Politics

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’. The news was shocking but not surprising. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, recently claimed that the Ukrainian army had suffered over 160,000 casualties during counter-offensive last year. Such Russian updates on

If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal Protection Service officer responsible for ensuring the product of the president’s bathroom breaks return to the Motherland. Foreign powers may, after all, go to extreme lengths to test his health. When Putin does travel abroad, it is not just with his own food and drink, his own chefs and his array of bodyguards, it is also with his dedicated porta-potty. This allows his numbers ones and twos to be collected, sealed into special bags, and then put in a briefcase, ready to travel home

What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras, the political media has found a compelling talking point with which to divert our attention. Rather than address the fundamental issue – that the Leader of the Opposition and the Commons Speaker gave ground to the mob – here we are agonising about whether Rishi Sunak acted swiftly or harshly enough against his most notorious