In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine. Later that day, the Russian navy captured Snake Island in Ukraine’s Black Sea waters. When the news broke, oil and European gas prices soared. The war that began, …
Gaza, Ukraine and our quest for catharsis
The moment Hamas carried out its heinous terror attacks against Israel, the war in Gaza was instantly globalised, reverberating in the hearts and minds of people oceans away who were neither Israeli nor Gazan. Millions on social media picked a …
How Putin exploits Russian antisemitism
Sunday’s ugly scenes at Makhachkala Airport in Russia’s Dagestan region, where a mob ran riot through the terminal and onto the runway in search of Jews disembarking from a plane from Israel, might suggest that Vladimir Putin is beginning to …
The myth of Irish neutrality
Over the summer of 1951, there were so many visitors to a remote Irish Army facility in County Donegal, known as Finner Camp, that traffic jams were common. The crowds were trying to catch sight of a strange new aircraft, …
Israel and the rise of a new world order
Within hours of Hamas’s attack on Saturday, the celebrations had started in Iran. The Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a new propaganda video, glorifying the so-called “Al Aqsa Storm” operation. In Tehran’s “Palestine Square”, regime flunkies …
Nato won’t win a long war in Ukraine
As grand acts of foreign diplomacy go, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent trip to Washington will make the history books for all the wrong reasons. From the moment his jet touched down, the Ukrainian president was greeted with a lukewarm reception, and …
One year on, who blew up Nord Stream 2?
So whodunnit? Who destroyed the Nord Stream 2 at three minutes past midnight on September 26, 2021? Explosives set 262 feet below the surface of the Baltic caused a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter Scale. It ripped apart the …
Will we execute the Russian oligarchs?
As the war was starting in the early hours of February 24, 2022, when the CIA was forecasting Kyiv’s imminent fall and a quick victory for Moscow, a wealthy Russian friend mailed me for my views. His own were conveyed …
The Russian invasion was a rational act
It is widely believed in the West that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was not a rational act. On the eve of the invasion, then British prime minister Boris Johnson suggested that perhaps the United States and …
Anarchy ended our imperial dream
It’s 1994 and Robert D. Kaplan is in China’s Xinjiang Province, home to 11 million Turkic Uyghur Muslims whom the world now knows as the Uyghurs. He soon learns they are “trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression …
Does Ukraine need to compromise?
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 …
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 …