Ukraine war is hurting Africa, South African President Ramaphosa tells Putin
In this handout photo provided by Photo host Agency RIA Novosti, Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pose for a photo during a meeting with a delegation of African leaders and senior officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, Saturday, June 17, 2023.Evgeny Biyatov/AP KYIV, Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with a group of leaders of African countries who traveled to Russia on a self-styled "peace mission" the day after they went to Ukraine, but the meeting ended with no visible progress.
Abandoned cats and dogs roam vacant streets lined with blasted apartment buildings, rubble and crumpled cars in Shebekino, a Russian border town pounded by shelling from Ukraine.A hair salon still smoldered last week.Every window in the blackened carcass of the police headquarters was blown out.Almost all of the 40,000 inhabitants had fled, officials said.
Everything Will Die': A Dam Blast Imperils Ukraine's Vital Lifeline
The view from villagers' gardens on the northern shore of Kakhovka Reservoir has changed significantly in the four days since an explosion destroyed the nearby dam and the waters receded.Mud flats stretch for hundreds of yards, and a long sandbar has emerged from the water reaching out across the bay.
In the Brezhnev era of Vladimir Putin's youth, May 9 was an occasion for Soviet militarism, a celebration of weapons and might.It could be forgotten, at least for a moment, that Leonid Brezhnev's war of choice would be fought and lost in Afghanistan less than two decades after he began the May 9 celebrations, much as what is likely Mr. Putin's last war is today being fought and lost in Ukraine.
Ronald Steel, Critic of American Cold War Policies, Dies at 92
Ronald Steel, a historian who derided America's Cold War foreign policies as a succession of misguided adventures and wrote a definitive biography of Walter Lippmann, the dean of 20th-century foreign policy realism, died on Sunday in Washington.He was 92.The death, at a nursing home, was caused by complications of dementia, said his longtime physician and friend, Michael Newman.
The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy review deeply personal study of an old-fashioned imperial war'
On 23 February 2022, Serhii Plokhy was in Vienna on sabbatical from his teaching job at Harvard.He went to bed hoping the disturbing news on CNN was somehow wrong.Like many others, including his country's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian historian was reluctant to believe Russia was about to launch a full-scale assault on his homeland.
The Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, a perspicacious liberal critic of the contemporary right and left, has an essay in the latest issue of Liberties Journal analyzing the appeal and perils of nostalgia.The appeal is universal, he argues: Like late-middle-aged adults flipping through vacation pictures that remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now, almost every society finds itself mythologizing and romanticizing its own origin or past.
The Final Blocks: Inside Ukraine's Bloody Stand for Bakhmut
After 10 months of one of the longest and bloodiest battles in Russia's war in Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers are now defending a shrinking half-circle of ruins in a western neighborhood of Bakhmut, only about 20 blocks wide and continually pounded with artillery.Pushed into this ever-smaller corner of the 16-square-mile city, the Ukrainian army is determined to hunker down and hold out, even as allies have quietly questioned the rationale for fighting block by block, sustaining significant casualties, in a city that is a devastating panorama of damaged buildings and rubble.