Clara Ferreira Marques

Mikhail Gorbachev was a man who hoped for the best, and got the worst. The legacy of the last Soviet leader, who died yesterday aged 91, was largely undone by two decades of Vladimir Putin. Now a grinding war in Ukraine is its grim and bloody requiem. Gorbachev had an aversion to violence, a…

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has long put domestic concerns ahead of diplomacy. He’s now about to host one of the most significant geopolitical gatherings in years. On Thursday, he told Bloomberg News that Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping plan to attend the Group of 20 summit. For…

Dictators are rarely funny. Even ones who cultivate bare-chested, bear-hugging personas and have a penchant for extra-long tables. In more than 20 years of watching Russian President Vladimir Putin, I can’t recall him laughing spontaneously, or cracking a joke — certainly not a memorable one…

Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine has been a public relations disaster for the world’s second-largest exporter of weaponry. Plentiful images of exploded Russian tanks — their turrets ejected and abandoned in fields — a reportedly high failure rate for some Russian precision-guided missiles and…

Russian forces have bombed grain silos and farms and plundered Ukrainian wheat, which US diplomats say Moscow is now trying to sell on. Ukraine’s Black Sea ports are blocked by mines to protect the shoreline from attack by Russia’s navy, which is also bottling up shipments. And yet, if President…

Economic sanctions have a bad reputation as a weapon that promises plenty — “something more tremendous than war,” as US President Woodrow Wilson put it in 1919 — but delivers comparatively little. Unprecedented measures aimed at isolating Russia have not stopped the fighting in Ukraine, or forced…

It’s hard to gloss over the record of Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a man with film-star looks who manipulated the political machine, plundered the state to the tune of $10 billion, and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of his opponents and the torture of tens of thousands more. His…

As Russia’s devastation of Ukraine drags on — forcing roughly a quarter of the country’s population from their homes and fueling calls for even tougher sanctions — is China’s support for President Vladimir Putin wavering? The West should be wary of hearing the answer it wants to hear. China’s…

Sitting on the fence is uncomfortable. Faced with a geopolitical fight that is both unthinkably brutal and sprawling in its consequences, Beijing officials are finding that such a posture might also, in the long run, be impossible. When President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he appears to…

Kyiv’s residents have watched shells rain down on the city these past days as they did in 1941, then at the start of a brutal war in which Ukraine endured unthinkable suffering. As images circulate of families huddled in basements and in the city’s subway for safety while rocket strikes light up…