Right-wing populist Georgescu won the first election round, but the results were canceled, he was arrested, and is not allowed to run in the ‘do-over’

Through the past three year period, Moscow claimed that it faced an existential threat from the US-led proxy war in Ukraine. But in the past six weeks, this threat perception has largely dissipated. The US President Donald Trump has made a heroic attempt to change his country’s image to a portmanteau of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ with whom Moscow can be friendly despite the backlog of a fundamental dislike or suspicion.

The NATO-Ukrainian Trans-Atlantic Coalition is crashing. NATO’s chief force and benefactor, the U.S., has abandoned the Coalition. The U.S. may do so regarding NATO itself. Thus, Europe moves to oppose the new U.S. administration of President Donald S. Trump’s push for rapprochement with Russia and an end to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War over NATO expansion and other emncroachments on Russian national security interests in and around Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is seeking to militarize a weak Europe in order to replace waning U.S. support. The trend is towards dissolution between and within all or at least most of the the forces involved in the NATO-Russia Ukrtainian War, bringing chaos, uncertainty, miscalculation, and a larger more destructive and degrading war closer, despite and, in. part, in spite of Trump’s peace intitiatives. The international level of the Ukrainian conflict is shifting from a bilateral confrontation between the West and Russia to a trilateral confrontation involving Russia, the U.S., and a new European-Ukrainian axis, with each riven by divisions generated by the intra-Atlantic cold civil war. This begs the question: Will Europe become a separate pole in the international system’s new multipolar stucture, adding to the U.S, and Sin-Russian pole?

The American Chamber of Commerce in Russia (AmCham Russia) is calling for the removal of sanctions on the country’s aviation sector, citing a “humanitarian necessity” to prevent potential plane crashes, AmCham Russia president Robert Agee said in an interview published Friday.

There is a mounting campaign by Ukraine and its Western supporters to make certain that any peace accord ending NATO’s proxy war against Russia contains reliable “security guarantees” for Kyiv. A settlement without such binding assurances, they argue, would amount to a surrender that rewarded Russia’s aggression against its neighbor.

The eminent Russianist Richard Sakwa is emeritus professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book (his fourth since 2020) is called The Culture of the Second Cold War which examines the prevailing attitudes and ideologies behind the drive for conflict with Russia.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer is convinced that the U.S. government under Trump wants to leave Europe to concentrate on China. Germany, he says, must assume responsibility for its own security.

Why does he want to join the alliance if he believes Russia plans to attack it?

As Trump commits to max pressure 2.0, Moscow is expressing interest in mediating a new deal

“Peace throught strength”