Opinion

For Kazakhstan, closer engagement with Belgium fits into a broader effort to diversify its economic partnerships while maintaining relations with other major powers

King Philippe and Queen Mathilde travel to Astana and Almaty on 11–14 October, with talks, business deals and academic ties on the agenda

Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov says most Russians want the war over, while Putin pays families for the fallen and treats a stage-managed election as a licence to escalate

Brussels drops the idea of membership before reforms and offers Ukraine gradual access plus farm sector limits

The problem is not simply that the world has more urgent crises. It is that, following repeated failures, the issue may be regarded as one with a low probability of success

Bulgaria received the remains of its tsar, Greece received 48 relics, and North Macedonia received one more reason to argue about the past

Oleksandr Khara thinks Ukraine’s remaining leverage is the ability to keep hitting Russia until Moscow calculates that a pause hurts less than another winter of burning refineries

How Die Linke’s election success united parties from AfD to the Greens - and what Mark Mazower’s history of a shifting word reveals about the charge itself

The three leading candidates want the war in Ukraine to stop, but not all of them want Russia to be stopped

As protest within Turkey builds and international condemnation mounts, it is clear that the Turkish authorities have every intention of intensifying the crackdown

From summit diplomacy to a standing platform for investment, industry, and the Middle Corridor

Sanctions hit hard - but they also trigger adaptation. And in a tightly wired global economy, some of that pressure loops back on the senders