For more than three years, the Kremlin’s war machine operated under a comforting geopolitical illusion: that the vast, landlocked expanse of the Caspian Sea served as an inviolable sanctuary. While...
MOSCOW — For nearly a quarter-century, the architecture of Vladimir Putin’s rule has projected an image of unyielding monolithic strength. From the outside, the Kremlin has operated as an impenetrable...
TEHRAN — For decades, the existential threats to the Islamic Republic of Iran were charted along familiar geographic coordinates: the narrow chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic expanse...
MOSCOW — For over two decades, the architectural design of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic regime has rested on a fundamental, brutal arithmetic: absolute personal loyalty exchanged for absolute impunity, lavish financial...
MOSCOW — History, it has often been said, rhymes. But for Vladimir Putin, the month of August has a way of sounding less like a clever verse and more like...
MOSCOW — Along the sprawling highways and suburban byways of the Russian Federation, a quiet, orderly patience that has defined generations of civic life is beginning to fracture. For the...
The narrow, sun-scorched ribbon of water separating the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa has long borne a haunting moniker: Bab el-Mandeb, translating literally from Arabic as the “Gate...
KYIV — For nearly four years, the narrow strip of sand known as the Kinburn Spit served as an unyielding thorn in Ukraine’s southern flank. Jutting out between the Black...
MOSCOW AND GROZNY — In the theater of modern authoritarianism, few acts have been staged with as much cinematic precision as the alliance between Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov. For...
BEIJING AND MOSCOW — The grand geopolitical alignment that Vladimir Putin spent years constructing is fracturing under the crushing weight of economic insolvency and hard-nosed transactionalism, with Beijing signaling a...