Major indices, including the Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500, and Dow Jones Industrial Average, all recorded gains, with the Nasdaq delivering its strongest weekly performance since November.
In 2021, when Olga Rudenko and other journalists launched the Kyiv Independent, they were committed to making a publication that wouldn't face political pressure from an owner. A few months later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Independent began reporting breaking news from the front lines.
One could attribute Russian attempts at hacking and influencing the 2016 general election to retaliation for the CIA's involvement in Ukraine, or to a personal vendetta against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with regard to Ukraine ahead of the Maidan revolt, or to rousing anti-Putin sentiment in Russia: ... Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square. "She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal," Putin said. "They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work." (No evidence was provided for the accusation.) ...
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, inspired a wave of enthusiastic nodding among the cosmopolitan crowd gathered in Davos last month when he took to the podium and proclaimed that the world order underwritten by the United States, which prevailed in the west throughout the postwar era, was over. The organizing principle that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, that interdependence would promote world peace by knitting nations' interests together in a drive for common security and prosperity, no longer works.
Countries are increasingly settling aside old grudges to lessen their reliance on Washington. As Donald Trump continues to unleash havoc on allies and trading partners, countries are scrambling to forge new alliances and mend broken ones as they try to shield themselves from a mercurial American president. The past few months have seen a flurry of diplomatic moves by governments seeking to lessen their reliance on the United States, including among countries that had long nursed grudges against one another.
But the echoes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin's imperial land grab of the waiter's own country are clear to him. They're crazy. The pair of them. For those paying more attention in Ukraine, amid Russian airstrikes, the freezing cold and power cuts, the correspondences are not only clear, but often alarming even if for now Trump has switched from sabre rattling to trying to rationalise a vague and incoherent deal he thinks he struck for the territory with Nato.
