Europe Archive

As Russian warplanes continue to attack targets in Syria, the apparent decisiveness of Moscow’s actions, at least in the view of some observers, has obscured an important reality: the poor readiness of Russia’s accident-prone military, which could increase the risk of an error with significant political or military consequences. The United States and Russia have been engaged in so-called deconfliction talks to prevent accidental contact or clashes between American and Russian jets in the skies above Syria. But as a reportedly errant cruise missile strike in the early days of Russia’s intervention showed, along with Russian planes consistently breaching Turkish […]

Against the backdrop of Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, Croatia is gearing up for general elections on Sunday, Nov. 8, following one of the shortest campaign periods in its history. They are Croatia’s first parliamentary elections since it joined the European Union in 2013. The ruling coalition, which calls itself Croatia Grows and is run by Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic’s Social Democratic Party (SDP), will face the Patriotic Coalition, anchored by the center-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the former head of Croatia’s internal security agency and Interior Ministry, Tomislav Karamarko. Croatia is just turning the page […]

The war in Afghanistan has been both a boon and curse for neighboring Central Asia. The conflict placed this sparsely populated region, long disconnected from the globalization taking place around its borders, on the front lines of the international community’s 15-year effort to stabilize Afghanistan. Central Asia became a staging point for coalition military forces, a transit corridor, a donor as well as a recipient of aid and at times a pawn in a larger strategic competition playing out between the United States and Russia. The region also found itself on the receiving end of Afghanistan’s noxious exports: extremism, drugs […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the European refugee crisis and European Union member states’ approaches to addressing it. French President Francois Hollande held talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday on the refugee crisis, with a French official reporting that the two leaders agreed on policy objectives. However, France’s response to the refugee crisis has been far more subdued than Germany’s. In an email interview, Didier Fassin, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, discussed […]