Over the past year and a half, calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have been widely dismissed by the Ukrainian government and its more maximalist online supporters as either Putinist propaganda or defeatism. Yet the so-far lacklustre results …
How Ukraine is using animal propaganda
A “big, white bear of a dog” called Bayraktar, named after the Turkish-made drone that neutralised a Russian convoy heading for Kyiv; a scarred black poodle called Dishika, after the belt-fed, tripod-mounted DShK machine gun that has taken down dozens …
How MBS wins friends and influences people
Prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, nobody cared much for Saudi Arabia: a largely nomadic, pre-industrial desert nation with a population smaller than London. But in the last 50 years, it has become a friend worth cultivating. So much …
Will Russia split up the Brics?
When the 15th annual Brics summit gathers in Johannesburg next week, the vaunting hope of the five invested countries will be that the group finally begins to show some of its initial promise. The host, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, …
Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West
Do you remember the Imperial Stormtroopers from the Star Wars movies, lurching around in their white plastic armour? When Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original movie said that no one else was as precise as Imperial Stormtroopers, he was clearly making …
Why Ukraine’s offensive has stalled
Whenever Russian missiles strike a Ukrainian city, or Kyiv’s drones target a building in Moscow, the attacks are inevitably followed by the sort of media coverage worthy of a Blitz raid. Yet generating headlines is just about their only achievement: …
Ukraine has exposed the EU’s nationalism
Over the past decade, and especially since the political shocks of 2016, there has been an increasing tendency to see both domestic and international politics in terms of a set of binary opposites: democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and illiberalism, internationalism …
The Ukraine war is about to get worse
Amid the never-ending coverage of the latest offensive or counteroffensive in Ukraine, it is often unappreciated just how much worse the global economic repercussions from the conflict could have been. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of gas and provided …
Putin’s holy war on Ukraine
As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhin’s name, he said that …
The Prigozhin copycats are coming for Putin
Kremlinology is like reading tea leaves or astrology. It is closer to an art than a science — little is as it seems, and what information does trickle out has often only been released to service further palace intrigue. Nearly …
The Nato mindset leads to war
As Nato members and their Asia-Pacific allies convene today to discuss the bloc’s expansion and future strategy, the Ukrainians are destined to be disappointed — insofar as membership is concerned at least. In an interview on Sunday, Biden said it …
Has the West lost control of oil?
Oil might be a source of power, but trying to control its price is a politically hazardous business. Led by the odd pairing of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), and Vladimir Putin, the Opec Plus oil producers’ …
What will become of Putin’s useful idiots?
Just outside Moscow, Russian migration lawyer Timur Beslangurov is looking for residents for his new Potemkin Village. But unlike the fake one supposedly constructed by Russian nobleman Grigory Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great, Beslangurov’s village and its inhabitants will …
Russia’s toxic military politics
No group in history has posed as many dangers as soldiers who feel abandoned by their leaders. Whether they are conscripts, volunteers or mercenaries, officers or rank-and-file, the men who fought for a cause that later became reviled as failed …
Dodging shells on Ukraine’s eastern front
I’m running. Shells explode around me. Sometimes they roar like thunder; sometimes they whistle on approach. Large parts of the forest are on fire. Smoke rolls by like dry ice.
“Run. Run. Run,” says Dima. I follow him over the …