Ukraine

In the first scene of Ukrainian President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky’s hit sitcom Servant of the People, three faceless oligarchs stand above Kyiv’s Maidan Square one week before the presidential election. They agree to stop competing with one another to buy...

As Ukrainians prepare to elect a president on March 31, the West and the East wait to see which candidate will emerge victorious and what, if any, impact he or she will have on the direction of the country’s...

Many Western scholars studying Russia and policymakers dealing with Russia have long found it an exhausting and bewildering endeavor. Winston Churchill famously described it in 1939 as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” More recently, Bobo...

Long before the Kerch Strait incident in October 2018, Russia had already begun to strengthen the forces in its Southern Military District, which spans from near Volgograd to Russia’s border with Georgia and Azerbaijan. Naturally, that has caused concern...

As Ukraine’s March 2019 presidential election nears, the Kremlin has not masked its interest in the outcome. Indeed, in November, nearly five years after Kyiv sanctioned Russia for the annexation of Crimea, Moscow finally decided to respond with retaliatory...

The People’s Republic of China is actively engaging Black Sea littoral states through various initiatives to open new markets for Chinese goods, facilitate the acquisition of valuable or strategic local industries, and offer loans for large development projects. These...

On November 25, Russian border service patrol boats opened fire on two Ukrainian navy gunboats and rammed a Ukrainian tugboat as they attempted to transit through the Kerch Strait from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov, a...

Russia and Ukraine have spent the last four years locked in a conflict with many fronts, from the battlefields of Donbas to the servers of Ukrainian businesses. This paper will examine one under-studied front: the dispute between Russia and...

In August 2015, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense officially launched a comprehensive effort to overhaul the country’s armed forces as conflict razed through the country’s Donbas region. Three years later, fighting capabilities have reached their highest levels since independence...

Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the President the power to negotiate alliances with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”  Presidents made limited use of that power in the first century and a half of...