New Atlanticist

DIRECT TRANSLATION: Meet the Ex-Convicts, Bullies, and Armed Bikers Who Helped Seize Crimea

By Irena Chalupa

Putin Secretly Decorates Russian Volunteers Who Backed Moscow’s Troops in Takeover Russian President Vladimir Putin bestowed state honors in recent months on more than 300 Russians who it declared had done an outstanding job in helping Russia’s seizure from Ukraine of the Crimean peninsula. But the happy news has been kept strangely quiet. The official […]

Storify: #FutureNATO with German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen visited Washington, DC on June 19th and spoke at an Atlantic Council event on how best to secure Europe amid rapid change and turbulence.

Disarm Russia’s Gas Weapon: Call Russia’s Bluff and Stem Ukraine’s Corruption

By Matthew J. Bryza

Europe Should Demand That Russia Sell Its Gas at One Basic Price for All EU States In a moment of friendly candor, one of Russia’s most senior diplomats once told me privately, “We Russian diplomats negotiate hard because we know we are weak.  When we have an issue on which we know we are strong, […]

Iraq: The Hard Questions

By Bilal Y. Saab

Bilal Y. Saab, senior fellow for Middle East Security with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, provides his perspective on the US role in the Iraq crisis, what’s at stake for US national security interests, and what it will really take to stabilize the situation.

The Battle For Mariupol

By Askold Krushelnycky

MARIUPOL – Despite other setbacks, a good piece of news for Ukraine’s government last week was its re-assertion of control over the southern city of Mariupol, an industrial port in Donetsk province that had been taken over by Russian-backed militias fighting to separate the southeastern region of Donbas from Ukraine. The recapture of Mariupol dramatized […]

Governing Under Siege

By Irene Chalupa

More than two months after Russian-backed separatist militias seized government buildings in the capital of Ukraine’s southeastern most province, its Kyiv-appointed governor, Iryna Veryhina, runs her administration, as best she can, from, well, a provincial city. Veryhina was thrust to the front lines of the battle between Russia and Ukraine last month, when Ukraine’s interim […]

DIRECT TRANSLATION: Dispatch From A Depopulated Luhansk

By Irene Chalupa

The anti-terrorist campaign is encircling Luhansk ever tighter. The number of people remaining in the city is growing smaller, and those that remain keenly feel the foreshadowing of certain battles to come, writes Luhansk native Valentyn Torba in a blog post for the Ukrainian daily newspaper Den.