USSR (Former Soviet Union)
Russia Planned a Major Military Overhaul. Ukraine Shows the Result.
Army vehicles were so decrepit that repair crews were stationed roughly every 15 miles. Some officers were so out of shape that the military budgeted $1.5 million to re-size standard uniforms. That was the Russian military more than a decade ago when the country invaded Georgia, according to the defense minister at the time. The […]
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Russia’s Grave Miscalculation: Ukrainians Would Collaborate
KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — The solicitation to commit treason came to Oleksandr Vilkul on the second day of the war, in a phone call from an old colleague. Mr. Vilkul, the scion of a powerful political family in southeastern Ukraine that was long seen as harboring pro-Russian views, took the call as Russian troops were […]
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The Making of Vladimir Putin
His intent, in hindsight, was clear enough, many months before the invasion. It appeared so to Mr. Eltchaninoff, the French author. “The religion of war had installed itself,” he said. “Putin had replaced the real with a myth.” But why now? The West, Mr. Putin had long since concluded, was weak, divided, decadent, given over […]
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For a Ukrainian Poet, Putin’s War Is All Too Familiar
LVIV, Ukraine — At 83, no longer a young poet, Ihor Kalynets knows something of life under Russia’s thumb. Having spent nine years in the Soviet Gulag, including hard labor cutting stone, he secretly wrote on cigarette papers what are regarded as some of his best verses. They were crumpled into tiny balls and smuggled […]
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Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts
“All those remaining in Grozny will be considered terrorists and will be wiped out by artillery and aviation,” an official military edict warned. Though the statement was rescinded, Russian forces shelled the city indiscriminately, blockading its exits to prevent residents from fleeing. Mr. Putin, whom President Boris Yeltsin promoted from virtual anonymity to prime minister […]
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Russia’s War in Ukraine: This Is How World War III Begins
The usual date given for the start of World War II is Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that was just one in a series of events that at the time could have seemed disconnected. Among them: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Italy’s invasion of […]
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Biden Targets Russia With Strategy of Containment, Updated for a New Era
Mr. Biden emerged from the meeting offering some professional respect for Mr. Putin as an adversary. For his part, Mr. Putin said, “There has been no hostility.” At one point, Mr. Biden asked the Russian leader how he would feel if Russia’s gas pipelines were attacked from afar — a comment that some interpreted as […]
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Russians Now See a New Side to Putin: Dragging Them Into War
MOSCOW — Russians thought they knew their president. They were wrong. And by Thursday, it appeared too late to do anything about it. For most of his 22-year rule, Vladimir V. Putin presented an aura of calm determination at home — of an ability to astutely manage risk to navigate the world’s biggest country through […]
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In Ukraine Crisis, the Looming Threat of a New Cold War
MOSCOW — Vladimir Pozner was an English-language Soviet propaganda editor in Moscow in 1962, a job that gave him rare access to American newspapers and magazines. That allowed him to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis outside the Soviet media filter, and sense a world at the brink of war. Mr. Pozner, a longtime Russian television […]
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