Commentary

Ukrainian bravery and sacrifice, aided by significant support from NATO and European Union member states, helped stave off an early Ukrainian defeat. However, it is now critical to redouble allied efforts in order to help Ukraine evict the Russians and create the conditions for sustainable peace. This includes the delivery of weapons that allies have been reluctant to give to Ukrainians, but, more importantly, NATO should intensify its efforts and take an active role in the defense of Ukraine in response to Russia’s illegal war. Fortunately, the West already has the means and structure through NATO to plan, coordinate and execute this enhanced support to bring about an end to the war. NATO allies can do this through a carefully telegraphed set of escalatory steps in direct support of Ukraine that go well beyond the support given to date. This includes the...

This investigation was reported and produced by Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Dmitriy Khavin, Christoph Koettl, Haley Willis, Alexander Cardia, Natalie Reneau and Malachy Browne. When videos and photos emerged in April showing bodies of dozens of civilians strewn along a street in Bucha, Ukrainians and the rest of the world voiced horror and outrage. But in Russia, officials had a completely different reaction: denial. President Vladimir V. Putin dismissed the gruesome scene as “a provocation,” and claimed that the Russian Army had nothing to do with it. But an eight-month visual investigation by The New York Times concluded that the perpetrators of the massacre along Yablunska Street were Russian paratroopers from the 234th Air Assault Regiment led by Lt. Col. Artyom Gorodilov...

At our apartment complex there was no electricity, water, heating, Internet, and mobile phone connection for almost 48 hours. Since we don’t use gas and have electric stoves, we couldn’t cook either. Our apartment complex is very “young”—I guess 80 percent of the residents are families with small children and small pets. The kids didn’t have school or training sessions or hobby groups to attend. After I climbed the stairs to the 13th floor for the umpteenth time, my butt was as stiff as a nut, probably a coconut. And you know what? We have adapted. The kids read and do their homework using flashlights. There is a battery-operated garland with lights in lieu of fixtures in the hall. We have candles, dry food that doesn’t spoil, and supplies of fresh water. Grocery stores and cafés functioned with generators, and fed people. No one was closed!..

Russian scorched-earth methods of conducting warfare against and occupation of “enemy” countries are deeply rooted in its history: blanket devastation, wholesale murder of civilians and prisoners of war, torture, rape, kidnapping, mass deportations and ethnic cleansing, plunder, looting, destruction of civilian infrastructure, lying, and spreading disinformation. This seems to point to Russia’s some innate inferiority complex (“catch up to, and overtake” the West), which is compensated by aggression, conquest, brutality, and destruction. Just as critically important is Moscow’s vicious destruction of Ukraine’s ancient national heritage by targeting its historical and cultural monuments, churches, museums, libraries, archival collections, music and art institutions, and centers of learning...

A bizarre factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that most Western experts on the Russian military agreed with the Kremlin that Russia had a powerful army which would defeat Ukraine within two or three days. While there has been much analysis, including by this author, of how Russian imperial nationalist stereotypes of Ukrainians made them miscalculate, there has been no investigation of why Western experts exaggerated the strength of the Russian army and underplayed Ukraine militarily and as a resilient society. This article launches an overdue discussion on the latter question, regarding the exaggeration of Russian military power and under-playing of Ukrainian capabilities. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recalled that when the invasion began, ‘most people who called me – well, almost everyone – did not have faith that Ukraine can stand up to this and persevere.’ National Security and Defence Council Secretary Olexiy Danilov remembered the West believed Ukraine...

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin “completed the formal annexation of more than 15% of Ukraine on Wednesday just as Russian forces battled to halt a Ukrainian counter-offensive across swathes of the territories,” Reuters reports. “In the biggest expansion of Russian territory in at least half a century, Putin signed laws admitting the [so-called] Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the [so-called] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), Kherson Oblast and Zaporizhzhia Oblast into Russia.” After holding its sham referendums in Ukraine’s seized regions on Sep. 23-27, Russia announced the annexations. The ballots, according to Western nations and Kyiv, violated international law and were forced and misrepresentative...

China (Republic of China) was charter member of the United Nations from 1945. It was not the People's Republic of China which currently holds a permanent seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. In fact the Korean war of the early 1950's pitted a coalition of the United Nations against Communist North Korea, Communist China and the USSR.. In the struggle between Communist and Nationalist China, the Communists ultimately prevailed in the 1950's, but its was not until much later that the Peoples Republic of China became a UN member and succeeded to China's permanent seat at the UN Security council This required a formal application by the Peoples Republic pursuant to the UN Charter and a two thirds vote of the UN General Assembly. This happened in 1971 largely as result of President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's efforts, two very dubious historical figures in terms of integrity. Many opposed argued that this was a bizarre reward for Chinese communist bad behavior...

Denys Shmygal expressed the gratitude for Canada's leadership in supporting Ukraine, supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian military. He stressed on that such support was a significant contribution to our victory. The parties also discussed sanctions against russian energy resources and establishment of a tribunal to hold the russian leadership accountable for all crimes committed in Ukraine. The aggressor must pay for his war at the the court, but also to compensate for all the destruction...

Much has been written about the atrocities at Irpin and Bucha, two cities in the Kyiv region of Ukraine, and what was discovered there after the Russian defeat and withdrawal in March of this year. Photos from Bucha corpses of civilians shot execution style with their hands and feet bound appeared on global networks and screens. Back in March, Ukraine and more than forty other states appealed to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate these events as war crimes. The ICC continues to conduct its investigation. Obviously, the human remains have been interred, but very telling real evidence remain in the ruins. The cities have returned to some degree of normalcy, but with much less vibrancy, and lasting very vivid signs of war crimes remain. There are far fewer residents in Irpin, a city of over sixty thousand prior to the war. People are slowly rebuilding their places of residence, often places where they had been born...

On Thursday, July 14, “The New York Times” (NYT) carried a relatively even story about the recall of Ukraine's Ambassador in Berlin, Andrij Melnyk for comments he had made concerning German lack of support for the Ukrainian war effort. The NYT went a little further, expounding on the current Ukrainian German political conundrum, lack of tangible support and German obsession about Nord Stream 2. Within the discourse predicated on German guilt for World War 2, was the Ambassador's presentation of history on German television, particularly Ukrainian activity during World War 2. Called upon, he specifically addressed Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian partisan effort, the Poles, their partisans and the “Holocaust”. Ambassador Melnyk had laid flowers at the grave of Stepan Bandera. A German “journalist” noted that Bandera held antisemitic, fascist views. The NYT article then gratuitously included customary anti-Ukrainian nationalist calumny, uncorroborated by legitimate historians except the likes of the vitriolic anti-Ukrainian pseudo- expert of Polish ethnicity Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe...