Europe

Could one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies in Europe soon flip to become one of the most sceptical nations in the West when it comes to military and political aid? That question is troubling Kyiv and the EU, as a political crisis in Slovakia leaves the door wide open for a party to take over which is more hostile to Ukraine.  It was announced on Sunday that a technocratic caretaker government will be formed next week following the resignation of the Slovak prime minister, Eduard Heger. An election is expected in September, which the left-wing populist and Ukraine-sceptic Robert Fico is now favourite to win.   While the vast majority of Slovak politicians and

Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, some of the Kremlin’s staunchest friends in Europe were the energy executives who lobbied for ever greater dependence on Russian gas and their political allies. The war – and the still-unexplained destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines which connected Germany directly to Russia last September – sent Russia’s share of European gas supplies plummeting from over 40 per cent to around 5 per cent. Sweeping US and EU sanctions made doing business with Russian state-owned companies not only taboo but illegal.  Nonetheless, many of Europe’s energy tsars, industrialists and politicians still dream of restoring cheap Russian gas supplies – and are making increasingly public

He huffed, and he puffed, and he damn near blew his own house down. The way Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man behind the Wagner mercenary force, was forced to walk back his threat to pull out of the fighting for Bakhmut is a reminder of the divided nature of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Prigozhin has periodically and publicly called out defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov for their alleged back of support for Wagner. But on Friday, he escalated with two expletive-laden videos posted on social media. In the first, he pointed at the corpses of dead soldiers and bellowed: ‘Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the

The French have revealed yet again their shameless hypocrisy in regard to Europe’s illegal migrants crisis that this year looks set to break all records. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, keen to divert attention from the riots that characterise France on his watch, managed to tell three lies in a single sentence last week about Italy’s new prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Emanuel Macron’s right-hand man told Radio Monte Carlo: ‘Madame Meloni, a far-right government chosen by Madame Le Pen’s friends, is incapable of solving the migration problems on which she was elected.’ His remarks prompted Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, who said they were ‘unacceptable’, to cancel a meeting that same

The presence of drones over the Kremlin earlier this week was reported widely as the first attack on Moscow since the Napoleonic era: after an explosion, Russian officials claimed that this was an attempt on the life of a suddenly vulnerable Vladimir Putin. But it’s actually more akin to 1987, when an amateur German pilot landed on a bridge near Red Square, fooling the Soviet air defence system. Mathias Rust said he’d gone to Moscow on a mission of peace – but ended up humiliating the communist military leadership, who had to resign one after another. This – the humiliation – is what Ukrainians plan to repeat during the upcoming

Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there. Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us But our side

It is almost six years to the day since Marine Le Pen went head to head with Emmanuel Macron in a live television debate that came to be seen as the defining moment of the 2017 French presidential campaign. It did not end well for the leader of the National Front, the party she has since rebranded as the National Rally. Le Pen was ripped apart by her young opponent on the evening of May 3. Macron combined boyish charm with a head for facts, outmanoeuvring Le Pen in every argument and on every subject. It’s increasingly hard to find anyone in France who respects their president. Le Pen was

In a historic speech to the US Congress on 12 March 1947, President Truman addressed the menacing spread of Communism and the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe. Known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, he portrayed the battle lines for the Cold War as a struggle between autocracy and democracy – something which resonates uncannily today in Ukraine. The Soviet ‘way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority’, declared President Truman. ‘It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms…The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms’.

What salary should a soldier receive in a war-torn country? Obviously, there is no number that can make up for the sacrifice Ukrainians make on the frontline. But a proper salary is still necessary. When Russia invaded last year, Volodymyr Zelensky increased the payment for the military to seven times of the average salary in Ukraine. ‘We will pay 100,000 hryvnias (£2,200) monthly to military personnel who hold weapons… so that they know that the country is grateful to them. And so it will be until this war ends,’ Zelensky said. The war, as it has turned out, is well into its second year – and the Ukrainian President is faced

In the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, France is getting tough on illegal immigrants. Authorities launched Operation Wuambushu (Take Back) on Monday, with police sent into the shanty towns to remove those there illegally and demolish their settlements. Around half of Mayotte’s population are foreign, mostly illegal immigrants from Comoros, 45 miles to the north-west. But it wasn’t long before the crackdown came unstuck. Mayotte is the same size in land mass as the Isle of Wight – 147 square miles – but whereas the latter has a population of 142,000, Mayotte’s is somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. No one knows the precise figure because of the high rate of illegal immigration.

The EU deigns to warn the Tories: don’t try and bypass the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) when it comes to deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Senior EU officials, including European commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson and European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič, are among those to voice concern about the UK’s attitude toward the ECHR. But the sheer brass neck of the EU on this is hard to take. The EU is said to be worried that the UK intends to ignore injunctions from the ECHR. But the EU itself continues to drag its feet over its own accession to the European Convention on Human Rights which established the

A match-fixing scandal centred on Barcelona FC has spilled over into politics, showing that decades-old divisions die hard in Spain. Triggered by the so-called ‘Negreira Case’, which concerns payments of 6.7 million euros (about £5.9 million) allegedly made by Barca to a company linked to a Spanish refereeing official between 2001-18, Real Madrid and their greatest rival are accusing each other of links to Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who ruled the country from 1936 to his death in 1975. The row started last week, when Barca’s president Joan Laporta claimed that if any Spanish club should be subject to suspicions of referee favouritism, it’s Los Blancos, which he provocatively