Yerevan
On a hillside overlooking the capital is Armenia’s last line of defence in the event of war. Squeezed between a junkyard and a Soviet-era apartment block is a dusty assault course littered with rusting cars, discarded water bottles and …
Will Putin’s gamble pay off?
“Let that motherfucker send as many slaves as he wants. It won’t make any difference. We will send them back to Russia in boxes, like we did to the ones he sent already.”
“Ivan” pauses. He is involved in civilian …
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 …
Will Putin use WMDs?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is dragging into its fifth month. Initially, most observers believed that Russian forces would steamroller weaker Ukrainian defences in days or weeks. Instead the invaders were pushed back. The conflict is now a slog, with …
Is Russia winning the war?
A couple of weeks ago, I was smoking a cigarette outside my hotel in Kharkiv when a Ukrainian man, hearing me speak English, came over to show me a photo on his phone. It was of his 21-year-old son who …
Did Ukraine need a war?
War has always been the father of innovation: a reset for societies forced to adopt whatever methods work just in order to survive. The outburst of voluntarism that has gripped Ukraine is a striking example: mutual aid groups, local volunteer …
Is Europe’s far-Right always wrong?
“In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t about Putin’s attack against Ukraine… It is about democracy, sovereignty — fundamentals like freedom of speech and human rights. It is about Western democracies’ ability to stand up for themselves and the …
Germany’s arrogant pacifism
In Germany, this was a Victory in Europe Day like no other. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Berlin’s entire postwar consensus has crumbled. Previously settled policies and cherished beliefs have dissolved in this new reality: the brutal return of war to …
What we get wrong about appeasement
Much about the war in Ukraine has been unpredictable. Entirely predictable, though, has been the way stories from history have been mobilised by politicians and pundits to offer “lessons” about the crisis there: why it has occurred, what its consequences …
Vladimir Putin’s war on chaos
The ancient Greek word “chaos” means a chasm or void, and its opposite is “cosmos”, meaning the exquisite design of the world. Modern astrophysicists are struck by what they call the “fine-tuning” of the universe, a place which looks as …
How Russia’s sanction-proofing failed
“How could our government have been so stupid?” one Russian acquaintance of mine wondered, after the West imposed sweeping sanctions that froze around $300 billion of the Russian government’s foreign exchange reserves held in Western banks.
Over the past few …
Will Russia drop a nuclear bomb?
Why would a leader decide to drop a nuclear bomb? Almost three weeks into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with still no end in sight, it’s a question that hasn’t felt so urgent since the outbreak of the Cold War. When …
How magicians are fighting Putin
Last Wednesday at 3.33am, Moscow time, as the new moon waxed in the sky, the resistance to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine took the form of a mass binding ritual: a spell to frustrate and confound the Russian leader, to be …
America has won Europe’s war
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders have gone out of their way to condemn Putin and express their solidarity with the victims of the conflict. And yet, one cannot help but suspect that behind closed doors they are raising …
Putin’s toxic masculinity
Of all the ill-informed explanations for why Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, perhaps the most absurd is that he is afflicted with “toxic masculinity”. And yet, there are multiple commentators and think piece writers saying exactly that: the Russian President …
