American Committee for US-Russia Accord

At long last, a European leader has said what should have been apparent from the very first: that the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran and Iran’s retaliation against energy exports from the Persian Gulf, make it urgently necessary for European Union countries to normalize relations with Russia and resume buying Russian energy.

In light of our recent wild rampage abroad, we need to revisit events in Russia from several weeks ago. They demand a full and open U.S. national investigation.

The years between 1989 and 1991 were an apocalyptic time in which old rules, values and habits were overturned, and flux became the new norm.

A peaceful settlement in Ukraine will have profound consequences for the entire European continent. The European members of the political West will find themselves at a crossroads: either acknowledge the transformed security realities and engage in equitable, meaningful dialogue with Russia—taking its legitimate concerns into account—or prepare for a protracted confrontation with the aim of military revenge. The latter path would represent the worst possible embodiment of the historical analogy with twentieth-century Finland, writes Valdai Discussion Club Programme Director Anton Bespalov.

French leaders and the French people should be very cautious about embracing extended deterrence obligations.

A growing majority of Ukrainians would now back a peace deal involving territorial concessions—rising to 61% overall and 86% among likely voters—if tied to EU membership by 2027, security guarantees and reconstruction, underscoring how “legitimacy & question wording matter hugely” 

Breaking international law seems to be a feature, and not a bug, of Trump’s actions, consistent with his admission that he is expressly not guided by international law, norms, traditions, or common decency, but by “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Moscow has insisted that there can be no compromise on the entirety of Donbas and Crimea being part of Russia. That demand is a difficult one for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to acquiesce to, and it is unfair. But little in war is fair, and nothing in this war has been fair.

During the interview, De Wever said he advocates normalising relations with Moscow, in part to facilitate access to cheap oil and gas supplies.

How did the United States rise from a fragile collection of colonies to the dominant power in the international system, and what does that history reveal about today’s great-power competition with China and Russia?

In this conversation hosted by the University of Chicago Graham School, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer – one of the world’s leading scholars of international relations theory and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics – examines 250 years of American foreign policy. Beginning with the founding, he contrasts the United States’ liberal language of natural rights with the hard nationalism of a new state determined to secure its independence, expand across the continent, and keep rival powers out of the Western Hemisphere.

A joint interview with scholar Pascal Lottaz.

What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders?

The war reflects the clash of competing logics and is deeply rooted in contesting conceptions of post–Cold War international politics, says Sakwa in his forthcoming book.

The authors finds that countries that lose wars backslide “bigly” on the democracy front. Since the US has nearly always lost wars since World War II (and we fail to acknowledge that that was much more a Russian win than ours) save the dubious success in the Iraq War, our accelerating slide into authoritarianism is consistent with their findings.

Western travelers to Moscow often remark, with complete justification, on the sense of normalcy that the government has been able to sustain four years into the most dangerous, destructive war in Europe since 1945.

It has been several weeks since the subject was raised regarding the possibility of a new hard Russian line in the on-going talks to end the catastrophic NATO-Russia Ukrainian War.

Does the West bear no responsibility for a war lasting years, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead or injured on both sides, and much of Ukraine’s economy in ruins?

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

The extraordinary disclosures are contained in emails that Simons and his chief of staff at Labour Together sent to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, in 2024. A spokesperson for Simons, a Cabinet Office minister, said: “These claims are untrue.”