The violence in Syria has descended into sectarian warfare, attracting Islamic extremists from all over the world. Tensions with Turkey have escalated as the conflict claims Turkish lives and threatens to spill across its border. The West, wringing its hands over whether and how to intervene, has offered a diplomatic solution, but one that requires an impossible, simultaneous laying down of arms. READ MORE >>
The Spy Who Shot Himself in the Foot
What the blond-wigged accused spy may have been trying to learn
While Moscow slept, and Washington slept, a man named, as far as we know, Ryan Christopher Fogle, who had been, as far as we know, a third secretary in the political section at the American embassy in Moscow, was tackled by guys from the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB), pinned to the ground and handcuffed. He was wearing an awkward wig that shone blonde in the night time footage, with a gray baseball cap perched atop it. READ MORE >>
Foreigners in Their Own Land
Will Monday's anti-Putin protest in Moscow revive the movement?
Monday’s rally in Moscow started with a moment of silence to commemorate the event, exactly one year ago, that sowed the seed of the protest movement’s demise. READ MORE >>
The Tsarnaev Women Tell Chechnya's Story
If you want to understand their homeland, study not the Boston suspects but their aunt and mother
There were three important women in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s life—five, if you count his sisters—and each is a window into the culture to which he seemed to cling in the final years of his life. READ MORE >>
Shortly after Barack Obama finished his press conference after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dramatic apprehension last night, a Russian newspaper reported that the president did not mention the “Russian footprint” in his address. READ MORE >>
Friday morning, America woke up to Chechnya. Two Chechen brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had become suspects in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings, gunned down an MIT cop, and, in the ensuing chase, turned Boston into an eerily quiet war zone. Suddenly, everyone needed a primer on Chechnya, on the wars there, on its connections to Al Qaeda and the Free Syrian Army—despite the fact that we don't know whether their alleged acts were motivated by ideology. READ MORE >>
The Murky Morality of the Magnitsky List
Should the U.S. ban Russians implicated in Sergei Magnitsky's death?
On Friday, the State Department, in conjunction with the Treasury Department, published a list of 18 people who are believed, “based on credible information,” to be in some way responsible for the gruesome death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in November 2009. READ MORE >>
On March 13, before heading to Capitol Hill to talk deficit reduction with House Republicans, President Barack Obama, as is his custom before such showdowns, met with his economic team, including National Economic Council head Gene Sperling. The NEC, a Clinton-era innovation, is supposed to serve as an organizing body for the government’s other economic agencies, like Treasury and the budget office. READ MORE >>
The day that Cyprus rejected a European bailout that would have given every bank account in the country a “haircut,” the Cypriot finance minister Michael Sarris went on a mission. He went not to Brussels or Berlin, however, but to Moscow. READ MORE >>
While much has been made of Marco Rubio’s performance at CPAC and the GOP’s Latino outreach, it’s hard, walking the crowded, carpeted halls at this gathering, not to notice the Republican Party’s other big demographic problem: women. The attendees are overwhelmingly male and, of the forty-two speakers in the first two days of the conference, there were only five women. (Sarah Palin was slated for the convention’s third day.) This reflects the Party’s broader dilemma. READ MORE >>
