In 2027, the world will see the first newly independent country since South Sudan in 2011. Bougainville, an autonomous province in Papua New Guinea (PNG), voted almost unanimously for independence in a 2019 referendum.

Waterloo Uncovered, the groundbreaking charity that combines archaeology with veteran care and recovery, will be visiting the Falkland Islands this month to begin the first intensive archaeological survey of its battlefields.

By lending its support to the Moroccan autonomy proposal, Spain is reconciling with Rabat, but opening a new rift with Algeria.

Taiwan won’t follow China’s militarization of the South China Sea with its own island-fortification efforts, its top defense official told lawmakers on Tuesday.

New route offers children of those born on islands right to be British overseas territory citizens or British citizens.

Borders create paradoxes: when you cross them, everything changes but much stays the same. In Borderlands, Dutch journalist Milo van Bokkum describes this paradox and the way locals deal with the complexities caused by these often arbitrarily drawn lines.

Three decades later, and with war raging in neighbouring Ukraine, it’s worth remembering the sparks that ignited the conflict over Transnistria.

The Council of Europe on Tuesday for the first time designated Moldova’s breakaway region ‘occupied territory’ as opposed to territory ‘under the effective control of the Russian Federation’.

“Who wouldn’t want to buy an island?” Marshall Mayer asks above the roar of the engine as the boat cuts through the still waters of the Caribbean Sea. Mayer is co-founder of Let’s Buy an Island, an ambitious project that in 2018 set out to crowdfund the purchase of an island. By December 2019, the group’s aspirations became reality, raising over $250,000 to complete the purchase of an uninhabited island off the coast of Belize.

Despite its reliance on Russia and reputation as a plaything of Moscow, Transnistria has important ties to Ukraine as well – which explains its current policy of staying out of the conflict.

Vladimir Putin has consistently used Kosovo’s Western-backed unilateral declaration of independence as legal justification for his military incursions into other former Soviet republics to support Russian-backed rebels, writes judge Dean B. Pineles.

The “world’s most challenging shipwreck search” for one of the greatest legends of exploration history, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, lost more than a century ago in the icy waters of Antarctica, has succeeded. The site of Endurance was declared a historic monument under the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

Moldovans fear that Transnistria, a region run by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Moldova, might be the next target after Ukraine.

There have been no air raid sirens in Moldova, no explosions and no casualties, but already some of the turbulence and anxiety of war is starting to build.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recognized the Kurdistan Region on Thursday, with a top Kurdish official saying this will pave the way for the birth of the Kurdistan flag emoji.

For the Kremlin, NATO’s 1999 war against Serbia is the West’s original sin—and a humiliating affront that Russia must avenge.

Vladimir Putin claims to be defending populations in the Donbas. In fact, the Kremlin-controlled statelets there are dominated by military rule and repression of organized labor — a troubling indicator of the future Putin has in store for neighboring regions.

As it overturned precedent to follow the U.S. and Europe in imposing harsh sanctions to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, Japan said it scrambled fighter jets to intercept a helicopter—thought to be Russian—that entered its airspace. That fueled more sniping between Japan and Russia, which have been at odds over four small islands that lie between them since the end of World War II, preventing them from formally ending hostilities.

Many in Taiwan see parallels with Ukraine. “We must use this time of peace to prepare for the worst,” says a nonprofit working to promote civil defense.

Moldova’s envoy to the United States says that his country is closely monitoring Russian soldiers already deployed to Moldavian territory, which is also claimed by Moscow-aligned rebels who carved out their own breakaway state along the Ukrainian border three decades ago.

The Moldovan authorities commemorated those who fought and died in the war with Russian-backed separatist forces that seized control over the eastern region of Transnistria in 1992.

Richard Norton-Taylor flags the UK’s dispute with Mauritius over sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where the largest island hosts a major U.S. bomber base.

Liberland, a micronation situated on a slice of disputed land between the Croatian and Serbian borders, is quickly taking shape in the metaverse with a futuristic crypto-powered design by Zaha Hadid Architects.

It was a week when Ukrainians saw their lives upturned. Artist and activist Diana Berg, born in Donetsk, reveals her fears but also the pride felt in the resilience of her peers. She runs TU platform, a space in Mariupol created by people who were united by the war and who began to fight it through cultural initiatives.

Ukraine crisis has thrust Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik into centre of events, amid claim they are puppets of Putin.

The differences between the situations with Russia and Ukraine and China and Taiwan are significant. There is one concept that unites Putin on Ukraine and Xi on Taiwan, however: The idea that history and geography can trump self-determination and democracy, no matter what.

A look at the implications for the wider crisis in which the US says Russia may be poised to invade Ukraine.

The former president of South Ossetia, Eduard Kokoity, is returning to politics again – he is nominated as a presidential candidate for the upcoming elections. Despite the fact that, according to the law, he cannot be registered as a candidate – due to the fact that he has not lived in his homeland for many years. Presidential elections in South Ossetia will be held on 10 April.

An Olympic athlete is under investigation after posting a video of an ensemble that has enraged fans in her home country.

Exactly 45 years ago, the Kalakuta Republic burned to the ground. The secessionist state within Nigeria provided political asylum for musicians, friends and family of afro-pop musician and activist Fela Kuti.