For @NYTmag, I wrote about Germany's halting efforts to build up its armed forces in the face of ingrained societal skepticism of the merits of military power. Germany’s reluctance has a lot to do with the Nazi past. But there's also a lot more to it. https://t.co/R6sI7pRO8q
The Kremlin appears to have stepped up efforts to reinforce rising pro-Russia forces on Germany’s far right as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s popularity plummets.
https://t.co/YtAXmzmELL
As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s popularity plunges to new lows, he is traveling the country to persuade Germans that things remain on the right track.
It’s not going well.
https://t.co/6KlZFJpQrq
Surreal and maddening to see our friend in a glass cage in a Moscow courtroom. An innocent man—decent, kind, and honest—arrested for doing his job. Every day he spends in jail is an outrage. https://t.co/sGNfMJdc4H
News that my friend, colleague, and thoroughly professional reporter @evangershkovich has been detained while doing his job in Russia. Hope and trust he’ll be released imminently. Goes w/out saying, journalism is not a crime. https://t.co/A4ZZ1Ohnu6
For @nybooks I wrote about the new Historikerstreit -- and how a growing awareness of Germany's colonial crimes has spurred a heated debate about their place in Germany's culture of remembrance and whether there are historical connections to the Holocaust https://t.co/2AMDTD1k6l
Fight breaks out in the city of Omsk among men who’ve been drafted and local police forcing them onto buses. Draftees called on the police to come die with them in the trenches.
📹 Omsk Civil Association
“We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,” a senior Kremlin official recently told teachers. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”
On the Kremlin’s plan to reprogram society through Russia’s 40,000 schools: https://t.co/liN69QNcQ5
So many stories like this: woman writes me to say her brother was detained by Russian soldiers at home in village outside Kyiv. Others saw him, hands tied, led at gun point to building Russians used as base. Four days later his body was found by side of the road, shot in back.
Ukrainian soldiers help a fleeing family crossing the Irpin river in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, March 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Through the horror I can’t stop thinking about the sheer idiocy. Putin is creating & reinforcing all the things he is most scared of that were once phantom. A Ukraine that’s alien to Russia and despises it, and a massive reinvigoration of NATO and huge anti-Russian resolve.
This is the constituency map Germans are waking up to. SPD dominance in the north, conservatives in the industrial south, dots of Green in some cities, and a very AfD-blue Saxony after the CDU slumped there.
https://t.co/2s5JWJON9Z
My piece for Politico on Germany’s hugely-popular Wahl-O-Mat, a “voting advice application” that puts concrete policies and issues above intangible factors like candidate “likability.” Question is whether it works.
https://t.co/ZdTi4mtBUJ
My essay for @nytopinion about why Victory in Europe Day —the May 8 anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation —is increasingly commemorated as a “Day of Liberation” in Germany, and how, despite good intentions, this could contribute to historical amnesia.
https://t.co/8L4UFqD3Ez
For a long time, the question was: How could the vanquished Germans celebrate their World War II surrender? Now, writes @jamesangelos, Germans are increasingly grappling with a thornier question: How could they not? . https://t.co/vPj5OlVqqB
For anyone interested in reading some background on the recent violence in Belfast, I’m re-upping this piece I wrote at the end of 2019 about how Brexit is aggravating sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland:
https://t.co/xznIii2cM3