World

Wednesday

Matt McDonald

Jury finds Donald Trump sexually abused author

A New York federal jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the author E. Jean Carroll. The jury ordered the former president to pay Carroll $5 million (£4 million) in compensatory and punitive damages. Trump was not found liable for the more serious charge of rape leveled against him by Carroll. ‘We are very happy,’ Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan told the press as she left the courthouse with her client. Carroll did not address reporters. In her suit, Carroll had alleged that Trump had raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman store in New York in the mid-1990s. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan

Andrew Finkel

Erdogan is desperate

There is such a thing as governing for too long. After about ten years in post, politicians’ once natural feel for the nation’s pulse instead starts to rub the electorate the wrong way. Thatcher, Blair and de Gaulle all saw their time run out.  What about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? He has led Turkey since 2003 as prime minister and since 2014 as president. This Sunday, he will try to defy political gravity.  Opinion polls don’t suggest a clear outcome in the Turkish election. They suggest that no presidential candidate will get 50 per cent of the vote in the first round on Sunday, and that Erdoğan’s principal and not overly

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Victory Day threatens Putin’s alternative reality

As Vladimir Putin rounded off his Victory Day speech with a resounding ‘Hurrah!’ to Russia, the contrast between the celebrations of this year and last could not be starker. Putin was a president in a hurry: he spoke for just nine minutes, the parade was wrapped up in under 25 minutes. ‘A real war has once again broken out against our motherland,’ he began. Perpetuating the lies upon which he has sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine, Putin continued with the trademark bellicose ranting that we have come to expect from his speeches over the past year: ‘We have resisted international terrorism, we will defend the citizens of the Donbas, and we will guarantee our own safety’. 

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

War in Ukraine rains on Putin’s Victory Day parade

It may be having trouble on the battlefield, but the Russian army does know how to stage a parade. Behind the goose-stepping ranks, massed bands, and rumbling missile launchers, though, was a clear sense of the practical and political costs of the war in Ukraine. Although parades from Crimea in the south to Pskov in the north had been cancelled on reasons of security, there was no way Vladimir Putin could let this one not run – even Covid had not accomplished that. The Senate’s golden dome had been repaired after last week’s drone attack – and anti-drone guns were very much in evidence among the security team – and

Ben Domenech

The ‘brutal’ poll that spells trouble for Joe Biden

The latest poll from the Washington Post and ABC News sent shockwaves through America’s media over the weekend, with numbers that are absolutely dire for president Biden. ‘This poll is just brutal’, announced former Democratic spokesperson turned ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. He’s correct: with approval ratings at just 36 per cent, and lagging far behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in potential general election matchups, the voting numbers are terrible. But the personal ratings are somehow even worse than that — 68 per cent of those polled, including 48 per cent of Democrats, believe Biden is too old for another term. And just 32 per cent think he has the mental acuity to

Owen Matthews

Pushback against Russian sanctions grows in Germany and Italy

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

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Vote Joe Biden, get Kamala Harris?

Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk – and significantly so. For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to happen. Biden would have to keep her as his vice-president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the 80-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice-president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden won in 2024 and didn’t complete his second-term, it would be all hail Kamala, the lady

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin has made Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin eat his words

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

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin scared of a Victory Day attack?

In the Russian calendar 9 May holds near-religious significance. Celebrating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, the occasion is considered Russia’s biggest patriotic celebration of the year.  Last year, following the invasion of Ukraine, the holiday took on a jingoistic significance for the Kremlin as Putin stoked up nationalist fervour to legitimise his war. This year’s celebrations, however, are shaping up to be a muted affair. More than 20 cities across Russia have cancelled their Victory Day parades. Marches of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, during which ordinary people parade through the streets carrying portraits of relatives who served and died during the war, as well as in the Afghan and

Sunday

Nicholas Farrell

France’s migrant hypocrisy

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

Robin Ashenden

Why are some Russians still in denial about their troubled past?

Few books change your life but one that heavily influenced mine was Among the Russians (1983), Colin Thubron’s travel book about the late Brezhnev-era USSR. Catching me as a 20 year-old, it launched me on a lifetime of living and travelling in the former Soviet Union. Returning in 1999 from a long trip to Minsk, Kazan and Volgograd I reread it, marvelling at how uncannily it evoked my own experience of the country. Other travel books merely informed you about Russia – this one, dense with metaphor and luminously described human encounters seemed, in its 200 or so pages, to transport you there and make you feel it. You couldn’t

Saturday

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

God save our Islamophilic King

Britain today celebrates the crowning of a new king, but the coronation will be watched and celebrated by millions across the Commonwealth. To an extent that is often not appreciated abroad, the Queen – who was Defender of the Faith – was revered by her subjects of all faiths. In our often sectarian world, she exerted a unifying force: one that her son recognised and exemplifies. King Charles is deeply informed of Muslim beliefs, culture and mores Muslims in Britain and the world over will recognise, in King Charles, a monarch who is deeply Islamophilic. He has spoken about his attempts to learn Arabic in order to understand the Quran

Joe Wallen

The Dabbawalas of India will be celebrating Charles’ coronation

Mumbai, India Weaving through the throng on a hot May afternoon, Kiran Gavande had a determined look on his face, despite the sweat that trickled down from his head. This wasn’t a routine trip to the market in Mumbai’s Lal Baug neighbourhood for Mr Gavande. Instead of buying onions and tomatoes, he was searching for a silk turban and an intricate shawl to give as a gift to King Charles.  His gifts would soon be handed over to the British High Commission before being shipped over to the UK and presented, by hand, to Charles, following his coronation today.  ‘When we heard of Charles’s ascension to the throne, I wrote

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How ordinary Russians continue to resist Putin

Russia is gearing up for its annual festival of state-sponsored militarist kitsch that are the 9 May Victory Day celebrations, albeit in rather more limited form thanks to security concerns surrounding the ongoing war. Amongst all this, it is all too easy to forget that not everyone is consumed with nationalist pageantry. Instead, what is in many ways so much more striking is that there is still an active, if beleaguered, civil society in this country. To be sure, open protests against the war have become increasingly small in scale. This is an authoritarian regime sliding into full-blown totalitarianism, which has been cracking down viciously on any such ‘fifth columnists’.

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine’s plan to rain on Putin’s Victory Day parade

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

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron, not Meloni, is to blame for Europe’s migrant crisis

France and Germany have fallen out again after the French interior minister Gérald Darmanin accused Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni of incompetence in her handling of the migrant crisis. In response, Itay’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has cancelled a meeting in Paris scheduled for today and he is demanding an apology from Darmanin for his ‘vulgar insults’. Meloni has put on hold her own visit to Paris, which was due to take place next month, according to the Italian press. It’s not the first time the interior minister has outraged a neighbour. Twelve months ago, Darmanin was accused of wrongly laying the blame for the chaos that erupted in Paris during the

Wednesday

Madeleine Teahan

The alarming spread of child euthanasia

A few weeks ago the Dutch parliament announced that euthanasia will be licensed for children between the ages of one and 12, for cases involving ‘such a serious illness or disorder that death is inevitable, and the death of these children is expected in the foreseeable future’. The coverage of this latest development was eerily muted, considering the enormity of what had just been communicated; namely, that a European liberal democracy had deemed it appropriate for seriously sick infants and primary school-aged children to receive lethal injections. How have liberal democracies become so enticed by the sinister notion that children should be eligible for euthanasia? Meanwhile, over in Canada, two

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What’s the truth about the Kremlin drone attack?

The Russian government has claimed that ‘two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin. As a result of timely actions taken by the military and special services with the use of radar warfare systems, the vehicles were put out of action.’ There were, it continues, ‘no victims and material damage’, although it is considering it a ‘terrorist’ attempt to kill Putin. That said, unverified videos circulating on social media (which, of course, is not necessarily proof in the age of deep fakery), shows at least one drone hitting the Senate Building, one of the larger structures inside the Kremlin complex, starting a small fire. Ukraine has been developing longer-range

Tony Radakin

Will my coronation marching measure up?

Travelling to Ukraine on the President’s train is the most secure route into Kyiv. This is my fourth visit to the country since the invasion. Previously I accompanied Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. This time I am with Tim Barrow, our National Security Adviser. The continuity of access reflects the extraordinary trust between Britain and Ukraine. The train is punctual and with an aura of seasoned grandeur. The enforced lack of phones combined with a steady rhythm for ten hours aids reflection. I think back to travelling to Moscow with Ben Wallace before the invasion and a meeting with my Russian opposite, General Gerasimov. At the time we still hoped

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

On looking without seeing

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