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On 24 February 2022, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, unleashed an attack on Ukraine that developed into the most significant conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Fought over the same ground that the Germans and the Soviet Union battled on between 1941 and 1944, Russia attempted to advance to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and replace its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a puppet regime. Facing determined resistance, the Russians failed to reach the city, being compelled to withdraw and re-direct their forces to other fronts. The Battle of Kyiv tells the story of the heroic resilience of the Ukrainians over the military forces of a country which has more than three times its population and an economy almost ten times larger. This book is also an analysis of the enormous support given to Ukraine, both politically and militarily, by NATO and other nations, without which Ukraine's military might have failed to beat back the invaders. The author explores the first phase of the war, during which Russian armour, mechanized and air mobile troops drove on Kyiv, surrounded Chernigov, seized Kherson twice, and threatened the very existence of the Ukrainian state. The United States' intelligence services estimated that the Russians would seize Kyiv within three days. They offered to evacuate President Zelensky back to Lvov. His alleged response to the Americans was: 'I need ammunition, not a ride.' He and his government stayed in Kyiv and the battle lines were drawn.

"While the past half-century has seen no diminution in the valor and fighting skill of the U.S. military and its allies, the fact remains that our wars have become more protracted, with decisive results more elusive. With only two exceptions -- Panama and the Gulf War under the first President Bush -- our campaigns have taken on character of endless slogs without positive results. This analytical work takes a ground-up look at the problem in order to assess how our strategic objectives have recently become divorced from our true capability, or imperatives. The book presents a unique examination of the nature of insurgencies and the three major guerrilla wars the United States has fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Political passions aside, it addressed in hard detail -- demographic, terrain, cultural issues, and pure distance -- which insurgencies across the globe can successfully be fought It applies the hard experience of the last five decades to address the issues of today. As such, it also provides a timely and meaningful discussion of America's current geopolitical position. It starts with the previously close-held casualty estimate for Iraq that The Dupuy Institute complied in 2004 for the U.S. Department of Defense. Going from the practical to the theoretical, it then discusses a construct for understanding insurgencies and the contexts in which they can be fought. It applies these principles to Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, assessing where the projection of U.S. power can enhance our position and where the expense of our forces merely weakens it. It presents an extensive analysis of insurgencies based upon a unique database of 83 post-World War II cases. The book explores what is important to combat and what is not important to resist in insurgencies. As such, it builds a body of knowledge based upon a half-century's worth of real-life data. In these pages, Christopher A. Lawrence, the President of The Dupuy Institute, provides an invaluable guide to how the U.S. can best project its vital power, while avoiding the missteps of the recent past."-- from book jacket

The 1994 Agreed Framework called for North Korea to dismantle its plutonium-production complex in exchange for civilian light water reactors (LWRs) and the promise of political normalization with the United States. The accord succeeded at rolling back North Korea's nuclear program, but the regime secretly began enriching uranium when the LWR project fell behind schedule. Today, scholars look back at the Agreed Framework as a U.S. offer of "carrots" to bribe the regime, but this framing overlooks the credibility challenges of normalization and the distinctive technical challenges of building LWRs in North Korea. A combiniation of political and technical analysis reveals how the LWR project helped build credibility for the political changes promised in the Agreed Framework. Under this interpretation, the LWR project created a platform for important breakthroughs in U.S.-North Korean engagement by signaling a U.S. commitment to normalization, but its signaling function was undercut when the United States displaced the costs of LWR construction to its allies. The real challenge of proliferation crisis diplomacy is not to bribe or coerce target states into giving up nuclear weapons, but to credibly signal a U.S. commitment to the long-term political changes needed to make denuclearization possible.

How has commercial remote sensing influenced the framing of public narratives about nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction? This article examines an early and formative case: In 2002, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization used commercial satellite images to publicly identify the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. The episode helped inaugurate the 'Iran nuclear crisis' as we have known it since. But it also played a role in fomenting a commercial market for remote sensing, adjusting the role of 'citizen scientist' in the nuclear arms-control community, visualizing a new television journalism beat of 'covering the intelligence community', legitimizing a transforming role of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and solidifying Iran's nuclear program as 'clandestine'. This article follows the images as they pass through these social worlds and examines how heterogenous actors incorporated remote sensing into their identities and commitments to global transparency.

Summary
Guy's Hospital was a major setting for the creation of heart surgery as a practice and speciality in immediate post-war Britain. Medical reformers of the twentieth century characterised much London hospital medicine as conservative and not organised for the production of modern research. Through the minutes of a hospital club formed to manage congenital heart disease, the paper explores how dynamic surgical research was carried out in an institution committed to traditional values and organisation. I trace the background to this development from around 1900.