Articles by: "Slawomir Sierakowski"
Will the West abandon Ukraine?

After a long, mysterious silence, US President Joe Biden has spoken out about the ever-increasing concentration of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. He would have been better off keeping quiet, given his astonishing and …

Europe’s new refugee crisis

The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has already deepened conflicts elsewhere, including Europe, where a confrontation is escalating between Belarus and its European Union neighbours: Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Even before the meltdown in Kabul, Belarusian …

The Tusk effect

In July, Donald Tusk, the former European Council president who served as Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, returned to Polish politics. Many voters remember him as the politician who raised the country’s retirement …

Belarus hijacks Western complacency

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has once again demonstrated the lengths to which he will go to crack down on his opponents. On 23 May, he deployed a MiG-29 fighter jet to force down a commercial …

Putin’s sound and fury

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent annual address on the state of his country was so ostentatiously threatening as to sound reassuring. Not only did he forbid the West from crossing red lines, but he announced …

Is Russia’s future Belarus’s present?

The biggest wave of protests in years has swept Russia, raising hopes that popular pressure will persist and intensify, gradually eroding an autocratic regime, as is happening in neighbouring Belarus. But we should be wary …