Russian president Vladimir Putin and Vietnamese president To Lam attend a reception at the Hanoi Opera House in Hanoi, Vietnam, on June 20 2024.
Gavril Grigorov / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool
The 2024 D-day commemorations sent a message of European unity but missed the opportunity to acknowledge Ukraine’s contribution to the defeat of Nazism.
The Soviet Union’s leading newspaper only mentioned D-Day in small print at the very top of its front page on June 7, 1944.
Pravda
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said D-Day ‘was not a game changer’ in World War II – and Soviet media delivered that message starting the day after the invasion.
A protester wearing a Georgian and European flag faces off with policemen blocking a street near the Parliament building in Tbilisi, Georgia, May 14 2024.
David Mdzinarishvili / EPA
Georgia is backsliding toward Russia’s sphere of influence.
Vladimir Putin speaking during a concert in Moscow’s Red Square to mark the 10th anniversary of Crimea’s reunification with Russia.
Sergei Ilnitsky / EPA
Since annexing Crimea ten years ago, Putin has set out to destroy non-Russian identities on the peninsular.
Muhammadsobir Fayzov, a Tajik suspect in the Moscow terror attack, sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow on March 24, 2024.
(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
News that four of the suspects in the Moscow terror attacks are Tajik will likely result in further demonization against people already facing poverty and discrimination, despite a glorious history.
A repeat of the Berlin airlifts of 1948 and 1949 would require a unity of political will that doesn’t exist in the west – at least, not yet.
Onlookers at a Key West, Fla., beach where the Army’s Hawk anti-aircraft missiles were positioned during the Cuban missile crisis.
Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Argentina is already feeling the sting of its new president’s policies – but Javier Milei is pressing ahead with ever-more radical plans to overhaul the economy.
In this photo released by Sputnik news agency on Feb. 9, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow.
(Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Why is there such a Russian focus on the Second World War? Because it’s used to justify authoritarian states, the rule of dictators like Putin and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.
The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
The whitewashing of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his crimes is crucial for understanding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialist ideology and goals.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a city on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s far east.
Kokhanchikov/Shutterstock
Putin is planning to bring a mass tourism industry to Russia’s wild far east.
Pavel Sulyandziga, a Russian Indigenous activist, poses with his family in 2017 in Yarmouth, Maine, where he awaits a decision on political asylum.
Derek Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
More than six years after Pavel Sulyandziga, an Indigenous activist from Russia, left the country to seek political asylum in the US, he continues to face harassment by the Russian government.
The head of Crimea’s Russian-backed government Sergey Aksyonov, is behind the reemergence of Smersh.
AP/Alamy
Cuba gets less attention as an espionage threat than Russia or China, but is a potent player in the spy world. Its intelligence service has already penetrated the US government at least once.
Cuban President Fidel Castro watches former U.S. President Jimmy Carter throw a baseball on May 14, 2002, in Havana, Cuba.
Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photography/Getty Images
Beloved in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter became the 39th US president and used his office to make human rights a priority throughout the world.
Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, Affiliate Professor at the Institute for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies, University of South Florida