A journalist browses the Messina museum website showing a picture of the Early Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina’s artwork, multiple pieces of which were stolen from the Sicilian museum on Aug. 15, 2026.
The roots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in “the world order.”
Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.
A photo of the exterior of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in June. For months, a tarp has covered the arts complex’s facade, ever since a federal judge ruled that President Trump’s name was unlawfully added to the center.