Atlantic Council blogs

The KGB and Me

By Jeffrey Gedmin

We overlapped, Vladimir Putin and me. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985 as a 32-year-old KGB major. He was working undercover as a consular officer, recruiting academics, journalists, and business people to spy for the Soviet Union in the West. I was in Dresden and throughout communist East Germany often in those days; I […]

Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending

By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller, Spiegel

Even now, the German military is having trouble spending its money sensibly. The structures are simply too complicated…

The Heavens Are Home to More than One Hundred

By Robert McConnell

In the fall of 2013, students took to the Maidan (Independence Square) in Kyiv in protest. Their complaint was with then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who had reneged on his pledge to sign the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine and was instead negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Euromaidan was underway. Additional protesters streamed into the […]

The Nuclear Fallout of a Possible Trump-Putin Détente

By Mariana Budjeryn and Andreas Umland

So far, US President Donald Trump’s Russia policy remains a mystery. Does he want to set in motion a US-Russia rapprochement? If so, sanctions against Russia may be increasingly difficult to sustain. The Trump administration might judge Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity to be a bothersome yet insufficient impediment to mending fences with Putin and, […]

Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement: How a Once Moderate Group Joined Fateh al-Sham

By Hosam al-Jablawi

Since the Syrian regime’s forces seized control of the city of Aleppo, a significant conflict has emerged between opposition groups in the areas of northern Syria. Extremist groups are clashing with moderate groups over military and ideological issues, and many of these forces have split into two main camps. One, called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, is […]

Mattis: NATO is “is Under Threat on Multiple Fronts”

By Jim Mattis, Department of State

I just completed the defense ministerial, where I had the opportunity to engage in a bilateral discussion as well with a number of our fellow ministers, in there.  We all took part in a dinner last night, reaffirming our strong transatlantic bond

Who’s Up and Who’s Down in Eastern Ukraine?

By Oleksandr Nykonorov and Volodymyr Yermolenko

The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) are self-proclaimed entities that emerged in spring 2014 in eastern Ukraine thanks to massive Russian support. Ukraine’s attempts to retake them in spring and summer 2014 were stopped by a full-scale Russian military offensive that August. This more or less fixed the demarcation line between […]

TRADE in ACTION – February 16, 2017

By Global Business & Economics Program

This week, TRADEinACTION.. is about relations with Canada on both sides of the Atlantic: The European Parliament approved the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) on Wednesday after 7 years of negotiations with Canada, while Canadian PM Trudeau visits the White House; Steven Mnuchin gets confirmed as Treasury Secretary, Linda McMahon confirmed to head White House’s Small Business Administration, while […]

Opposition Leader Katumbi to Return to the DRC

Moïse Katumbi, a prominent opposition leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), will return to the country to continue the fight for the first peaceful, democratic transition in its history. “My heart is with the Congolese people,” Katumbi said on February 16 at a meeting hosted by the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “I […]