Russia

DIPLOMA: What NATO is failing to do today? With a mildly satirical exterior and a deadly serious core, Arthur Franck's account of the groundbreaking Helsinki Accords of 1975 demonstrates the great historical significance of a diplomatic process that was considered both boring and irrelevant at the time.

WAR: Norway has – at one level or another – participated in all of the US and NATO wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We also help remove leaders we believe some should not have. But what are we willing to die for?

POWER:Today's autocratic regimes have turned what was once a domestic policy into a foreign policy doctrine. Autocracy Inc. is brilliant and terrifying from Anne Applebaum.

SV:MODERN TIMES publishes here an open letter to the SV leadership. Why is the previous work program's claim that NATO is not primarily a defense alliance being deleted? And why should SV no longer believe that NATO is "a tool for promoting Western economic and foreign policy interests"?

RUSSIA: Jan-E. Askerøi has visited Ukraine and seen what consequences a boycott of Russia has had on Ukrainian industry.

THE LAW OF THE PEOPLE: Russia's formal justification for carrying out its "special operation" against Ukraine is an exact mirror image of NATO's justification for bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 – despite established international law.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS: For Moscow, the Ukraine war is about defense, not conquest. But for the West, the war is about Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine and about Ukraine's right to choose an alliance. Like the Western doctrine, the Russian one now allows for the first use of nuclear weapons.

USA: The European political-media elite portrays Trump as the new Hitler, but is nevertheless in a great hurry to subordinate itself to the USA economically, militarily and politically. Glenn Diesen analyzes the US situation now.

WAR: The fear of a third world war is becoming palpable. Last year, 59 armed conflicts were registered in the world, the highest number since the end of the previous world war. Can one today compare states at war with teenagers who have not yet developed the ability to think about consequences? Today, the possibility of nuclear war is undoubtedly present – with Norway linked to a nuclear-weapon dependent NATO.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS: Most have assumed that it was Russians who had shot the civilians found in the street in Butsja. But here in MODERN TIMES, peace researcher Ola Tunander criticizes this perception by documenting several facts that point in a different direction. For example: If Russian forces were responsible for the killings in Butsha, why didn't they try to cover them up? They have buried others.

BORN: Instead of showing magnanimity to an adversary that no longer wanted to be an enemy, the US continued to exclude Russia and rejected any idea of ​​a common European security architecture.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The main message of Annie Jacobsen's book is to demonstrate how terrible a nuclear war would be. A nuclear war would destroy the indispensable anthropological basis for any form of high culture and technology.

EAST GERMANY: Wellmer's observation that the war in Ukraine has triggered a new distance or 'Entfremdung' between East and West Germany is apt. Criticism of Putin is experienced today by East Germans as an attack on their East German identity. The West is now wronging Russia in the same way that West Germany dominated the East after the fall of the Wall.

MILITARISM: The Ukraine war risks becoming the prelude to an inevitable decline for the West. The Nordic countries are now among the largest suppliers of weapons to Ukraine. This book is a quantitative visualization of the decline of the West and of growing distrust of institutions among large sections of the population in Western societies. The West can no longer aspire to moral leadership in the world.

UKRAINE: The country has always been more complex than these stirring Manichean explanations of a battle between the forces of good and absolute evil suggest. Diana Panchenko tells the story of a Ukraine that was seduced into becoming a kind of Anti-Russia. The Western narrative is simple and seductive: Putin is a bloodthirsty madman, Stalin's real heir, never satisfied with new conquests, and he attacked Ukraine only because the country wanted to be free and democratic.

GEOPOLITICS: In The Battle for World Power, Tunsjø is guilty of 'mirror imaging'. In recent decades, the United States has started a large number of wars and supported a large number of coup d'états, while in the same period China has actually built up trust in various states in the Third World.