Owen Matthews

Pope Francis’s unhelpful Ukraine comments

11 March 2024 4:49 am

Pope Francis has made a statement on the Ukraine war that has sparked fury among many of Kyiv’s supporters. Asked…

Ukraine’s spirit isn’t even close to broken

17 February 2024 9:00 am

Rome and Kyiv have one thing in common – the distinctive whine of motor-scooter engines in the night. The difference…

The tragedy of Alexei Navalny

17 February 2024 1:00 am

I knew and greatly respected Alexei Navalny. The news (as yet not independently confirmed) that he died in prison came…

Putin’s ‘peace’ is a partitioned Ukraine

6 January 2024 9:00 am

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new…

The heady, hedonistic summer in which I became a life-long foreigner

2 December 2023 9:00 am

Rome I have spent almost all my adult life as a foreigner. When I graduated from Oxford I faced a…

The exiled activists who dream of dismantling the Russian empire

23 September 2023 9:00 am

The dream of the dismantling of the Russian empire

Why the US will decide Ukraine’s fate

2 September 2023 9:00 am

The US will decide Ukraine’s fate

Yevgeny Prigozhin was a dead man walking

24 August 2023 7:11 am

Yevgeny Prigozhin died, as Macbeth almost said, as one that had been studied in his death. In the last three…

The Ukrainian war is coming to Moscow

5 August 2023 9:00 am

War is coming home to Moscow

Russia’s complex relationship with the ruble

29 July 2023 9:00 am

The first banknotes were greeted with deep suspicion in 1769 – but it was nothing to the distrust that Soviet and post-Soviet issues aroused

The Wagner Group isn’t Russia’s only private army

1 July 2023 9:00 am

The Wagner Group isn’t Russia’s only private army

Prigozhin has made Putin more dangerous than ever

25 June 2023 9:06 pm

As rebel tanks trundled up the highway towards Moscow yesterday morning, Vladimir Putin labelled the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin…

Why Prigozhin rebelled

25 June 2023 3:09 am

Civil war broke on Russia like a thunderstorm, replacing weeks of mounting political heat with a deluge of fire and…

Where’s Putin? The Russian leader is losing control

17 June 2023 9:00 am

The Russian leader is losing control

Erdogan made himself indispensable – to Turkey and the West

30 May 2023 12:21 am

Some Turks voted for the devil they knew. More voted for the hero they knew. Either way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s…

Lithuania’s PM: ‘If Russia is not defeated it will come for somebody else’

20 May 2023 9:00 am

Lithuania’s Prime Minister on what a Ukrainian victory would look like

Vladimir Putin must be praying that Lukashenko survives

16 May 2023 2:22 am

Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been missing from public view since being taken ill during a Victory Day parade in…

Erdogan faces runoff vote in the Turkish elections

15 May 2023 4:02 pm

Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can –…

Is Europe returning to business as usual with the Kremlin?

9 May 2023 4:42 pm

Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, some of the Kremlin’s staunchest friends in Europe were the energy executives who lobbied for…

The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition – stay, or go?

29 April 2023 9:00 am

The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition