Ukraine

The Frontline States: Conversations and Observations About Russia’s Other War in Europe

  All Soviet efforts…will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control. This is only in line with basic Soviet instinct that there can be no compromise with rival...

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Wagner’s Head is Dead, Now Bury the Body

Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, alongside Wagner Group’s co-founder and operational commander, Dmitry Utkin. They leave behind a business empire and thousands of security contractors in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Kremlin has...

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Biden’s Bombs: The Dance of Ethics and Interests

On July 7, 2023, at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, operators carefully placed an M55 rocket filled with nerve agent onto a machine that drained and neutralized the deadly material. America destroyed its last chemical weapon—the final...

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Expert Commentary: Prigozhin’s Death and the Future of Putin’s Rule

Editor’s Note: The head of Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is presumed dead as a result of a plane crash on August 23. Below, FPRI experts examine what the controversial mercenary boss’s death means for Russia, Putin, and the war...

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Russian Disinformation in Africa: No Door on this Barn

In 2018, Yale scholar Timothy Snyder called Russian information operations in the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, “the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare.” Likewise, recent advances of Russian disinformation in Africa have resulted in some...

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Fighting to Win: Ukraine, Russia, and the War for Survival

  Download PDF Introduction  I arrived in Kyiv this July after a thirteen-hour overnight train ride in a clean but austere Soviet-era railway car. Since I couldn’t purchase a return ticket in Poland, immediately upon arrival at the train...

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The Folly of Merging the Indo-Pacific and Europe

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has embarked upon an ambitious endeavor: containing its two most powerful rivals, China and Russia, at the same time. Central to this strategy is the imperative of...

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Wagner Group Licks its Wounds in Belarus

Most analysts have labeled Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion and the Wagner Group mutiny a failure. And in many ways, that’s true. Indeed, Prigozhin and the contingent of Wagner fighters that eschewed signing contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defence...

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Drone Wars over Moscow

Twice this week, drones attacked a building housing government ministries in Moscow. The Kremlin immediately blamed Ukraine. Ukrainian officials remained coy, not directly claiming responsibility for the strikes but noting that Moscow “is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged...

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The Primacy Trap

In the 2010s, the global landscape changed. The Arab Spring, the Russian occupation of Crimea, and China’s national security law in Hong Kong were indicative of a profound change in the global system. The era of the unipolar moment,...

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