Navigating the Vortex

The term that perhaps best describes the international impact of the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House is “disruption”. His tariff policy , his abolition of USAID , his questioning of the transatlantic alliance, and his attempted rapprochement with Russia have neither destroyed the liberal international order nor established anything new in its place. But the prospect...

After months of negotiations, the United States and Ukraine have finally signed their long-awaited so-called minerals deal on April 30. The agreement establishes a United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund “for the long-term reconstruction and modernization of Ukraine, in response to the large-scale destruction caused by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and in pursuit of a peacef...

After a second consecutive night of deadly Russian air attacks – against the capital Kyiv on April 23 and the eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad on April 24 – a ceasefire in Ukraine seems as unrealistic as ever. With Russian commitment to a deal clearly lacking, the situation is not helped by US president Donald Trump. He can’t quite seem to decide who he will ultimately blame if his efforts to a...

United States President Donald Trump is finding the reality of negotiations to bring about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine yet again less easy than he imagined on the campaign trail before returning to the White House for a second term. Having boasted about ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, he now finds himself close to the 100-day mark of his second term oscillating between threatenin...

After more than three years of war, the prospects of peace for Ukraine remain slim. There is no obvious, credible pathway even to a ceasefire, given Russia's refusal to extend a brief and shaky truce over Easter — despite the US , UK and Ukraine all signalling their support for this idea. And even if the considerable hurdles impeding a ceasefire deal could be overcome, a more fundamental problem w...

On April 3, flanked by the outgoing and incoming prime ministers of Greenland, the Danish leader, Mette Frederiksen, reiterated that “you cannot annex another country”. This was not a message sent to Russian president Vladimir Putin, but to Donald Trump, the president of one of her country’s closest allies, who has threatened to take over Greenland . Frederiksen, speaking in Greenland’s capital Nu...

By Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko After more than two hours on the phone on Tuesday, March 17, the US president, Donald Trump, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, agreed to nothing more than what can at best be described as confidence-building measures. The two leaders came away from the call with a limited prisoner exchange, a suspension of attacks on energy infrastructure, and the...

By Tetyana Malyarenko & Stefan Wolff On March 11, 2025, senior US and Ukrainian officials reached an agreement on an American proposal for a thirty-day ceasefire in the war in Ukraine after nine hours of negotiations behind closed doors in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This does not mean that the guns in the war will now immediately fall silent. No ceasefire agreement between the warring parties — Russia...

By Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff A week is a long time in politics, and with Donald Trump in the White House, it's even longer in international affairs. It has been eight days since the infamous shouting match on February 28 between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Ever since, the near-total breakdown in the relationship between the US and Ukraine and the almost irrep...

If there were international affairs Oscars in the category of biggest return for least investment, then the Russian president would have won hands down after the fiery blow-up between the US and Ukrainian presidents, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, in the White House last Friday (February 28, 2025). The meeting itself would probably win in the category of most unexpected screenplay, given the...

The visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on February 28, 2025, has not gone to plan. There were extraordinary scenes as a press conference between Zelensky and Trump descended into acrimony, with the US president loudly berating his opposite number, accusing him of “gambling with world war three” — a familiar Russian talking point . “You either make a deal or we’re ou...

There has been much and justified focus on the implications of a likely deal between US president Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and the overwhelmingly negative consequences this will have for Ukraine and Europe. But if Trump and Putin make a deal, there is much more at stake than Ukraine’s future borders and Europe’s relationship with the US. As we are nearing the third a...

The last week has left European leaders in little doubt that they will be mostly on their own when it comes to providing security guarantees to Ukraine when Russia and the US have made a deal on the future of the country. This will most likely be a deal negotiated largely in the absence of both Europe and Ukraine. And it will be a deal that looks, at least in the short term, more like a Russian vi...

European leaders are scrambling to respond to what looks like the end of reliable US protection of the continent. It is unclear what the “main European countries” (including the UK) might be able to agree beyond a hastily convened meeting in Paris on Monday February 17. But individual countries, including the UK and Germany , have come forward to put concrete offers on the table for Ukraine’s secu...

In an unprecedented decision on 6 December 2024, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the November 25 presidential elections after it received credible intelligence of large-scale external interference rigging the results of the first round in favour of a hardly-known far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu. His massive last-minute surge in support was largely blamed on Russian-controlled bots...

Donald Trump never fails to surprise. But the bombshell that he dropped at his press conference with visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 4, 2025, was of a completely different magnitude. He suggested that the United States take over the Gaza strip, develop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, and take a “long-term ownership position”. “This could be so magnificent,”...

Three weeks before the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, EU leaders came together for their first-ever meeting solely dedicated to defence issues. At that February 3, 2025 gathering in Brussels, it was clear that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was only the tip of an iceberg of security challenges that Europe faces. Not only has war on a scale not seen in Europe...

We are now well beyond the 24 hours that Donald Trump had promised it would take him to secure an end to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. But Trump’s first week since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, has nonetheless been a busy one regarding Ukraine. In his inauguration address, Trump only made a passing and indirect reference to Ukraine, criticising his predecessor Joe Biden of...

Even before taking office for his second term in the White House, Donald Trump gave some very clear indications of a renewed focus of American foreign policy on the western hemisphere. This included plans to buy Greenland , annex Canada and to resume control of the Panama Canal . Of these three Panama, for now, appears to be the one highest on the US president’s agenda. In his inauguration speech...

Donald Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, 2025, is widely seen as ushering in a period of significant upheaval for US foreign policy, and a change in the way diplomacy is done. Trump’s favoured style of bluster and threats against foreign leaders already seems to have paid off in helping to craft a peace deal , however shaky, in Gaza. The deal was negotiated by Biden and his team, in...

When Donald Trump first offered to buy Greenland in 2019, he was widely ridiculed and nothing much came of it, apart from a cancelled state visit to Denmark. Fast-forward six years and Trump’s renewed “bid” for the world’s largest island is back on the table. And with renewed vigour at that. In an interview on January 7, the incoming US president refused to rule out the use of force to take posses...

On December 31, 2024, the last contract that the Russian energy giant Gazprom had for the over-land supply of natural gas to Europe came to an end . This was the result of Ukraine refusing to renew the transit contract that had been in place since 2019 and contributed around $5bn to Gazprom’s annual revenue. Given that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, this was not an unreasonable decision for the g...

This is the podcast version of our analysis of the likely consequences of the end of over-land deliveries of Russian gas to Europe. You can read the original post, which includes a number of hyperlinks, here . We hope you'll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to this and other podcast editions via the website or on all major podcast pl...

This morning, the High-Level week of the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly gets under way in New York. This is the annual gathering of the heads of state and government of most of the UN’s member states. Notably absent this year, however, are four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—Russia, China, and France are not sending their presidents, and neither is th...

The 15th BRICS Summit , held in South Africa from the 22nd to the 24th of August was predictably underwhelming in its lack of concrete outcomes. The BRICS, even after the addition of six new members next year, will be anything but an alternative or rival to the G7. For all the talk about multipolarity, the BRICS, and their expansion, contribute further to the consolidation of a new bipolar order w...