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Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.

Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.

I was one of those who until the very last moment could not accept the notion of a full-scale invasion with airstrikes on our major towns. Putin’s speech was sickening, but still there was a logical, if fictional, justification for a limited Russian operation. The full-scale attack on Ukraine destroys even that.

I told my Russian journalist friend about our mood. For years I have been reluctant to compare any dictator to Hitler, or any war to the second world war. The comparison, to me, seemed exaggerated, even vulgar.

But what other analogy is there? With no reason, in an act of pure madness, an old-fashioned air assault has been inflicted on a neighbouring country.

Today, from Brody to Kharkiv, we are seeing, once again, the collapse of an age, and perhaps with it an order. Like Count Morstin, we must now reckon with this change. For so long many of us have avoided making the imaginative leap required to believe that a modern political leader could order the invasion of a European country.

For many in the West, it seems, wars of aggression are things that happen to poor countries a long way away. They are done by us. They are not done to us. And yet this has happened.

The old ways of dealing with Russia (and potentially China) no longer apply. The belief that autocratic regimes will democratize and liberalize as they bend into our rules-based order was naive.

. Since the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003, estimates of the lives lost to violence vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. The number of injured will surely be several times that, and the number of men, women and children displaced from their homes is put at between 3.5 and 5 million, somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.

In sum, failures do not come any more abject than Iraq, nor catastrophes any more pure.

this additional probe was impossible to avoid. None of the other investigations provided an official answer to the burning, central question, of how on earth the UK had got embroiled in this great misadventure in the first place.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida struggled on Sunday to give clear answers about whether it was a mistake for the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003, becoming the latest Republican presidential candidate to trip on the wisdom of the military invasion.

Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time.

Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.

Ukraine’s president has warned his army to be ready to repel a “full scale” Russian invasion, as fears mount of a return to all out warfare in eastern Ukraine.

At least 26 people were killed and dozens wounded on Wednesday when Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists fought a fierce battle on the outskirts of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk on Wednesday, in the most serious bout of fighting since a haphazardly observed ceasefire came into force in February.

Mr Poroshenko claimed there were already 9,000 Russian troops in separatist-held territory inside Ukraine, and said their was a “colossal threat” that Russian-backed forces would launch large scale operations in the near future. Russia denies deploying troops to east Ukraine.

For eleven years, from his defeat at the Boyne in July 1690 until his death in September 1701, James II lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Versailles) in one of the most spectacular royal palaces of the Baroque period

Louis was obliged to recognise William III as de facto King of England, as a condition for signing the peace treaty of Ryswick, which marked the end of the War of the League of Augsburg. The treaty in no way affected James II’s status as de jure king, nor his son’s status as de jure Prince of Wales, but James now had to tolerate the presence in Paris, and occasionally at the French Court, of a hostile English ambassador

At the tercentenary of the King’s death, it is surely time to take a closer look at the life that James led in France

The United States is experiencing a "peaceful invasion" at its southern border, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told "The Ingraham Angle" Wednesday. 

"It is very clever of Biden, on the eve of the press conference, to turn it over to her [Vice President Kamala Harris], so with every question tomorrow about the border, he can say, 'That is Vice President Harris' job and you need to talk to her about it, next question'," Gingrich said. "In that sense, he ducks all responsibility for what is not a crisis, but a disaster. It is getting worse."

"We go through all of these things at the airport, all of these tests at the airport, then we have a policy under Biden that allows people to come in here," said Gingrich, who added that the surge means "the poorest Americans will have their wages suppressed by this competition ... every taxpayer will get hit. We will provide shelter, food, we will provide education. Then we will provide health care. We are taking on ... billions and billions of dollars in additional costs."

‘With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom’ Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018)

The morning after the terrorist attacks on the US, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a headline which summarised a widespread sentiment in Europe and the world at large: ‘We are all Americans.’

There was an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the US worldwide, including the Middle East. Even in Iran, which had been under punishing economic siege from the US for two decades, 60,000 spectators observed a minute’s silence during a football match in Azadi Stadium and hundreds of young Iranians held a candlelit vigil in Tehran. Iranian leaders sent sympathetic messages to their American counterparts, the first official contact between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”

If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, 20 years later, the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State (or ISIS), has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria.

Most important, however, is the United States’ success in securing its homeland.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, many German politicians have publicly admitted they got Vladimir Putin wrong. Even German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologised, saying it was a mistake to use trade and energy to build bridges with Moscow.

"It's a bitter acknowledgement that for 30 years we emphasised dialogue and co-operation with Russia," says Nils Schmid, foreign affairs spokesperson for Mr Steinmeier's party, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). "Now we have to recognise this has not worked. That's why we have entered a new era for European security."

That new era was dubbed "Zeitenwende" - literally meaning a turning point - by Germany's SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a now-famous speech in the German parliament a few days after the invasion.

The ceremony belatedly jolted Germany into reappraising Merkel’s role in the years leading up to today’s European crises—and the verdict has not been positive.

Merkel’s critics argue that the close ties she forged with Russia are partly responsible for today’s economic and political upheaval. Germany’s security policies over the past year have been, in many ways, a repudiation of her legacy. Earlier this month, Berlin announced a new $3 billion military aid package to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and an approaching NATO summit is expected to discuss how to include Ukraine in Europe’s security architecture—an extension of the alliance that Merkel consistently resisted.

Merkel was a key architect of the agreements that made the economies of Germany and its neighbors dependent on Russian energy imports. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed that strategic partnership, forcing Germany to find its oil and natural gas elsewhere at huge costs to business, government and households.

Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state

“A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.

the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.

Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.

What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”

That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.

A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.

Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.

War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.

In the final weeks of World War I, a German general sent a telegram to his Austrian allies summarizing the situation. It was, he wrote, “serious, but not catastrophic.” The reply came back: “Here the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”

“The U.S. thinks Putin will do a full-blown war,” he said. “Europeans think he’s bluffing.”

full-scale war is generally as unimaginable for a Western European public as an alien invasion. The many decades of peace in Western Europe, combined with the continent’s deep dependence on Russia’s oil and gas, incline officials to assume aggressive Russian moves must be a ruse.

“What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”

But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago.

TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”