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 …
Why the West fell for Putin’s bluff
“Russia says some troops returning from Ukraine border,” blasts the update from the BBC. My phone buzzes feverishly: WhatsApp and Facebook ping; Twitter DMs light up my screen; Signal messages come in from Ukraine and Russia. It will only get …
How Europe’s hypocrisy enables Putin
Almost a year before Putin closed in on Ukraine, British policymakers saw the whole thing coming. Russia would become “more active around the wider European neighbourhood,” stated the Government’s 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Presented …
Putin’s Grand Plan Is Failing
Last month there was a three-hour debate in parliament entitled “Putin’s Grand Strategy.” It began with a passionate speech by Tory backbencher Sir Bernard Jenkin, who spoke about the “admirably precise” focus of the Russian president, while lamenting the lack …
How Britain became Putin’s playground
On Monday, Liz Truss warned Russia’s oligarchs that there will be “nowhere to hide” their dirty money in London. Which is pretty weird when you think about it, since the statement includes the implicit admission that the money is already …
What Ukraine can learn from Israel
Almost eight years ago I watched a Ukrainian teenager lob a can of Mojito Royce Ice into a ditch and had the first stirrings of what the future might hold. It was May 2014, and I had travelled to the …
Putin’s next move
A couple of weeks ago, in a biting sleet wind, I visited the graveyard of the tiny village of Bohoniki in Poland’s far north east, home to Poland’s minuscule Tatar Muslim minority, descendents of the Mongol Golden Horde. On the …
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, …
Stop saying the UK is transphobic
When it gathered in Strasbourg on Tuesday to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people”, the Council of Europe singled out a small collection of the most inhospitable countries. It contained the usual suspects …
How the EU betrayed Ukraine
Cast your mind back to February 2014 — and the dramatic conclusion to the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Given the choice between alignment with Brussels or Moscow, there was no doubt as to where the crowd’s sympathies lay.
On the …
How Biden can defeat China
In 1930, John Dos Passos wrote that America is many things: it is a “slice of a continent”, “the world’s greatest river valley”, and “a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts”. “But mostly,” he wrote in The …
Vladimir Putin’s war on history
Vladimir Putin came to the world’s notice, in 2000, styled as a New Russian Democrat. He had been an aide to the charismatic Petersburg reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. His assumption of the supreme political office of president — after a …
Why Biden has sacrificed Ukraine
Every January I think of eastern Ukraine. Wherever I am in the world, it’s never as cold as the winter months I spent there during the height of war between Kyiv and Moscow between 2014-2015. Technology stops working, your knees …
2022: The Year Ahead
Source: The Corbett Report Read the original article here: https://www.corbettreport.com …
What lockdown took from my parents
In the uneasy, bright days of the first lockdown of 2020, my father remembered 1946, and his own father setting off on the train from Wallingford to London to debrief Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s successor for the last days of the …