Maria Lipman

1 month ago | foreignaffairs.com | Nicolas Véron |Maria Lipman |Andrew Moravcsik

In 2012, responding to the eurozone debt and financial crisis, European leaders agreed to create a banking union. They transferred oversight of the EU’s big banks from national supervisors to a single European supervisor, the European Central Bank. Véron uses official reports, secondary sources, and participant interviews to describe the negotiations leading up to this decision. The crisis, he shows, underscored the problems of decentralized supervision.

1 month ago | foreignaffairs.com | Shaun Walker |Maria Lipman

Drawing on archival materials and hundreds of interviews, including with former spies, Walker crafts a fascinating account of Soviet and Russian agents planted in various countries under false names and identities. His narrative starts in the 1920s, when Bolsheviks excelled in espionage by drawing on their prior experience with clandestine activities in tsarist Russia—and on the abundance of communist sympathizers in European capitals.

Sep 18, 2024 | foreignaffairs.com | Michael Kimmage |Maria Lipman

In late 2022, a Moscow court sentenced the Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin to eight and a half years behind bars. He was a prominent and outspoken member of the Russian opposition and an ally of Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny, prominent opposition figures who both met untimely deaths. Had he not been freed in last month’s prisoner swap with the United States, Yashin, too, might have met an untimely death. Now exiled in Berlin, he can do his political work unimpeded. Yashin did not want to leave Russia.

Aug 20, 2024 | foreignaffairs.com | Tom Parfitt |Maria Lipman |Tom Parfitt Headline |Alissa Klots

In This Review In This Review High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted HinterlandParfitt, a British journalist, has been haunted by nightmares since covering the horrific hostage crisis in Beslan in North Ossetia in 2004, when a rebel attack on a school led to the deaths of over 330 people, most of them children. Four years later, he undertook a months-long hiking trip through the Russian North Caucasus.

Apr 23, 2024 | foreignaffairs.com | Maria Popova |Oxana Shevel |Maria Lipman |Amy Knight

In This Review In This Review Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging StatesAs they meticulously trace developments in Russia and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Popova and Shevel point out that the current war was not preordained. In the early 1990s, both countries followed parallel tracks as they struggled to overcome dysfunctional economies and social and political chaos.