or you are dead,” reads a tweet posted earlier this…
With these words, Francis Fukuyama described what the Donald Trump administration is doing to Ukraine at an international conference in Vienna in early December. Not only is it increasingly openly pushing Ukraine into the Kremlin’s arms—it is doing so aggressively, with rhetoric drafted almost at Red Square. When we add to this the open disdain…