How many of Ukraine’s priests are working for Putin? The nation’s security services are determined to find out. Last month, the SBU raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv looking for Russian citizens, cash, and pro-Russian literature. Priests at …
Should America be more like Ukraine?
For those of us in the West, the Ukrainian response to the Soviet invasion has been somewhat embarrassing. We are used to living in peace and prosperity and are not in the habit of fighting for our way of life …
Will Russia push the nuclear button?
Ukrainian forces have recently retaken much of the ground that was captured by Russia in the first months of this year, and the Russian government and military response has looked increasingly panicked. Hundreds of thousands of civilian men have been …
The British Army has a class problem
In 2008, at a birthday party in Fulham, a 26-year-old aspiring portrait painter met the adjutant of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. As the section of the British Army that performs ceremonial duties with horses, the regiment is often judged …
Has Putin sacrificed Armenia?
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 is Russia obsessed with slavery?
There’s nothing wrong with being cautious. Since 1709, when Peter the Great routed the troops of Swedish King Charles XII at Poltava, smack-dab in the middle of modern-day Ukraine, Europeans have understood Russia as a military threat. Never has this …
Bankers have failed us again
A year ago, the governor of the Bank of England tried to downplay growing fears of inflation. Any increase, Andrew Bailey assured us, was understandable given the “bumpy” economic recovery after the pandemic, and he expected “it to come back …
How Dubai entices crooks
Dubai might be “the planet’s influencer capital”, but the people bankrolling the city aren’t TikTokers arriving with suitcases of bikinis. The Emirati city also attracts the kind of people who jet in on helicopters stuffed with cash, positioning itself as …
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 …
Our Russia strategy has backfired
Whatever the origins of the Ukraine war, the West and Russia are now engaged in a broader confrontation that is not confined to the military struggle: the war has become a competition in pain-tolerance.
This is, as Thomas Schelling wrote, …
Refugees could weaken Russia
On the evening of 24 August last year, Karin Garretsen and her 10-year-old son rode their bicycles to the sprawling army camp on the outskirts of their village in the Dutch countryside. Some Afghans who had fled the Taliban takeover …
Neoliberalism died before Ukraine
The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world. Unfettered capitalism would release the global economy from arbitrary constraints, and if …
