Thudding artillery and tank gunfire under the gaze of swooping attack helicopters, all set to a soundtrack of 1980’s heavy rock band Van Halen: This is what Germany’s Bundeswehr looks like in 2024.
This weekend, Vladimir Putin will win another election as Russia’s president. The election will, of course, be rigged in Putin’s favor, just as all of his past elections have been, but Putin is all but assured to claim another six-year term, taking him to at least 2030.
Vladimir Putin must be enjoying this moment.
Not only did the Russian president manage to snuff-troll the Munich Security Conference with news of the death of his main political rival, Alexei Navalny (“slowly murdered” by his jailers in Siberia, according to the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell); he also scored a well-timed battlefield success when, over the weekend.
For a second week in a row, Washington is the most important theater in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Billions in military and economic aid for Kyiv hang in the balance. As does, with only a bit of exaggeration, Ukraine’s fate as a nation, stability in Europe and America’s credibility as a world power.
Russia once controlled 20 percent of U.S. territory. That legacy helps explain its aggression against Ukraine.
In the racial-reckoning summer of 2020, local leaders in a small American town gathered for a contentious vote on whether to take down a statue that honored a man who was, as one assessment read, “steeped in racial division, violence and injustice.”
Canada’s Hunka scandal is a demonstration of how when history is complicated, it can be a gift to propagandists who exploit the appeal of simplicity.
Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.