When the U.S. president on Tuesday announced that he would seek reelection in 2024, attention quickly turned to his advanced age. If elected, Joe Biden would be 82 on inauguration day in 2025, and 86 on leaving the White House in January 2029. POLITICO took a look around the globe and back through history to meet…
MOSCOW — If Americans in Russia were worried before, they now have an extra reason to be concerned. The arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has sent ripples of alarm through the community of American journalists in Russia, leaving many in the country wondering who, if anyone, might be next. Gershkovich was seized by FSB security…
Jérémy Lissouba is a member of parliament for the main opposition party in the Republic of Congo. He’s also a deputy judge in the country’s High Court of Justice and an alumnus of the Obama Foundation’s 2018 Africa Leaders Program. Over a year since the war in Ukraine began, the world remains caught in the…
Thousands of people demonstrated in Tbilisi overnight, waving EU flags and facing down riot police in protest against a controversial law which Georgia’s president says is “dictated by Moscow.” In video footage and photographs, protesters chanted “down with the Russian law” as they squared off with heavily armored police who blasted them with water cannons…
BERLIN — News this month that the number of German soldiers declaring themselves conscientious objectors rose fivefold in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine created little more than a ripple in Germany. For many Germans it’s perfectly natural for members of the Bundeswehr, the army, to renege on the pledge they made to…
Europe is waking up to a troubling reality: It may soon lose its NATO benefactor in Ukraine. With conservatives poised to make gains in the upcoming U.S. elections, NATO’s most generous donor to Ukraine’s war effort may suddenly seem much more parsimonious in 2023. The possibility has put the spotlight on the gap between American and…
Europe’s American president: The paradox of Ursula von der Leyen European Commission chief’s top-down approach has endeared her to Washington but alienated colleagues in Brussels. By Suzanne Lynch and Ilya Gridneff Illustration by Lucas Peverill for POLITICO Ursula von der Leyen’s whirlwind tour of the United States started in New York at the United Nations General…
PARIS/BERLIN — Thirty years after the horrors of the Balkan wars laid bare Western Europe’s incapacity to deal with conflict on European soil, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating how little has changed. As Yugoslavia started to break apart in 1991, it fell to the Luxembourgish Foreign Minister Jacques Poos to make the ill-fatedly optimistic…
Putin’s attack on democracy is working. Just look at Europe. As winter approaches, cracks in the West’s support for Ukraine are starting to show. By Matthew Karnitschnig Illustration by Ann Kiernan for POLITICO BERLIN — It was a scene that has played out on city squares across Europe for months: jarring eyewitness accounts of the war…
James Snell is a widely published writer and a senior advisor on Special Initiatives at the New Lines Institute. Just last month, there stood United States President Joe Biden, fist bumping Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the U.S. intelligence community says approved the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. It wasn’t a…