Russia
Bear-baiting
Sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work
Perfume and politics
This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt,…
The Belarus hijacking reveals the West’s complacency
On Sunday evening an act of appalling state kidnapping took place over the skies of Europe. Four alleged KGB officers…
Why Lukashenko keeps getting away with it
The diversion of a Ryanair flight bound for Lithuania from Athens and the arrest of passenger Roman Protasevich – an…
A nuclear crisis is closer than you think
It has long been widely accepted as orthodoxy that the world was saved from nuclear war during the Cuban Missile…
Forewarned, but not forearmed
The most extraordinary thing, still, about Operation Barbarossa is the complete surprise the Wehrmacht achieved. In the early hours of…
Putin and Biden need one another
Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. ‘Mmm-hmm, I do,’ answered the President.…
Alexei Navalny’s big gamble
Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24…
Why isn’t the West standing up for the Czech Republic?
The discovery by Czech intelligence services that a bombing of an ammunitions and weapons depot in 2014 that killed two…
Putin’s on manoeuvres – are we ready?
‘What follows plague?’ I asked a medieval historian at the start of the pandemic. ‘War,’ he replied. In recent days,…
Putin steps back from the Ukrainian brink
After weeks building up forces in Crimea and close to the Ukrainian border — over 100,000, all told — Moscow…
The rules of Putin’s game
What does Putin want? It’s more straightforward than you might think: usually the answer is ‘what he says’. It’s worth remembering…
Can Biden bring relations with Russia back from the brink?
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a depressing assessment on the state of U.S.-Russia relations earlier this month. While holding…
Two spies, an explosion, and the new Czech rift with Russia
‘Putin is a murderer,’ read the signs carried by protestors outside the Russian Embassy in Prague on Sunday. On Saturday…
Russian count
Putin’s hidden Covid deaths
The Kremlin’s strategy to undermine Britain
The past week has seen the war in Ukraine, which has been simmering for the last seven years, once more…
How the West can respond to Putin’s military build-up
In the last few weeks, Russia has been flaunting its military build-up in and around Ukraine, sending 20,000 extra troops,…
Biden’s backhanded bid to kill Nord Stream 2
Washington, D.C. is universally known as a town divided, a place where compromise and dialogue are often sacrificed at the…
Berlin has been bounced into accepting Sputnik
Munich has had enough of the vaccine chaos in Berlin and Brussels. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Bavaria’s minister…
The EU’s decline is self-inflicted
In 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, the EU demonstrated to the world its divisions and helplessness,…
What does Belarus’s opposition leader want?
There is an assumption that those fighting tyranny must instead want Western-style democracy, that the arc of history bends towards…
America’s Russian sanctions are futile
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to approach Russia and its irascible President Vladimir Putin with a new…
A defeated Armenia descends into turmoil
Ever since its disastrous military defeat at the hands of Azerbaijan last year, Armenia has suffered from a wave of…
Amnesty International has undermined Navalny’s fight for freedom
In his fight against Putin, Alexei Navalny needs all the help he can get. The might of the Russian state…
The new great game
An international power tussle over vaccines is under way
