New Atlanticist

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.

A Strategy for Syria & Iraq

By Barry Pavel

The spread of the Syria crisis to engulf Iraq was predicted and predictable.  Some have called the Syria conflict a “factory for extremism.”  For years, many have been urging more robust US leadership and action in this crisis – not “boots on the ground” but using US military forces in a coalition with our allies and partners to […]

A Ukrainian Filmmaker in Prison for Opposing Russia’s Occupation of Crimea

By Irene Chalupa

Oleg Sentsov Waved Ukrainian Flags, Now is in Moscow’s Former KGB Prison Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, a native of Crimea, won wide acclaim a couple of years back with a sensitive docu-drama about a teenager caught between his success in the virtual world of video games and his struggle in the real world around […]

DIRECT TRANSLATION: ‘Donbas, the Heart of Russia’

By Irena Chalupa

A Commentator Close to Putin Writes: Unitary Ukraine is Finished A prominent Russian business magazine, Ekspert, publishes a lead article this week by two highly placed Russian policy thinkers writing about Ukraine’s southeastern provinces and proclaiming, “We won’t abandon them.” That emotional headline might represent more than just another piece of nationalist opinion-making, for the […]

Storify: #ACAbdullah with Afghanistan Presidential Candidate Dr. Abdullah Abdullah

The stakes could not be higher. Afghanistan faces an historic presidential election on June 14 with a runoff between frontrunners Dr. Ashraf Ghani and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah.