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Latest from The Conversation for August 15, 2024

Posted by: The Conversation Global highlights

Date: Friday, 16 August 2024

Military incursions into Russia tend not to end well, history suggests. Which makes the Ukrainian advance into Kursk Oblast all the more astonishing – it is the first breaching of the Russian border by an enemy army since World War II.

It is still, of course, early days. But as Patrick Bury, a former British Army captain and warfare specialist at University of Bath, notes, so far the Ukrainian soldiers have been successful – managing to venture some 30 km into Russian territory with relative ease. Bury explains that good intelligence and pinpointing a weakly defended part of the Russian border were key. 

And no matter what happens next, “one thing neither side will forget is how easy it was for Ukraine to roll over the weakly protected Russian border and embarrass Russian President Vladimir Putin,” writes Bury. As to how this is all going down in Moscow, Peter Rutland of Wesleyan University in the U.S. suggests that the Ukrainian advance represents a huge challenge to the Kremlin’s narrative on how the war is going.

Elsewhere this week, we’ve been wondering about another astonishing advance, this time’s Stonehenge’s massive Altar Stone which seemingly made its way 700 km from Scotland to Salisbury Plain. 

Matt Williams

Senior International Editor, New York

Ukraine war: Kursk offensive has taken the war into Russia and put Putin on the back foot – for now

Patrick Bury, University of Bath

Ukraine has captured hundreds of square kilometres of Russia in a well-planned surprise attack.

Stonehenge’s giant Altar Stone came all the way from north-east Scotland – here’s how we worked out this astonishing new finding

Nicholas Pearce, Aberystwyth University; Richard Bevins, Aberystwyth University; Rob Ixer, UCL

This is the longest known journey for any stone used in a Neolithic monument.

Raising the retirement age won’t defuse China’s demographic time bomb – but mass immigration might

Dudley L. Poston Jr., Texas A&M University

By 2100, China’s population will likely be half its current size. It will also be a lot older, with fewer working-age men and women.

In praise of the weird

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University

Despite feeling some schadenfreude at watching politicians squirm over being derided as such, a scholar of speculative fiction wants to keep America weird.

 
 
 
 

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