TO: NATO heads of state and governmentFROM: Ian Brzezinski and Alexander VershbowSUBJECT: Decisive action needed at NATO’s Vilnius summit on Ukraine and the completion of Europe DOWNLOAD PDF What do world leaders need to know? The Atlantic Council’s new “Memo to…” series has the answer with briefings on the world’s most pressing issues from our
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent high-profile visit to Poland underlined the deepening cooperation between these two neighboring countries and the increasingly prominent role their partnership is playing in European politics. At a time when the likes of Germany and France are struggling to find the right response to resurgent Russian imperialism, Poland has emerged as
The April 7 decision by Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy to reauthorize the export of electricity represents a symbolic victory on the energy front in the war with Russia. Ukraine banned electricity exports in October 2022 following the initial rounds of a Russian airstrike campaign that targeted the country’s civilian energy infrastructure in a bid to
Ukraine’s state-owned energy sector operator Ukrenergo announced in early April that it was resuming commercial electricity exports to neighboring European countries for the first time since October 2022. The news has been widely touted as an example of Ukraine’s remarkable wartime resilience, and is also being seen as further evidence that Moscow’s six-month bombing campaign
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka to Moscow in early April for two days of talks. In their public remarks, both men avoided the topic of nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Russia’s plans to place nukes in Belarus loomed large over this latest meeting between the two dictators. Days earlier, Putin had made
It is no secret that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not gone according to plan. Nevertheless, with the conflict now in its second year, Vladimir Putin still hopes to break Ukrainian resistance in a long war of attrition. This may be easier said than done. While Russia enjoys significant demographic, industrial, and economic advantages
Finland has just become the thirty-first member of NATO and the silence from across the border in Russia is deafening. For more than a year, the Kremlin has been using the distant prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership to justify the largest European conflict since World War II. In stark contrast, Moscow has offered virtually no
