Coinbase’s former chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan wants to use social networks to create states. What doesn’t fit into his vision are things like poverty, illness and ageing.

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

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.

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.

Since hostilities between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front in Western Sahara resumed in November 2020, the EU has been reluctant to play an active role in the conflict. But a recent EU Court of Justice ruling against the inclusion of Western Sahara in the EU-Morocco trade deal could soon force Brussels to step into the fray.