Czech President Milos Zeman, right, and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the terrace of the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic, March 30, 2016 (Photo by Rene Fluger for CTK via AP Images).
PRAGUE—With its foggily lit Gothic alleyways, Prague has long had the image of a hotbed of international espionage. A recent report by the Czech Republic’s national intelligence agency, the Security Information Service, or BIS, does little to dispel that narrative. It cautions that Russia and China are steadily increasing their efforts to sow division and win influence in this small country in the heart of Eastern Europe, which is a member of the European Union and NATO. Both Moscow and Beijing are widely suspected of seeking to provoke instability across the West, but in few countries are these tussles playing [...]
Forensic officers at the scene of the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian asylum-seeker believed killed by Russian agents, Berlin, Germany, Aug. 23, 2019 (Photo by Christoph Soeder for dpa via AP Images).
The German government announced earlier this month that it believed Russian agents were responsible for the killing of a Georgian asylum-seeker who was murdered in Berlin last summer in broad daylight. The incident had all the hallmarks of a Russian state-orchestrated assassination: The target was a known anti-Kremlin rebel, and the prime suspect, who was taken into custody just hours after the murder, was a Russian man with a criminal record who had traveled to Germany on a fake passport less than a week before the killing. Yet despite ample evidence, the German government for months was cautious in publicly [...]
South Korean middle school students march in a rally against Japan in Seoul, South Korea, Aug. 28, 2019 (AP photo by Ahn Youg-joon).
Over the past half century, the United States and its two key allies in Northeast Asia, South Korea and Japan, have established a limited yet effective framework for trilateral defense cooperation. That system has largely remained intact despite a history of bad blood between Seoul and Tokyo, specifically over Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 until 1945. But regional observers are now increasingly worried that this edifice is beginning to crumble. The latest sign of trouble was South Korea’s decision last month to scrap a 2016 intelligence-sharing pact with Japan. The General Security of Military Information Agreement, [...]
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