Humanitarian initiatives can enhance American “soft power,” supporters say, which can buy the United States good will and leverage in countries across the world for a comparatively small fraction of federal spending. In 2023, U.S.A.I.D. funding represented .07 percent of the U.S. federal budget. In 2021, before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for .04…
The time had come to bend the knee — or at least bend to reality. A delegation of Russian diplomats arrived last Tuesday in a caravan of white SUVs for a summit in Damascus and an unenviable assignment: lay the groundwork for Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, less than two months after…
North Korean soldiers who joined their Russian allies in battle against Ukrainian forces have been pulled off the front lines after suffering heavy causalities, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials. The North Korean troops, sent to bolster Russian forces trying to push back a Ukrainian offensive inside Russia’s borders, have not been seen at the…
Internal political tensions in Ukraine have been rising in anticipation of a cease-fire that might lead to elections. This week, they burst into the open with a striking public rebuke of President Volodymyr Zelensky by the mayor of Kyiv. In a video address issued on Wednesday, the mayor of the country’s capital, Vitali Klitschko, accused…
At a campaign rally in Virginia in June, Donald Trump hinted at the new kind of relationship America might have with Russia, China and North Korea if he were to be re-elected. “If you have a smart president, they’re not enemies,” Mr. Trump said. “You’ll make them do great.” Mr. Trump has made no secret…
When Ilya Rusinov returned to the Russian work force after rehabilitating a vertebra damaged in the Ukraine war, his first job was teaching in a school. But he had also launched a side project, a patriotic club he called Zveno, or “Squad,” that provides military training for different age groups, including teenagers. After struggling at…
They have been circling each other carefully for seven days now — sending out invitations to talk, mixing a few jabs with ego-stroking, suggesting that the only way to end the Ukraine war is for the two of them to meet, presumably without the Ukrainians. President Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, whose relationship was always…
Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally. “Don’t use the word election to describe…
When a 28-year-old volunteer named Nikolai stepped onto a sandy beach on Russia’s Black Sea coast in a hazmat suit just before New Year’s Eve, he was so overwhelmed by the amount of thick oil film that he almost broke down. He and other volunteers were tasked with shoveling away the oil-drenched sand, but “the…
At the start of his second term President Trump has positioned himself at the crest of a global wave of hard-line conservative populism, offering fuel and inspiration to surging nationalist parties in the European Union and beyond. Those parties are generally united by tough stances against immigrants, support for what they call “traditional” values in…