When I started working at Berliner Zeitung two years ago, the staff were putting together a dossier on the East-German experience to commemorate the 30th anniversary of reunification. It seemed like the natural thing to do: the newspaper had been …
Vladimir Putin’s failed strategy
As the first 250 days of Russia’s war in Ukraine have proved again, the logic of strategy is paradoxical. It has never been linear, as in the Roman Si vis pacem para bellum: if you want peace prepare for war. …
Who will stop Putin from going nuclear?
In the early hours of 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel in a Soviet Air Defence command centre outside of Moscow, was covering for a sick colleague when an alarm when off. According to Soviet satellites, five …
Why Russia rewrote Lord of the Rings
“Here, our only way is to withstand the onslaught of Mordor,” declared the Ukrainian Minister of Defence in early March. “The area is free of orcs,” another Ukrainian official reported some months later. Meanwhile, President Zelenskyy pleaded that Ukraine not …
How the Left fell for capitalism
What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the 21st century emerged from the rainforest remnants of southern Mexico on 1 January 1994, carried down darkened, cobbled colonial streets by 500 pairs of black leather boots at …
Sanctioning Russia could topple the West
The West, following the lead of the United States, has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by introducing a “crippling” regime of sanctions. It is a “total economic and financial war” aimed at “caus[ing] the collapse of the Russian economy”, …
German pacifism is dead
I was a teenager when my father was posted to Munich, on secondment from British Aerospace to work on the Eurofighter Typhoon. None of us really understood what he did there — all I knew is that he was an …
Putin can’t win a Cold War
When Harry S. Truman rose to his feet before a Joint Session of Congress to deliver the speech that won the Cold War, exactly 75 years ago today, some of his listeners might have been forgiven for wondering what on …
The liberal order is already dead
In the summer of 1990, I stood where the wall had been and wondered at what had happened to Europe. I wasn’t alone: the rest of the city, the rest of the continent, was wondering too.
I was 18 years …
Did the New York Times spy on its workers?
Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, is by all accounts a union man. In his recent essay on “The Power in Numbers”, he concluded with a rousing demand: the Government …
Putin has history on his side
If you set off from Kiev and drive east, heading across the flat fields of central Ukraine, after about four hours you’ll come to a city called Poltava. By post-Soviet standards it’s not such a bad place, with a sleepy, …
