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Byline: Serge Schmemann In 2015 when Angela Merkel, the former center-right chancellor of Germany, declined to shut her country's doors to asylum seekers coming into Europe, she garnered bouquets from [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann We may never know all the details of how Israel got explosives into thousands of pagers, and apparently other wireless radios, that have been exploding in Lebanon, [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Historical memory is bound to shape the first reaction to the powerful showing of a far-right party in two German state elections on Sunday. Nonetheless, there is [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann In purely military terms, Ukraine's surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann 'I don't think war is inevitable,' Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday, after senior leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas were killed in pinpoint attacks in a [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel demonstrated on Wednesday that he is master of the American way of doing politics, shaking hands right and left on his [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Last month, Russian prosecutors finally brought the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to trial on charges of espionage, after holding him for almost 15 months in [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Two terms crop up often in the French political lexicon: 'la rupture' and 'la cohabitation.' The former means the same as in English and is applied to [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann An unusual crush of summer shocks - President Biden's debate debacle, electoral upheavals in Britain and France - seemed for a spell to push other crises into [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews, to celebrate the first [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann The visit of Vladimir Putin to North Korea this week was choreographed as an old-timey Communist summit, with armies of flag-waving children, portraits waving from every lamp [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann By all accounts, the real reason Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dissolved his 'war cabinet' - the small decision-making body he established soon after the Hamas [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann That far-right parties made gains in the just-concluded elections to the European Parliament somehow doesn't seem too shocking, though President Emmanuel Macron's decision to hold snap elections [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann The Georgians call it the Russian Law. It was passed recently by the Parliament in the Republic of Georgia, purportedly to improve transparency by having civil society [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Anyone who was at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 cannot help but see a reprise of those stormy, fateful and thrilling days in what is [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann This piece has been updated to reflect recent developments. For most of the 12 or so years in which Alexei Navalny crusaded against the rule of Vladimir [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann A senior Hamas leader this month declared that any deal to end the fighting in Gaza must include the release of Marwan Barghouti. Three weeks before, a [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann It has become clear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is not the leader for this critical moment. The devastation of Gaza is at intolerable levels [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann The new report in The New York Times that Russia is quietly signaling a readiness to freeze the war in Ukraine is both suspicious and tantalizing. The [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann There was a time when road trips I took invariably included picking up local papers. I'd read from Page 1 through to the editorials and sports. They [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann After the well over 1,000 Israelis killed on Oct. 7, and the thousands more Palestinians in Gaza killed in the war against Hamas, it may appear unseemly [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann A few days after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, I remember an Israeli acquaintance telling me that however terrible the circumstances of [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann On the drive to our cottage here in June, my wife and I collided with the dense wall of Canadian wildfire smoke. The clear spring air began [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Russians have always had a penchant for rumor and conspiracies, underpinned by the presumption that official news is deeply doctored by the Kremlin. So it is not [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Whatever Yevgeny Prigozhin intended his rebellion to achieve, it proved short and senseless. Less than 24 hours after he sent his tanks and troops trundling on the [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann In April, secret documents allegedly photographed by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard began making their way into the mainstream media. Many were briefings prepared [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann It has become commonplace to perceive Vladimir Putin as reverting to Soviet ways. So it seemed natural, shortly after the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann The announcement last month by President Vladimir Putin of Russia that his country would suspend participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Back in 1995, Russia's two major art museums, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, mounted exhibitions a month apart that attracted considerable attention. Not so much because of [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann There is a pattern to Russia's history, and it may be catching up with Vladimir Putin. Under the czars and then the commissars, Russia's rulers wrenched enormous [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Almost four months after the popular Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, an American citizen, was killed during an early-morning Israeli raid in Jenin, the Israel Defense Forces [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann To function in an otherwise normal democracy, a hereditary monarchy requires that the citizenry accept a bit of fiction - namely that one family, standing above politics, [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Back in the old Soviet Union, the political joke was the principal underground conduit of political opinion. One that made the rounds soon after Mikhail Gorbachev came [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann There were reports on Saturday that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a team of experts ready to visit Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant within days. It [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Reports are circulating that the United States is negotiating with Russia to exchange two Americans being held in Russian prisons for a notorious arms dealer serving time [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Sergey Karaganov is a prominent Russian political scientist whom I have known for almost 20 years in covering Russia and have interviewed many times as a window [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann If the first casualty of war is truth, then the corollary in Ukraine is that information is the first battlefield. That was where the war began, in [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann It is hard to feel sorry for Russia today, when its army is savaging Ukraine. But for those of us who were in Moscow on that August [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann On Dec. 25, 1991, at 7:32 p.m., the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin, and the pre-revolutionary Russian flag of white, blue and red horizontal stripes [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann A long time ago, soon after I arrived in the Soviet Union as a young wire service reporter and became acutely aware that I was being followed, [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann 'Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl / But she doesn't have a lot to say,' sang the Beatle Paul McCartney in a playful ditty tucked into the [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Almost every article written about Angela Merkel's tenure as Germany's chancellor notes that one of her greatest political strengths has been that she is so often underestimated. [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann The last time American and Russian leaders met in Geneva was when Ronald Reagan squared off against the new Soviet chief, Mikhail Gorbachev, in November 1985. Oh, [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Hockey fans rejoiced last Sunday when Canadian health officials agreed to let National Hockey League teams cross the U.S.-Canada border for the Stanley Cup playoffs. It was [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann In the end, a full moon succeeded where puny machines could not, wrenching the mammoth barge out of the Egyptian mud in which it became wedged six [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann For all the sound and fury, Trump's foreign policy has few accomplishments. Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board's verdict on Donald Trump's [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann Thirty-four years ago in Moscow I watched the government mishandle a disaster. Why does it feel like it was just yesterday? It seems terribly wrong that so [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann A correspondent recalls the chaotic and joyous days after the Berlin Wall came down. A couple of weeks after the breach of the Berlin Wall, I wrote [...]

Byline: Serge Schmemann One of the joys of living in Paris has been to hear the tolling of the great bells of Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, their festive peals echoing [...]

Byline: SERGE SCHMEMANN ATHENS -- 'Democracies are like angry dragons,' said Kishore Mahbubani, a professor of public policy in Singapore, expressing what emerged, in effect, as the theme of the [...]