For about three hours Wednesday morning, the Ukrainian flag was flying high over Russia’s capital city. Protesters fastened a blue-and-yellow banner to the Soviet star atop the spire of one of Moscow’s Stalin-era “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers on the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment about a mile from the Kremlin.

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equalizer. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content.

Google “Kosovo”, and Petrit Selimi knows exactly what you’re going to see: dry, diplo-speak scouting reports at best, and depressing references to past conflicts at worst. It’s not exactly the promotional buzz a fledgling country with sights set on global integration would hope for. 

Exactly one month from today, four million Scots will go to the polls to answer a simple question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

Lorries from a Russian convoy carrying aid to eastern Ukraine have reached a border post controlled by separatists. But they seem unlikely to cross into Ukraine immediately as the Red Cross said it had still not received security guarantees for the convoy to continue. Earlier Ukraine's military said that separatists had shot down a government fighter jet near the rebel-held city of Luhansk in the east of the country.

The Obama administration is pursuing a new approach to public diplomacy that stands to weaken US ties abroad, and delivers its most profound blow to the transatlantic relationship. In March, the administration proposed a 13% cut to the Fulbright fellowship program. Cuts to Fulbright come alongside the expansion of shorter programs that offer less substantive immersion for foreigners, neglect Americans, and shift the diplomatic lens away from Europe during a period that requires greater, not less, transatlantic cooperation. 

For the Argentine Francis, who was chosen to lead the world’s Catholics in part because of his allure for people in South America, a stronghold of the faith, South Korea presents an important test of whether his popularity there and in the United States and parts of Europe transfers to Asia.

MH17 has left Dutch society in a state of mid-summer anaesthesia. Exactly 25 years after the end of the Cold War, and 20 years after the Srebrenica genocide that left more than 8,000 dead in a UN ‘safe area’ under Dutch command, the shooting down of KLM double tagged Malaysian Airlines MH17 is another defining moment for the Netherlands’ external relations.