For the Kremlin, ‘Foglegate’ is another part of its psychological game with Washington.

Last week, a Cold War style spy scandal erupted between the USA and Russia, as an US embassy staffer was caught trying to recruit a Russian counter-terrorism officer for the CIA. Ondrej Ditrych looks at Moscow’s very public exposure of the operation, in the context of recent cooperation between the two countries in the aftermath of the Boston bombings. He argues that the Kremlin has decided to give wide exposure to the affair in order to help cement Vladimir Putin’s leadership, and to potentially humiliate Washington in mutual negotiations

"International terrorism" as conspiracy: debating terrorism in the league of nations

"This paper aims at historicizing terrorism by focusing attention on how the current dominant discursive patterns, constituent elements of the 'global terrorism' dispositive, have come to existence. It brings to the fore the first robust international debate on terrorism which took place in the League of Nations following the Marseilles assassination (1934) and Shows its conspiratorial features, many of which are detectable in the discourse of terrorism among states after 9/11." (author's abstract

The EU needs to adopt a more pragmatic policy towards Belarus based on cooperation rather than sanctions.

The EU’s sanction regime against Belarus and the government of President Alexander Lukashenka has been in place for more than 16 years. In an abridged version of a brief originally published by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, Ondrej Ditrych writes that while the sanctions illustrate the EU’s objections to the regime in Belarus, all the available evidence has shown that they have been largely ineffective in their objective of changing the political climate in the country. He argues that the best way to make sanctions effective may be to terminate them, and instead establish a roadmap for engagement with the country that makes EU assistance and cooperation conditional on positive reform