Cold War may have ended, but the battle never did

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not completely erased the West’s Cold War “victory.” But one thing is certain: The West failed to curb the rise of Russia from the ashes.

I worked as a reporter for WKRC-AM in Cincinnati when I was in college in 1990. The Queen City formed a sister city partnership with Kharkiv, Ukraine. And on one spring morning in 1990, I drove to the Cincinnati airport to do a report as representatives of Kharkiv were about to land. Cincinnati officials waited at the gate (remember, this was years before 9/11) to greet their counterparts.

President Dwight Eisenhower pushed sister cities in the mid-1950s. It was an effort to help link American cities with cities abroad for cultural and sometimes economic exchanges. The program sometimes tried to connect cities that had similar cultures or geography or history.