NEW YORK — “In just three short years,” US President Donald Trump declared in his recent State of the Union (SOTU) address, “we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny.” This baseless pronouncement, more propa

MOSCOW — For an armchair warrior like US President Donald Trump, who received five deferments from serving in Vietnam, assassinations must look like a foreign-policy silver bullet.

NEW YORK — In the 1960s, the dissident poet Alexander Galich wrote about the mute complicity of Soviet apparatchiks in Joseph Stalin’s crimes, notably the Great Purges in which millions were detained or died in the Gulag.

MOSCOW — US President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that four Democratic congresswomen of colour, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, should “go back” to their countries was another reminder of his blatant racism and sexism.

KYIV — In the 2000s, The West Wing was everybody’s favourite television show about an aspirational US administration, one that fought terrorism without waging war on an entire region or religion, refused to trample on the rule of law and generally made decisions that were in the

NEW YORK — If life imitates art, Nikolai Gogol, who had a keen grasp of the delusional and demented, could have scripted many of the key political events of recent years.

NEW YORK — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have each championed a model of authoritarian capitalism, call it “development with a dictator’s face”.

MOSCOW — In his widely broadcast annual press conference last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin was confident and condescending, animated only when criticising Ukraine for skirmishes in the Black Sea or railing against the West’s “unfair” complaints about Russia’s behaviour

NEW YORK — Most of the world has spent the last two years thinking that Russian President Vladimir Putin is twisting his US counterpart, President Donald Trump, around his little finger.