Navigating the Vortex

As the war in the Middle East spreads and intensifies , the one in Ukraine continues . While geographically some 2,500 km (1,600 miles) apart, the impact of US president Donald Trump’s latest military adventure on the Russian war against Ukraine will be acutely felt across several areas. In the short term, the Kremlin will probably feel emboldened to double down on its aggression, but this is unli...

As Ukraine heads into a fifth year of defending itself against the unprovoked Russian full-scale invasion, the prospects of a just and sustainable peace agreement remain distant. On the ground, the land war continues to be in a stalemate, with the pace of Russian territorial gains now slower than some of the most protracted battles of trench warfare during the First World War. In the air war, Mosc...

On 13 February 2026, we spoke with John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury to mark the publication of the latest edition of Ethnopolitics — a special issue on Contesting Power-sharing: Contentious Politics in Divided Societies , co-edited by John and Simon Mabon , to which Tamirace contributed the article “ How Do Semi-Authoritarian Regimes Defeat Uprisings? Lebanon’s 2019 Uprising and the Dramaturgical...

The 25th Winter Meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) should have been a moment of celebration and of reflection on past successes in advancing the organisation’s broader goals of comprehensive, cooperative, and indivisible security . Yet, much like the 50th anniversary of the organisation in 2025, it was anything but. The OSCE con...

The inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s board of peace in Washington on February 19 caps a busy week for US diplomacy — though not necessarily for the country’s professional diplomats, who have been largely excluded from the close-knit circle of the US president’s personal envoys: his former real-estate business partner Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Earlier in the week, Witkoff and K...

In a surprise announcement on February 10, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that his administration was preparing to hold presidential elections in Ukraine before the middle of May. Alongside the elections, a referendum on a peace deal with Russia is also likely to be held. This is a dramatic shift in Zelensky’s stance: the president had long resisted elections under conditions of war...

Russia, Ukraine and the US have met for a second time in as many weeks to discuss a possible cessation of hostilities. The meeting got off to the same familiar and depressing start as the first one : on February 3, the night before the three sides gathered in Abu Dhabi, Russia launched a massive barrage of 521 drones and cruise missiles, once again targeting critical civilian infrastructure in Ukr...

The first official and direct three-way talks between the United States, Russia and Ukraine since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 had been a rare sign of progress in an otherwise bleak start to the new year. But they ended without a breakthrough on January 24, with follow-up discussions before too long likely, but not certain. It is hardly surprising that a peace agr...

The week that marked the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House for a second term as US president was particularly turbulent, even by his standards and especially for the transatlantic alliance. If there was even a hint of Trump being capable of self-reflection, one could add that it was a rather embarrassing week for him — on at least three counts. First, after much bluster...

Even before marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, United States President Donald Trump doubled down on his controversial and highly damaging bid to take over Greenland, warning on January 19 that being snubbed for the Nobel peace prize last year has made him no longer obliged to think “purely of peace” . Three days later, during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Dav...

It is hard to believe that Donald Trump has only been back in the White House for a year. His accomplishments are many — but most of them are of questionable durability or benefit, including for the United States. Even his UN-endorsed 20-point ceasefire and transition plan for Gaza released on September 29, 2025, is now in danger of being subsumed in yet another grandiose fantasy of the American p...

Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine passed a significant milestone on January 13. It has now outlasted the 1,418 days it took Vladimir Putin’s notorious predecessor, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, to bring his war against Nazi Germany to a successful conclusion. The two wars are hard to compare in any reasonable way. But there are nonetheless some important parallels wor...

The US military operation in Venezuela in the early hours of January 3, rang the new year in with a bang — even by the current standards of American foreign policy. After months of military build-up and planning, US president Donald Trump gave the go-ahead for the apprehension of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Operation Absolute Resolve — the codename for this successful effort to cap...

United States President Donald Trump has never been particularly discreet about wanting regime change in Venezuela. After months of sabre-rattling, the direct “ large scale strike ” on the South American country came in the early hours of January 3 — and involved a special forces operation apprehending Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. This demonstration of unconstrained force is the first ti...

Over the last few days, Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the town of Siversk in the Donetsk region. This brings Russian troops to within 30km of Sloviansk which is the most important hub in the northern part of the so-called fortress belt of cities in Ukraine’s east. This latest withdrawal caps a year of important territorial losses for Kyiv. With assistance from North Korean troops, Russia ha...

By agreeing to provide a loan of €90 billion for the years 2026-2027 “based on EU borrowing on the capital markets backed by the EU budget headroom”, EU leaders have set the direction for the future of support for Ukraine. At stake at yesterday’s meeting of the European Council was Kyiv’s ability to continue to defend itself against Russia’s ongoing aggression — as well as the credibility of the E...

Ukraine is under unprecedented pressure, not only on the battlefield but also on the domestic and diplomatic fronts. Each of these challenges on their own would be difficult to handle for any government. But together — and given there is no obvious solution to any of the problems the country is facing — they create a near-perfect storm. It’s a storm that threatens to bring down the Ukrainian gover...

On 14 November 2025, we spoke to George Kyris about his article on the recognition of Palestine. George is an Associate Professor in International Politics at the University of Birmingham and the co-founder and chair of the ECPR Research Network on Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict . You can find out more about him here . You can access the article we discuss in this episode here for free. The s...

Land for peace, take it or leave it. A deal proposed by the United States to end Russia’s war in Ukraine — negotiated in secret with Moscow — initially appeared to be an ultimatum to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy until his US counterpart Donald Trump said on Saturday (November 22) that it was not his “final offer”. Three days later, he reiterated that his original deadline was off. Kyiv...

Renewed talk of no-longer secret negotiations between the Kremlin and the White House over a plan to end the war in Ukraine that heavily favours Russia has added to a broader sense of doom in Kyiv and among its western partners. Coupled with the continuing fallout from a sweeping corruption scandal among Ukraine’s elites and stalling efforts in Brussels to provide additional financial aid to Kyiv,...

Considering Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin now meet semi-regularly — twice already in 2025 — the annual meetings of their heads of government could be considered fairly unremarkable, routine events. When Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited China on November 3 and 4 at the invitation of Premier Li Qiang, it was the 30th iteration of a practice that star...

The latest corruption scandal that has engulfed Ukraine could not have come at a worse time or in a more delicate sector of the economy for the increasingly embattled government of Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine’s military is now clearly on the back foot in several key sectors of the frontline. Meanwhile, Russia’s campaign to devastate Ukraine’s energy sector is putting enormous pressure on the count...

Ukraine is having a tougher than usual time at the moment. On the frontlines, the battle for Pokrovsk is raging , and it does not look like Ukraine is winning it. Nor do things look good for the country’s energy resilience after months of an intensive Russian air campaign targeting key infrastructure. According to the UN , this could trigger another major humanitarian crisis in the already war-rav...

Following another week of diplomatic flip-flopping in the United States, Ukraine’s European allies did not disappoint when it came to the fulsomeness of their diplomatic rhetoric. Yet concrete action to strengthen the capabilities Ukraine needs to win the war remained at a snail’s pace. After a less than successful meeting in the White House on October 17 between the American and Ukrainian preside...

Within twenty-four hours last week, US president Donald Trump performed yet another pivot in his approach to the Russian war against Ukraine. It is almost customary for him now to first express anger and frustration with his Russian counter-part, Vladimir Putin, then to threaten severe consequences, and finally to find some imaginary silver lining that, in his considered view alone, justifies back...