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Driving Forces
Berlin is more deeply engaged in solving the situation in eastern Ukraine than ever before in an international conflict. State Secretary of the German Foreign Office Markus Ederer on the attempts to make “Minsk” work.
The Vagaries of Memory
A project to memorialize five Holocaust mass grave sites in western Ukraine is helping pave the road to democracy and reexamine the country’s troubled past.
The Waiting Game
No, the West has not (yet) lost Ukraine, and the fragile Minsk truce and Western sanctions on Moscow have not (yet) failed. But Vladimir Putin’s 19th-century fixation on national military greatness may yet spoil attempts to stabilize the situation.
Deterrence Plus
Recent conflicts have shown that European security won’t work without a hybrid security policy. Here’s what a triad of deterrence, resilience, and defense could look like.
A Farewell to Arms?
There are four Western scenarios on the Ukraine crisis competing to explain where we stand: the McCain, Mearsheimer, Motyl, and Merkel theses. Which is right? (Part 2 of 2)
What Next for Ukraine?
As the sober National Interest warns that America and Russia are “stumbling to war,” roughly four Western scenarios compete to explain where we stand in the year-old Ukraine crisis. Let’s call them the McCain, Mearsheimer, Motyl, and Merkel theses of, respectively, Russian aggression, Russian hegemonic privilege, Russian decline, and Russian paranoia. (Part 1 of 2)
Greek Unorthodoxy
Greece’s new Syriza government may alarm Brussels, but there is more behind Greece’s affinity for Russia than can be explained by party alliances alone – as polls have shown, keeping Athens in line on Russia policy may be trickier than expected.
In For the Long Haul
Germany’s old Russia policy, an attempt to build a “modernizing partnership,” is dead and should be buried. The beginning of 2015 saw Berlin searching for a new way forward, informed by recent events.
Harbingers of Transformation
Even as the future of the European Union’s neighborhood remains under threat, a few developments on the EU periphery – in Ukraine, Romania, and Serbia – show that civil society and rule of law are making inroads in post-Communist kleptocracies.
Chasing a Chimera
The main cause of the conflict between Russia and the West lies in the internal legitimization deficit of Putin’s own system. A closer cooperation with Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) would not only undermine the EU’s values – the Kremlin is simply not interested. A reply to Mark Leonard’s and Ivan Krastev’s “The New European Disorder.”
