Month: June 2025

In the past, most military parades in the U.S. were staged to signal the end of a war and welcome home of those who fought.

The last major military parade in the nation’s capitol was in 1991. It marked the end of the Gulf War.

The capital has not seen a military parade like the one planned by President Trump for June 14th in decades – a parade estimated to cost $45 million.

NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with historian Joshua Zeitz. He’s a contributing editor for Politico Magazine and has written about where Trump’s parade fits into the American tradition.

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President Trump wants to make a deal with Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. Putin says Russia wants to engage in peace talks, but Putin has also been ordering the most widespread and violent aerial attacks on Ukraine in years. This has led Trump to criticize Putin more and more in public — a step that’s been rare over the course of Trump’s two terms in office.

Three years into his war on Ukraine, what does Putin really want? It’s a question leaders around the world are trying to figure out.

To learn more, NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with Angela Stent, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University, Senior Fellow at the Brookings institution — a nonpartisan policy organization in Washington DC — and author of the book “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.

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