Estonia’s parliament enacted a law on May 15 enabling the use of frozen Russian assets to compensate Ukraine for the damages caused by Russia’s war. Kyiv and its Western allies have discussed using around $300 billion in Russian assets held in Western accounts to support Ukraine. As of
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Kremlin has sought to play the nuclear card – both to frighten Ukraine and to deter the West from assisting. Kyiv and its partners cannot ignore Moscow’s nuclear threats, but they should understand that the Russian leadership does not
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on May 30, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. Nataliia Kalinichenko treasures her newspaper archives, with clippings dating back to the 1940s,
South Africans will flock to the polls on May 29 for the country’s most important general election since the advent of its non-racial democracy in April 1994. According to most opinion polls, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, Africa’s oldest liberation movement, is expected to fall below
As the West’s political leaders become increasingly preoccupied with the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, they risk losing their geopolitical influence in a small but strategically significant Black Sea country: Georgia. On April 29, in one of his rare public appearances, Bidzina Ivanishvili – the founder and de facto
Earlier this month, the European Union celebrated the 20th anniversary of its biggest-ever enlargement, which brought 10 new members into the bloc. That event remains a potent reminder of the EU’s potential to advance peace and unity across the European continent. But, at a time of deep internal divisions
Iran’s recent missile attacks against Israel serve as a stark reminder of the growing audacity of petro-dictatorships in flouting international norms and undermining global peace. Iran, emboldened by Russia’s relentless and indiscriminate assaults on Ukraine – targeting everything from hospitals and kindergartens to power stations with Iranian-made missiles and
Volodymyr Zelensky’s five-year term as Ukraine’s president expired on May 20. For most Ukrainian citizens, including the country’s constitutionalists, the path forward is clear: Zelensky should continue as president until martial law in Ukraine ends and new elections can take place. But critics argue that Zelensky and
Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to revive the Soviet Union, but two can play this game. To complete the Kremlin’s grotesque historical reenactment, the West should launch a new economic Cold War in response. In addition to the war of aggression waged against the civilians and cities of
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a clear signal to the West last week: China stands firmly behind Russia. Putin made his first foreign trip since his inauguration to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping on May 16. The visit came after a cabinet reshuffle in Russia the week prior,
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on May 20, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. When Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine began, Anastasia Boyko considered fleeing Ukraine to
Russian forces have encountered a new enemy in the Black Sea: Ukraine’s arsenal of naval kamikaze drones. These deceptively small unmanned vehicles have targeted Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since September 2022, picking off Russian battleships one by one. The latest of Ukraine’s maritime conquests was the Russian
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on May 12, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. Prisoner negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are one of the many things obscured
New U.S.-supplied weapons and money are now on their way to Ukraine. Whether to provide additional military aid was a matter of debate for many months in the U.S. Congress. In the end, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson stared down the most right-wing elements
U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians (REPO) Act on April 24. Largely overshadowed in the media by the groundbreaking approval of $61 billion in aid for Ukraine that same day, the REPO Act is equally crucial. However, the REPO Act has not
“Do you cooperate with independent Russian journalists to reach a Russian audience?” We at the Kyiv Independent hear variations of this question at every event we attend, and the audience rarely likes our answer: “No, we don’t; we don’t see the point.” A beautiful room in the old
As Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine rages on, the stability of neighboring Belarus, which has been backing Russia's aggression, appears to be fracturing. Has Russian President Vladimir Putin's war of aggression opened a Pandora's box for a regime that is practically a remote wing of the Kremlin? Recall that, in
Even as the 38th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster has come and gone, the nuclear threat posed by Moscow continues to grow. Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy company, has a hand in this – namely, by financing Russia’s war against Ukraine, fostering global energy dependencies that threaten to
The news this past week was undoubtedly met with relief in Kyiv and with grief in the Kremlin. The U.S. Congress finally broke its six-month logjam and approved a new package of military aid for Ukraine (as well as for Israel and Taiwan). And the breakthrough came only days
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on April 29, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. While most Ukrainians take shelter during Russian attacks, Ukrainian soldier Kostiantyn Chernyshov heads
You can pre-order Illia Ponomarenko's book, "I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv," on Bloomsbury or Amazon. See the end of the article for more information on the book's release. The Battle of Kyiv, one of the critical events of Russia’s full-scale invasion of
The collapse of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure last year due to Russia’s war brought the entire country to its knees. And while Ukraine was, for the most part, spared from widespread blackouts this winter, Russian forces are once again targeting critical infrastructure. Russia resumed missile and drone attacks on
Immediately after World War II, the Paris-exiled Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyc (of Lithuanian origins, born in Minsk) coined a phrase that would come to define Poland’s foreign policy toward its eastern neighbors: “There will be no independent Poland without an independent Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine.” Since the fall of
Although local elections often don’t make international news headlines or involve widely recognizable household names, anyone who cares about the state of liberal democracy would do well to pay attention to them. In Turkey, for example, recent elections not only revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s autocratic president,
Drone combat in Russia’s war against Ukraine is changing warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used at an unprecedented scale for which neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian armies were quite prepared. Both militaries have made significant progress with respect to drones, sometimes modernizing them in the midst
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on April 14, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. In a country at war, death is all around. But Pavel Goldin is
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), presented a "revolutionary" order on March 27: “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” The order claims: “From a spiritual and moral point of view, a special military operation (Russia’s term for its war against Ukraine)
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on April 11, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. On more than one occasion, I've gotten under the covers utterly exhausted from
There’s so much news and noise on the issue of using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine, so I thought it useful to put out a quick Q&A on the issue. How much money are we talking about? There are around $320 billion in Russian central bank assets currently
Once the “sick man of Europe,” Germany seems to be under the weather once again. That might be putting it mildly: much as it did in the late 1990s, Germany is staring down the barrel of “stagflation” – high inflation and unemployment combined with stagnant demand and low growth. A lack
TORONTO – As NATO marks its 75th anniversary, the idea that it is free-riding on the United States remains a live issue. While former U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized America’s transatlantic allies for spending too little on defense, it is worth remembering that presidents going back to
Russia’s war against Ukraine is shattering the conventions of warfare in many ways. One of the most illustrative examples is the systematic destruction of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) by Ukraine, a country that has virtually no navy of its own. The Ukrainian military’s use of coastal
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