World

Tuesday

Isabel Sawkins and Grace Rollison

Putin’s army is using rape as a weapon of war

In Ukraine, no one is safe from the onslaught of the Russian army. Men, women and children are all targets. And there is mounting evidence that Russian troops have been raping civilians since the onset of war last month, with sexual violence serving as part of the Russian army’s attempts to subjugate the Ukrainian population. It is a deliberate strategy. Nothing is off-limits for the Russian army. Gruesome images were recently shared online by Mariana Betsa, ambassador of Ukraine to Estonia, to document what is happening in Ukraine. She shared an image of the body of a three-year-old girl. Betsa said the girl had been raped. Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko has also accused

Christopher Booth

Russia’s ‘denazification’ project is only just beginning

Truth, infamously, is the first casualty of war. But the truth, in modern Russia, was critically wounded before it got anywhere close to the staging grounds, let alone the battlefield. And still the disinformation project limps on. The most recent and blatant example of the Kremlin’s communications modus operandi is its instant write-off as ‘fake’ of photographs and video from Bucha, a quiet town outside Kyiv, now littered with civilian corpses and the broken machinery of war. Perhaps the invading troops left in a hurry, or perhaps Bucha was meant as some kind of warning, but the perpetrators didn’t care to clear up their handiwork. Reporters have now recorded and

Monday

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

The West is powerless in the face of Russian war crimes

‘Our home is our heart,’ a video posted by a couple from the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel begins, showing them cycling through its leafy streets and playing with their dogs. In a split second, the picture changes. Their house is on fire. Outside, a car has ploughed into a ditch, its young passengers shot dead. Helicopters tear overhead while Russian soldiers stalk the surrounding woodland. The UN estimates that 3,500 innocent people have been killed or injured since the invasion of Ukraine began. As Russian troops are pushed back around the capital, evidence is mounting that the number may already be much higher. Just south of Hostomel is the suburb of

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Reinventing the Chinese language

46 min listen

After defeat in the Second Opium War, Chinese intellectuals wracked their minds for how the Chinese nation can survive in the new industrialised world. It’s a topic that has been discussed on this podcast before – listeners may remember the episode with Bill Hayton, author of The Invention of China, where we discussed the reformers and revolutionaries like Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. But for some reformers, the problem with China wasn’t just feudal politics or Confucian staleness, but its ancient language. Spoken Chinese could be any of a vast number of regional dialects which were too often mutually unintelligible. Meanwhile, written Chinese was extremely complicated, not helping the rock bottom literacy

Thomas Lorman

Why Hungary’s opposition failed

Viktor Orbán has now spent a total of 16 years as Hungary’s Prime Minister but he has not lost his hunger for power. Energetically campaigning across the country, exploiting every advantage of incumbency, and excoriating the incompetent opposition, on Sunday he notched up his fourth landslide victory in a row. Crucially, he maintains the two-thirds majority in parliament that he has held since 2010, allowing him him to amend the constitution whenever he chooses. Predictably, the opposition challenged the legitimacy of the election process even before the votes had been counted. They note that the lion’s share of the media supports Orbán. But this is an excuse, not an explanation. It was not

Matthew Lynn

Can Elon Musk save Twitter?

Teslas will be permanently trending. So perhaps will space rockets. Petrol cars will be quietly forgotten about. And if you get enough likes and followers perhaps you might win a place on the planned space colony on Mars. With the news that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and one of the richest men in the world, has today taken a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter there will be lots of jokes about how he might change the social media site. But by far the most significant one is this. He could shift it to the libertarian right. That really would be significant. Twitter shares soared by 25 per

Johnny Patterson

Carrie Lam’s disastrous legacy in Hong Kong

When Carrie Lam became Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017, she positioned herself as a candidate for unity. Five years on, having announced this morning her decision to step down, she will be remembered as Hong Kong’s most divisive leader.  There is a grim irony that Lam – who was Beijing’s favoured choice for the top job – used ‘WeConnect’ as a campaign slogan. If that was her hope, it is hard to think of a politician who has failed in their ambitions more profoundly. Lam’s stubborn insistence in pushing through a wildly unpopular extradition bill in 2019, which would have allowed Hong Kongers to be extradited to the mainland, did overwhelmingly unify Hong Kongers, if only

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are sanctions working?

When allied military operations go well or badly, we very quickly hear about them. But what about sanctions? It is about time that we started to ask: are they hitting their target, or are some of them slewing off, out of control, straight into civilian targets? Notionally, sanctions have been a success – or at least they seemed to be initially. The rouble and Russian stock market collapsed. But then the rouble recovered strongly, and the stock market, too, has staged some sort of recovery since it reopened. What seemed like a pretty comprehensive boycott by western companies turns out to be rather less complete than many might imagine.  The

Andrew Tettenborn

Viktor Orbán’s victory has dashed hopes in Brussels

The scale of Viktor Orbán’s victory in the Hungarian election overnight has taken even his supporters by surprise. Against many predictions, Orbán has actually improved his position: he has retained for his Fidesz party the two-thirds parliamentary majority necessary to override certain constitutional challenges to change a number of constitutional rules. Progressive opinion, in and out of Brussels, is not difficult to gauge. This is an unfair victory in a gerrymandered electoral system by someone who used an inflated media influence to trounce his opponent Péter Márki-Zay, who called for close EU co-operation and an increase in anti-Putin zeal. It shows Hungary as unconcerned with the rule of law. As a result it

Julius Strauss

Russian cruelty has been laid bare

It was 2 a.m. when Russian gunmen broke in and took away 21-year-old Milana Ozdoyeva. When Sara, her three-year-old daughter, tried to grab her mother’s hand they shoved her aside. Milana’s son, who was 11 months old, just stared uncomprehendingly. ‘They were wearing masks and camouflage,’ Milana’s mother told me. ‘They forced us all to the floor at gunpoint. Milana was too terrified to speak. She just looked at me and mouthed the words “mama”. It was the last time any of us saw her.’ The kidnapping and subsequent killing of Milana took place in Chechnya on 19 January 2004. Her sin was to have been married to a man

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Why Viktor Orbán keeps winning

Viktor Orbán took the stage for a victory speech in Budapest last night with supporters chanting his name. Not long after polling stations had shut, it was already clear that the Hungarian prime minister’s Fidesz party had won a stonking victory against the United Opposition, a group of six parties led by small-town mayor Péter Márki-Zay. This morning, with 99 per cent of the votes counted, Fidesz has more than 53 per cent and the United Opposition has only 35 per cent – a much lower total than predicted. Surprisingly, the far-right party Our Homeland also gained enough votes to enter parliament. Fidesz won more votes than four years ago

Sunday

Scott Reynolds Nelson

After invasion, famine

Geopolitical pundits fool themselves by thinking that President Putin wants simply to return to challenge Nato or return to the Soviet Union. This is a much older story. Russian imperialists have had utopian designs on the Ukrainian plains since at least the days of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. In 1768, Catherine the Great fulfilled the Russian dream by seizing Ukraine’s goldilocks zone of abundant fresh water, flat land, fertile soil, and the dirt roads that led to the Black Sea. This is the same land that fed the Greek city-states, the Roman and Byzantine empires, and, in the 18th century, the grain-guzzling cities of Europe: Liverpool, London, Antwerp,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron is the Messiah for French millennials

Emmanuel Macron welcomed the faithful to Paris on Saturday at a rally in the west of the capital. I know the venue well; it is the home of the Racing 92 rugby club and many a time I’ve sat in the indoor arena, roaring my approval at a bone-crunching tackle. The hollering on Saturday was for the president as he held his first and only significant campaign event before next Sunday’s election. It wasn’t quite a full house, with a few untaken seats in the 30,000 capacity arena, but the fervour reverberated around the arena as Macron made his grand entrance. It was like a boxer approaching the ring in a

Elena Attfield

Finland’s Bible tweet trial should trouble us all

Is it a criminal offence to quote from the Bible? Finland’s former home secretary Päivi Räsänen found herself in hot water when she did just that. ‘How does the doctrinal foundation of the Church fit in with shame and sin being raised as a matter of pride?’ she asked. Räsänen’s objection – which came after the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland partnered with a Helsinki Pride festival in 2019 – led to her being charged with incitement against a minority group. Finally this week, after a three-year legal battle, Räsänen has been cleared. Her ordeal offers a troubling case study of the way in which ‘hate speech’ legislation is being used as a modern blasphemy law. In

Saturday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

It’s time to bring the Falklands into the United Kingdom

Today marks 40 years since Operation Rosario, when Leopoldo Galtieri’s commandos landed on the Falkland Islands and began an invasion that prompted the Falklands War. The Guardian has commemorated the occasion with an unapologetic op-ed by the Argentinian government swearing itself to reasserting control over the islands. Foreign minister Santiago Cafiero, author of the op-ed, declares that ‘the recovery of sovereignty is an inalienable objective of the Argentine people’ and says ‘no Argentine government will cease in its pursuit of our sovereign claim’.  Cafiero’s op-ed is full of self-pity but utterly lacking in self-reflection. There is no acknowledgement that his country, then a military dictatorship, overran a tiny, peaceable island population who chiefly spent

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Why Macron’s poll lead is dwindling

With eight days to go before the first round of voting in the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron has just had his worst polling so far. The new numbers show that in the second round of voting, presumed to pit Macron against Marine Le Pen just as in 2017, the president has a lead of only six points (53 per cent to 47 per cent). He famously crushed her 66 per cent to 34 per cent five years ago. Macron has tried to stay aloof from the presidential campaign and position himself instead as the senior European political leader in the Ukraine crisis. His efforts have been clumsy. He’s fired

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What progressives can learn from France’s straight-talking communists

The latest poll has France’s socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo on 1.5 per cent. This is the party that won the presidential election a decade ago. Britain’s Labour party should look at the French socialists and be very afraid. This is what happens when a political party turns its back on its core electorate and instead panders to pet progressive policies, such as whether a woman can have a penis. Things have become so bad for Hidalgo that she now trails Fabien Roussel of the French Communist party. Named in honour of Colonel Fabien, a communist hero of the resistance in the second world war, Roussel caused a kerfuffle in January when

David Cohen

How New Zealand’s zero Covid strategy fell apart

The biggest thing in the political rock world returns to the international stage this spring with a one-off appearance at Harvard University on 26 May. The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, is booked to be the venerable institution’s main speaking act at its 371st Commencement, welcoming the classes of 2022 and 2021. Harvard lauds Ardern as ‘one of the most respected leaders in the world’. But trying telling that to fed-up Kiwis. Ardern herself has been off the international speaking circuit ever since she declared her country a no-go zone in response to the pandemic, effectively shutting the nation of five million off from all physical contact with the outside

John Keiger John Keiger

Who’s to blame for France’s catastrophic intelligence failure in Ukraine?

From the outset of the war in Ukraine, the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence agencies have accurately predicted every twist and turn of Putin’s playbook. The United States, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been linked in the world’s most sophisticated and integrated all-source intelligence gathering and analysis organisation since the Second World War. In doing so, they have offered up spoilers for Russian strategy, disorientating and disorganising president Putin’s planning.  The losers of the war so far then are clearly the Russians whose intelligence gathering and analysis of Ukraine’s and Nato’s reactions to invasion has been lamentable. But they are not alone in their intelligence blunders. The other losers are the EU nations, for all

Colin Freeman

How Russian drones are being used to spy on Kyiv

‘That used to be my neighbour’s Skoda,’ says Alexei Marchenko, as he points to a twisted lump of metal in the wreckage of a row of garages. We’re standing in the courtyards of his housing estate in Kyiv, where a Russian missile landed overnight. One person has been killed and another dozen injured, although it’s a miracle it wasn’t many more. As well as demolishing several flats, and shattering every window in a half-mile radius, the blast has destroyed the garages-cum-mansheds where Mr Marchenko and his neighbours used to potter. Anyone who’d been there when the missile landed would have been caught up in a cloud of manshed-shrapnel: fragments of Skoda,