TODAY IN HISTORY
March 18, 1921: The Treaty of Riga formally ends the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War. The Poles emerged mostly victorious, regaining some of the territory that had been lost to the Russian Empire during the three 18th century partitions of Poland, and the outcome put a damper on Soviet plans to try to spread the Communist Revolution to other parts of Europe. Poland’s borders with what had by then become the Soviet Union were of course redrawn again during and after World War II.
March 18, 1965: During the Voskhod 2 space mission, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first person to conduct a spacewalk. Leonov exited the Voskhod spacecraft and spent 12 minutes, 9 seconds in space. The mission’s end the following day almost became a tragedy when weather forced the capsule to touch down off course, in the heavily forested Upper Kama Upland region. Leonov and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had to spend the night in the forest because the terrain made their planned airlift impossible and ground rescuers couldn’t reach them until the following day.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The Syrian government has begun eliminating chemical weapons that were stockpiled by its predecessor under former leader Bashar al-Assad. This project involves an “international task force,” supported by the governments of Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US, that will be tasked with inspecting some 100 sites across Syria for elements of the Assad-era CW program. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will oversee the effort. Assad’s government brought Syria into the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013 and claimed at the time to have declared the country’s stockpile to the OPCW, but Western governments have maintained that Assad was continuing a secret CW program. The current Syrian government has accepted that Western framing and is pledging to fully eliminate the program.
