Ukraine’s spirit isn’t even close to broken
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
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
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
Rome I have spent almost all my adult life as a foreigner. When I graduated from Oxford I faced a…
Can the centre hold?
The dream of the dismantling of the Russian empire
America first
The US will decide Ukraine’s fate
Yevgeny Prigozhin was a dead man walking
Yevgeny Prigozhin died, as Macbeth almost said, as one that had been studied in his death. In the last three…
Attack of the drones
War is coming home to Moscow
Worthless pieces of paper
The first banknotes were greeted with deep suspicion in 1769 – but it was nothing to the distrust that Soviet and post-Soviet issues aroused
Brute forces
The Wagner Group isn’t Russia’s only private army
Prigozhin has made Putin more dangerous than ever
As rebel tanks trundled up the highway towards Moscow yesterday morning, Vladimir Putin labelled the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin…
Why Prigozhin rebelled
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
Erdogan made himself indispensable – to Turkey and the West
Some Turks voted for the devil they knew. More voted for the hero they knew. Either way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s…
Baltic view
Lithuania’s Prime Minister on what a Ukrainian victory would look like
Vladimir Putin must be praying that Lukashenko survives
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
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?
Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, some of the Kremlin’s staunchest friends in Europe were the energy executives who lobbied for…
Putin’s martyrs
The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition
‘Navalny is ready to fight and win’
The Russian rebel’s chief of staff on standing up to Putin
