Fredrik Wesslau is a distinguished policy fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and a board member of The Reckoning Project.
BRICS leaders will be meeting in South Africa for their annual summit later this month. Absent, however, will be Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
After months of insisting he would attend the annual gathering for the member countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, Putin finally decided against traveling, as the South African government couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov today warned the war between Russia and the West is no longer hybrid but is ‘almost a real one’, as he blasted Ukraine’s allies for sending weapons to the war-torn country.
Western nations have pledged to send billions of pounds worth of arms to Kyiv and Poland’s prime minister said today his government would ask Germany for permission to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine – and planned to send them whether or not Berlin agreed.
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LONDON — It was in the unlikely surrounds of Port Vale Football Club, a small town and perpetually lower-league team in central England, that the course of British political history was set.
In a rented boardroom overlooking the 15,000-capacity Vale Park pitch, Liz Truss was being put through her paces. Around the table were two of her most trusted aides, taking turns to roleplay the one man standing in her path to 10
If Ursula von der Leyen’s five-year term can be likened to a soccer match, her team is heading for the half-time break with the scores even and a few bruised shins (mostly from self-inflicted errors).
It’s been a wild ride.
When they took the field in December 2019, von der Leyen’s squad of commissioners envisioned a diplomatic offensive in which Brussels would sneak a few goals past its chief geopolitical counterparts, China and the United States. Tactically, the formation was
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BERLIN — Russia’s war against Ukraine has thrust Germany’s establishment into the throes of a tortured process of introspection, self-doubt and recrimination.
After years of lecturing the West that a bit of Ostpolitik was all that was needed to keep Russia in check, Germany’s political, media and academic elites are now obsessing over a new question: How could we have been so wrong?
Rarely has a country’s confidence about itself and its place
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The country’s complicated commercial ties to
Russia involve a lot more than just natural gas.
Illustration by Ricardo Tomás for POLITICO
BERLIN — Until just before the bombs began to fall, it was the most coveted ticket on corporate Germany’s calendar: tea with Vladimir Putin.
The annual gathering — at the president’s Sochi residence or in the Kremlin — offered Germany’s blue-chip CEOs a rare opportunity to speak to the Russian leader, listen
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are strange bedfellows — sometimes close strategic partners, but sometimes bitter regional adversaries.
For now, the Turkish leader is casting himself as a middleman, as he visited the Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus waterfront last week to personally welcome Ukrainian and Russian negotiators gathering for peace talks.
In assuming this role, Erdoğan is treading a delicate tightrope. The relationship between Turkey and
