Yevgeny Prigozhin, the vitriolic and confrontational leader of the Wagner “Private Military Company”, has come to play a leading role in the bitter war of words between the country’s nationalists and armed forces. For months, he has been lobbing increasingly …
Eat, Pray, Get Cancelled
This week has brought mixed news for beleaguered Ukrainians. Their army’s counteroffensive is taking a heavy toll on its own troops; there have been damaging missile strikes on the cities of Kryvyi Rih and Odesa; the breach in the Nova …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
How Aleksandr Dugin influences the West
As Europe’s leaders anxiously await the results of Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive, it is significant that Aleksandr Dugin’s latest essay opens by citing Ernst Jünger’s influential 1932 essay The Worker, to call for Russia’s total mobilisation to win the war. Though …
The plan behind Ukraine’s counteroffensive
“Kill them all — I never thought I’d say that, but these bastards have no humanity.” Dasha stabs her finger into the air as she makes her point over coffee in Odesa. Across south-eastern Ukraine, people are enraged at the …
Poland’s phoney war on ‘Russian saboteurs’
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party has undergone something of a rebrand. Its leaders, who were once widely derided as populist traditionalists with a taste for authoritarianism, have successfully rebranded themselves on the world stage as …
South Africa isn’t neutral on Ukraine
“Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division among us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.” Nelson Mandela, shortly before leaving office as president, urged constant vigilance against South Africa’s enemies, “even …
The capitalists are revolting over China
After marshalling Europe in its proxy war against Russia, America is now determined to repeat this success against China. Here, the consequences for Europe could be even more significant than the economic shock of the past year. Yet, despite a …
Why Putin will use nuclear weapons
However you try to spin it, the drone strikes that struck Moscow’s wealthiest neighbourhoods on Tuesday night represented a grim turning point in Putin’s flagging campaign against Ukraine. The surprise attacks — which killed eight people, and for which Kyiv …
The Arab Spring exposed America’s weakness
When Bashar al-Assad touched down in Riyadh last week, to be embraced by the Saudi king on the occasion of Syria’s readmittance to the Arab League, the Syrian War drew to a close, and with it the Arab Spring. His …
Kissinger’s final warning
How one chooses to celebrate Kissinger’s Century depends on where you sit in the “Kissinger wars”. To his detractors, Henry Kissinger was an imperialist who pursued US global supremacy with unmatched ruthlessness and cynicism. To his supporters, he was a …
Martin Amis knew the horror of words
Years after I first read The Rachel Papers, I bought the copy of Hamlet that Martin Amis had owned as an Oxford student from a book dealer in Charing Cross. It had his undergraduate jottings in the margins and his …
Poland’s leaders have endangered Nato
On 16 December 2022, the most significant territorial breach in Nato’s history took place, but the chances are you didn’t hear about it. That day — almost a month after a presumed-to-be errant Ukrainian air defence rocket made international headlines …
Why Africa welcomed the Wagner Group
“A phased shift is happening in the world. And it’s a good thing.” That is Yevgeny Prigozhin’s bullish assessment on Telegram of the Wagner Group’s growing impact on the Global South. Under his leadership, the quasi-private mercenary force has quickly …
How the Ukraine war became a spectator sport
In The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy’s 1912 poem on the loss of the Titanic, the great liner and the iceberg are presented as predestined to meet in their fatal embrace: “Alien they seemed to be/ No mortal eye …
