China and Russia are on the sidelines while Israel and the U.S. attack Iran

For the Russian strongman, the price of peace looks higher than the costs of war.

Trump’s moral indifference means he has no motivation, much less urgency, to help Ukraine.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among the greatest Russian writers, will be long read and remembered, but not as a social and political prophet.

The same factors that led up to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine are in place again, including domestic protests, a struggling economy and a desire for glory.

Trump’s Oval Office clash with Zelensky was exactly what Moscow desired.

2017 was the one hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and the year in which ISIS was decisively defeated. These two movements are connected by a thread of significance that we would be rash to consider mere history.

Prigozhin crossed a line. But it was the reaction of ordinary Russians that should worry the Russian president the most.

A secret-service overlord’s delusional outlook becomes the party line in Russia—with global implications.

There are remarkable similarities between several key foundational building blocks of the Russian and Chinese governments.

To Xi Jinping, a Russian victory over Ukraine would vindicate the Marxist theory of history.

Before the war, the average age of a conscript was 20. There is no information on how old today’s conscripts are – probably because of how many 18-year-olds straight out of school are among their ranks.

Ilya Ehrenburg’s book is a testament to cowed mankind’s ineradicable yearning for the dignity in gaining moral autonomy from the totalitarian state.

No previous Soviet leader, neither Stalin nor the often crude Khrushchev, allowed himself to refer to the West in the terms that Putin has used.

Putin’s domestic policies are motivated by revenge, self-pity and a search for those who betrayed the wonderful U.S.S.R.

For Putin, taking on the job of prime minister would be not just “stepping down” but wallowing in self-abnegation.

The overarching objective of the Putin regime could be summarized as the recovery of political, economic, and geostrategic assets lost in the Soviet collapse.

The deliberate nature of Putin’s decision-making now serves his pursuit of a long-term geopolitical project, a self-imposed personal historic mission, and his own political survival.

A 2008 warning about the Russian government’s territorial ambitions.

The Kremlin’s military strategists are rapidly reverting to the way Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union fought WWII: a maniacal slog over the corpses of Russian soldiers.

The Ukraine war is eating like a voracious mole into the Kremlin’s stores of money and men.

Even if Kyiv agrees not to align with the West, Putin will have other demands.

In a repressive society, dark political jokes allow regular people to describe what they see with their own eyes.

Two wars – one in Gaza and one in Ukraine – are unfolding simultaneously. They have nothing in common except this: both should be being seen as unambiguous in terms of which side is right and which wrong.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate has more to say about human freedom than any other Russian novel of the century. That's probably why it was locked up for so long.

The art of eating returns to Russia.

In our quest to understand the fundamental reality of aging, we should not overlook one short poem by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet.

Joseph Brodsky called himself “a Russian poet, an English essayist, and an American citizen.” He chose, embraced and mastered each of these identities with passion.

A prophet with honor in his own country and his own house. How generous of Providence, how apposite, and how unusual.

Products of Stalinist industrialization, an estimated 460 company towns grew around a single plant or factory. Now, many of these towns are struggling economically.

On the Kremlin’s efforts to rewrite history.

The Road provides an inside look into what it was like to live through the Soviet era, showing the realities of life in 20th century Russia through Vasily Grossman’s eyes.

In their search for a hero to guide them through the onrush of modernity, liberty, and choice, Russia’s emerging middle class could have done much worse than Boris Akunin’s Fandorin.

In The Winter Queen, American readers have a chance to savor Boris Akunin’s first detective novel.

As in largely post-Christian Europe, Russia is grappling with the spiritual vacuum that the Soviet Union left in its wake.

Changing demographics due to migration which have made Russia the largest ethnic Muslim country in Europe and Moscow a key international ISIL recruiting ground.

A new brand of radical Islam is rising in Russia, fueled by Russian fighters eager to perpetrate acts of terror at home.

Exiles from Putin’s Russia have a powerful role to play in what comes next in their country. It’s happened before.

By the nature of the regime he dismantled and the sheer number of people whom he freed, Mikhail Gorbachev may have been the greatest liberator of all time.

Boris Nemtsov led a very full life, politically and otherwise. And his legacy will likely be just as rich — and just as powerful — in death.

At the time, virtually no Western experts, Soviet or foreign officials, or even Soviet reformers foresaw the impending collapse of the USSR.

Very few people have shone as bright a light on the political and cultural realities of modern day Russia than former pollster Yuri Levada.

New leaders of former Soviet states may not be able to withstand the authoritarian temptation long enough for the democratic tradition to take firm root.

Most of the so-called “world leaders” at Putin’s Victory Day parade hailed from authoritarian regimes reliant on Russian support instead of democratic legitimacy.