New Atlanticist

Ukraine’s New President Must Begin Reforms Immediately

By Sabine Freizer

Poroshenko Must Partner With Prime Minister Yatsenyuk to Make Progress As Petro Poroshenko begins his first week as Ukraine’s president, his country needs him to begin difficult reforms immediately, even as his government struggles with the Russian-backed uprising in eastern Ukraine. The immediacy is enforced by a shriveling economy that is likely to lose between […]

DIRECT TRANSLATION: Russia’s Secret Fighters in Ukraine

By James Rupert

A Reporter Escorts 31 Bodies Home to Russia, Their Names Kept Hidden in Death as in Warfare President Vladimir Putin, and hence Russia’s state-run mass media, say the war in eastern Ukraine is a “people’s struggle” by ethnic Russians against attacks by ethnic Ukrainian fascists and Nazis backed by the United States. In the Kremlin’s […]

In the Fight With Russia, Can Volunteer Battalions Save Ukraine?

By Irena Chalupa

Only his family and closest friends know his real name and his face has never been shown in public. Television viewers have seen only his eyes and heard his calm voice, a voice that speaks many uncomfortable truths. Semen Semenchenko, is the nom de guerre of an ethnic Russian man from Donetsk, a father of […]

Chechnya’s Leader to Russian TV: ‘I Did Not Send’ the Chechen Militiamen Fighting in Ukraine

By Irena Chalupa

Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-allied president of Chechnya, has taken to Russian television to deny that he has sent any of his Chechen fighters to join the Russian-backed separatist militias in eastern Ukraine.

Nigeria’s Missing Daughters: What a Hashtag Might Do

By Justine Jablonska and James Rupert

On the night of April 14, 2014, armed men of Nigeria’s puritanical Boko Haram movement drove cargo trucks across the arid scrubland of northeast Nigeria, rumbling up an unlit, dirt road in the town of Chibok. They stopped at the Government Girls’ Secondary School. Shouting in the dark, they ordered the more than 200 boarding […]

To Liberate Ukraine, Get the Maidan Back in the Fight

By James Rupert

Let’s consider for a moment what has worked, and not worked, in Ukraine’s fight for freedom from Russian domination. What worked was the Maidan – the massive, determined and (almost completely) non-violent protest movement that overthrew the corrupt, Kremlin-dependent President Viktor Yanukovych. What has not worked has been the Ukrainian government’s patchwork counter-insurgency offensive against […]

Is the Crisis in Ukraine Pushing Sweden Towards NATO?

The crisis in Ukraine, as well as increased tensions in the Baltic Sea region, has stoked the public debate on security and defense in Sweden. On May 26, the Institute of International Affairs brought Nordic, European, and US perspectives together for a discussion on the future of Swedish defense cooperation and specifically its relationship with […]