Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron hosts Russian leader Vladimir Putin at his summer residence on Monday and his office is adamant about what the get-together is not. France isn’t playing the role of go-between with Russia and other world powers, Macron’s office says, after being stung by a tweet from President Donald Trump earlier in August that suggested Paris was ...

Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalise the regimes’ behaviour. America’s current administration has “national conservatives.” They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social engineer allocating wealth and opportunity. They call themselves conservatives, perhaps because ...

Nobody expected Ukraine’s economy to grow as fast as it did in the second quarter. Though the growth was driven, in large part, by a bumper wheat harvest, the optimistic numbers can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy promises a new kind of politics and investment-friendly change. Ukraine’s real gross domestic product increased by 4.6 percent ...