World Archives

Sunday

3 Apr 2022

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

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

2 Apr 2022

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

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

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

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,

Friday

1 Apr 2022

Ross Clark

Did P&O use an EU loophole?

Brexit, as Boris reminded us many times during the referendum campaign, would give Britain the power to make its own laws, unencumbered by constant directives from the European Commission. But it will take a long while to disentangle UK laws from the influence of the EU, as the government may be about to discover in its attempt to punish P&O ferries for sacking 800 workers and replacing them with agency staff. It will take a long while to disentangle UK laws from the influence of the EU At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson declared that P&O had contravened section 194 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992,

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is this the end of Imran Khan?

Imran Khan’s innings as the Pakistani Prime Minister may be coming to an end. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, one of his coalition partners, has split from the government. Khan has now lost his majority in the National Assembly, which is set to meet for a no-confidence vote on Sunday. And while all this falls perfectly in line with parliamentary norms, in the context of the country’s tumultuous political history, Khan’s premature exit would be another blow to democracy. Not a single Pakistani prime minister has completed their five-year term in the country’s 75-year history, almost half of which has seen direct military rule. The previous two civilian governments, which ran

Philip Patrick

Ukraine shouldn’t get a free pass to the World Cup

Should Ukraine be given a free pass into this year’s football World Cup? Boris Johnson has given his support to the idea, but there’s one downside: their entry into the tournament could come at the expense of Scotland or Wales. This hardly seems fair: Scotland will tonight feature in their first World Cup draw in 25 years; for Wales it is 64 years. Whatever the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine, it’s wrong to expect Wales and Scotland to step aside. While we perhaps shouldn’t take the notoriously football phobic PM at his word, far more football savvy commentators agree with Boris. Jim White in the Daily Telegraph called for Scotland and Wales to do

Thursday

31 Mar 2022

Jonathan Miller

‘McKinseygate’ won’t bring down Macron

We are in the final stretch before the first round of voting in the French presidential election on 10 April and Macron is still cruising to victory — though perhaps not quite as serenely as he had hoped. ‘McKinseygate’ is the latest scandal that probably won’t change much. Six million fonctionnaires being apparently insufficient to govern France, it transpires that Macron’s government has paid €2.4 billion (£2 billion) to consultants including McKinsey mainly to tell it what to do about Covid. Doubtless a mere bagatelle when the bill is finally totalled for the plague, but embarrassing. As anyone familiar with McKinsey could have predicted, the laptop geniuses turned France into an

Rod Liddle

I’m taking in a Ukrainian

Delighted though we all are that Benedict Cumberbatch has decided to allow a Ukrainian family to live in one of his houses, did he have to trumpet this to the entire population of the country? Surely these sorts of decision are best kept to oneself, no? But then, they’re always doing it, the luvvies – proclaiming their saintliness in order to protect and advance the brand, one supposes. Benedict should know that there are more than 100,000 ordinary people in this country, people who have never received a Bafta, who have offered their homes to Ukrainian refugees and they don’t go bragging about it on national media. People such as

Matt Purple

Biden’s war: does he know what he’s doing?

Anyone could see that Joe Biden veered off-script during his big speech in Poland. ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,’ he said of Vladimir Putin, which sounded a lot like a cry for regime change. Luckily for him, though, and perhaps for world peace, Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defence under Barack Obama, was on hand to explain the comment away: ‘I happen to think that Joe Biden – you know, he’s Irish – really has a great deal of compassion when he sees that people are suffering.’ To be sure, to be sure. Still, even if Biden’s threat to Putin can be wholly attributed to

James Cowan

Putin’s mines will plague Ukraine for years to come

A Ukrainian colleague told me a joke yesterday. ‘We used to believe the Russians had the second best army in the world. Now we know they have the second best army in Ukraine.’ Five weeks ago, most people would have bet that after a month of Russian aggression, Kyiv and Kharkiv would have fallen, and the Ukrainians would have been pushed back into the Carpathians. Yet a combination of home match, high morale, sensible tactics, defence advantage and foreign weapons has given Ukraine the edge. By contrast, Russia has scored own-goal after own-goal: hubris born of a belief in the ease of the initial victory; a bad plan with no

Freddy Gray

Ukraine’s most wanted – an interview with Dmitry Firtash

If you’ve heard of Dmitry Firtash, the odds are you’ll have the impression of a deeply controversial man. He was arrested in Austria in 2014 at the US government’s request on charges of ‘conspiracy to bribe’ in India. A warrant was then issued for his arrest in Spain. Last year, Firtash was sanctioned by Ukraine over claims that he was selling titanium products to the Russian military. In America, he has been called ‘Ukraine’s most wanted’. In Britain, he gave £4 million to Cambridge University and spent much more on other projects, and has since been held up as a classic example of an oligarch buying his way into our

Christopher Howse

Why the destruction of Ukraine’s churches matters

One small, deadly incident in the Ukrainian war proved memorable because it involved the ordinary things of life. A mother and two children trying to leave the town of Irpin on foot on 6 March died from Russian shelling. Their suitcases fell beside them and, miserably, a pet dog carrier. They lay on an ordinary road that could be in Surrey, on the steps of a memorial to Soviet dead from the second world war. That spot is opposite a little row of bells under a tiled roof in the grounds of the Ukrainian Orthodox church of St George. A neat hoarding was visible in 2015 on the building next

James Forsyth

The three stumbling blocks to a Ukraine peace deal

A month in, and the war in Ukraine looks very different to how anyone expected. On the first day of the invasion, western intelligence sources believed that Kyiv would fall to Russian forces within 72 hours, underestimating the Ukrainians’ ability to defend their territory and overestimating the Russian military’s capabilities. Among Vladimir Putin’s many errors was his underestimation of western unity. He did not predict the severity of the sanctions against Russia or that his act of aggression would snap Europe (most notably Germany) out of its complacency over defence spending. In some ways, Putin, by going for a full-on invasion, made it easier for the West to adopt a

John R. MacArthur

The descent of New York

New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith, but because I witness similar ugliness so frequently on the New York City subway. For me, Smith’s outburst was shockingly familiar – emblematic of a simmering, pre-volcanic atmosphere in the country that no one seems to be examining or attempting to explain. As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy