U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, retired U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove and Finnish Ambassador to the U.S. Mikko Hautala address Finland's membership in NATO and what that means for the U.S., Europe and Ukraine.
U.S. officials said Austin and Blinken pledged new assistance worth $713 million for Zelenskyy's government and other countries in the region. An extra $322 million in military aid for Ukraine would take the total U.S. security assistance since the invasion to about $3.7 billion.
Russia's defense ministry said the fire on the Soviet-era missile cruiser Moskva had been contained, but left the ship badly damaged. It did not acknowledge the ship had been attacked and said the cause of the fire was under investigation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the Western leaders to go further and repeated his call for a no-fly zone over his country, where thousands of people have been killed, millions become refugees.
After struggling to find a new post-Cold War role, countering terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, NATO is back defending against its original nemesis. But there's a difference.
Columnist Tammy Swift may be distantly related to Taylor Swift, but she wants people to know she did not found the SWIFT global banking system. In fact, she says the last time there was this much interest in any Swift banking system was 1985, when Mom and Dad Swift wondered how she could spend a whole quarter of student-loan money on shaker sweaters, trips to Target and Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.
The Russian invasion -- the biggest assault on a European state since World War II -- has failed to make the decisive early gains that Putin would have hoped for. But Kharkiv in Ukraine's northeast has become a major battleground.
World powers are engaged in one of the deepest crises in East-West relations for decades, jostling over post-Cold War influence and energy supplies as Moscow wants to stop the former Soviet state from ever joining the NATO military alliance.
Since 2019 the United States has deployed non-overlapping rotations of its own groups of about 500 troops and equipment in Lithuania, adding to the alliance's efforts to deter Russia from its vulnerable flank.
Scholz, under fire at home and abroad for showing insufficient leadership in the crisis, struck a more forceful tone before his departure, telling broadcaster ARD in an interview that he was open to deploying more troops to Lithuania to bolster NATO's eastern flank.
Feb 7, 2022
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By Andrea Shalal, Sarah Marsh and Andreas Rinke / Reuters
