World

After months of flat denials, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence has admitted that Kyiv is carrying out a campaign of sabotage and assassination inside Russia. But why change the official line now? Even if this is a good cop/bad cop routine, it still risks embarrassing the president, raising questions as to how far he is fully in control of HUR Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), has become one of the media stars of this war, not least thanks to an artfully curated public persona that a senior US intelligence official characterised as ‘George Smiley meets Jason Bourne.’ This week he took

Manchester is desperate for workers. There are 40,000 jobs advertised in the city at the moment, at every pay grade. Ann Summers wants a stockroom assistant (£10.70 an hour), or you could invigilate exams at £14 an hour or post videos on TikTok for £20 an hour. Sellcheck Chemicals is offering up to £75,000 a year for a sales manager (‘No biology background needed, no previous experience necessary’). Even the army is offering trainee officers £34,000 after their first year. But ask any employer in the city what it’s like hiring and they’ll tell you: it’s a battle. What’s strange about this is the fact that though all these jobs

Not much happens in Russian families without the say so of the babushka. Russia’s high divorce-rate, and a situation where fathers are often absent and the mother out at work, makes it normal for grandmothers – who often hold the family purse-strings – to raise children themselves. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the younger and older generation see eye to eye: babushka tends not to use the internet or understand modern technology, and might hold conservative opinions radically different from the grandchild’s. Yet there is often a spirit, in the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann’s words, of ‘hopeless obedience’ to her. Something similar is at play in the way many

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. These reports were part of the trove of classified materials leaked onto the Discord gaming server earlier this year. Taken on their own, they could be regarded as sneaky fakes intended to undermine Prigozhin, yet many other documents within the collection have quietly been acknowledged as real. While it still cannot be taken as