When did Secretary of State Antony Blinken last visit Moscow to talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or President Vladimir Putin? I will tell you. Never.

The war in Ukraine is a complicated tangle of three wars in one. It is a civil war between Ukraine’s European leaning west and its Russian leaning east. It is a war between Ukraine and Russia. And it is a war between Russia and NATO.

In a blow to Ukraine, the World Court ruled Russia didn’t finance terrorism in Donbass and the court refused to blame Moscow for the downing of Flight MH17.

For over a decade, experts have noted that Russian political culture has been drifting away from the pragmatic, technocratic authoritarianism that characterized the first stage of the Vladimir Putin era, which was open to all sorts of cooperation with the West.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the machine is starved — it’s close to a trillion dollar payday

“Where have you gone, Henry Kissinger? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you!”

An interview with Russian opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky.

M.K. Bhadrakumar raises the contemporary relevance of the Nazi effort to exterminate Russians by enforced starvation during the Siege of Leningrad.

Brown University / Watson Institute / Costs of War Research

A lady called Maria Mateiciuc provides this account of her recent visit to Ukraine, which was then published on the respected and highly credible Johnson’s Russia List site: