Europe experienced a truly miraculous few months 30 years ago. At a precipice, blood could have flowed. The floodgates of change opened instead, writes Carl Bildt

It is not necessary to have graduated from a school, or indeed a family, that advanced the view that Albion is always perfidious to recognise that the negative legacy of the British Empire remains a real and destructive force in today’s world. The evidence is unfortunately widespread and persistent.

The former Soviet state recently held free-and-fair elections, but unless it can eradicate corruption it will not gain EU entry and may slip into Russia’s clutches, says John Bruton.

Despite talk of missions to Mars and a renewed interest in returning to the moon, nothing can match the awesome feat of that first lunar landing 50 years ago today, writes Dan Buckley.

*Spoiler alert*

This year is the centenary year of the Limerick Soviet.

They called it the ‘Irish Football Stakeholder Forum’ but really last Friday’s gathering at the Mansion House was a cry for help.

Ireland recorded the fifth highest increase in household electricity costs in Europe during 2018, according to new figures from Eurostat.

Results from nearly all polling stations show that TV star Volodymyr Zelenskiy has won the Ukrainian presidential run-off vote in a landslide.

President Xi’s repression of Muslim minorities is redolent of the Soviet Union’s gulag and will foster a new generation of Islamist domestic terrorists, says Brahma Chellaney

It seems increasingly clear that Danske Bank was far from alone in its involvement in one of the world’s biggest money-laundering scandals.

I went to Berlin last week, a city I’ve never before been to. I’d intended to visit the zoo, although I disapprove of zoos but it’s the biggest zoo in Europe and has a giant aquarium. I’d look at exhibits of creatures that didn’t mind confinement, because they never go anywhere anyway, tarantulas and things that live under stones.

Withdrawal from 1987 pact with Russia would see a new generation of lethal weapons developed and deployed in Europe, says

After 32 days of unprecedented drama across the fields of Russia, France and Croatia brought the curtain down on the World Cup with Game 64 at the Luzhniki Stadium yesterday. Having traversed the place these past six weeks by foot and bike, car and plane, death-trap taxi and way too many night trains, Joe Callaghan outlines 18 reasons why Russia 2018 was the best World Cup we’ve ever seen…

UK voters’ decision to leave the EU may have been motivated by domestic issues such as immigration, but the costs of departure are being felt first in foreign policy, writes Mark Malloch-Brown.

The rise of pro-Putin parties in the recent Italian elections has again underlined how American leverage has waned in comparison, writes John Lloyd.

At least 52 people have died after a bus caught fire in Kazakhstan, emergency officials said.

The prevalence of doping in sport has been once again to the fore in recent weeks, writes Jack Anderson.

In 1935 Joseph Stalin is said to have asked contemptuously: “how many divisions has the pope?” The question was answered emphatically by John Paul II long after the Soviet dictator’s death when the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Eastern Europe emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.

Allegations that Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were "totally unfounded", say newly released documents regarding president John F Kennedy's assassination.

The Bolsheviks’ efforts to change the world remain relevant in our own time of popular disaffection with establishment politics and brutalist economics, says Geoffrey Roberts

Newly released CIA files show how spooked the Soviets were by Kenney’s assassination and the frightening spectre of nuclear war breaking out, writes Ryle Dwyer

The EU is caught between Brexit Britain and a disenchanted group of Middle Europeans whose political sentiment is antithetical to the liberal ideals of the EU, says John Lloyd.

US President Donald Trump does not intend to block the scheduled release of thousands of secret government documents related to President John F Kennedy's assassination.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been given another puppy as a gift.

The anticipated release of thousands of never-seen government documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination has scholars and armchair detectives buzzing.

Most US administrations have had an aide who deemed himself crucial to the president. Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s, until he had his wings clipped says Elizabeth Drew

If you remove the vestige and emblems of the past, do you erase the memory of what they represented too? asks Clodagh Finn

Back in the cold war era, regular reports from Pravda used to extoll the virtues of Soviet collective agriculture, reciting records of constantly improving wheat production.

What possessed seemingly cultured men to implement a policy of barbarism against the Jews of Europe? Laurence Rees seeks the answer in what JP O’Malley considers to be a magisterial undertaking of research.

There has been little else but talk about North Korea’s weapons programme for almost quarter of a century. That may not be true for much longer, says Michael Mandelbaum

Donald Trump has called journalists the ‘enemy’, and his autocratic tendencies should be a call to arms for writers, painters, and filmmakers, says Nina L Khrushcheva.

Trump’s election has continued a trend in the US of dumbing down political life that has pushed the country down a perilous path, writes Nina Khrushcheva.

A suspected suicide bomber today crashed a car through the entrance of the Chinese Embassy in the Kyrgyzstan capital of Bishkek, detonating a bomb that killed the attacker and wounded three embassy employees.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s latest book contains plenty of righteous anger at the state of modern Russia but is marred by being one-sided and presenting a lack of context for the general reader, writes Neil Robinson.

WHEN a sprawling yellow banner cascaded from the stands of Basel’s St Jakob-Park football stadium in late-2013 the world was suddenly alerted to a struggle for freedom thousands of kilometres away that had been waging for weeks.