World

Yesterday Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny achieved his martyrdom, with a panelled courtroom packed with journalists and Western diplomats standing in for Golgotha. A Moscow judge turned an outstanding two year, eight month suspended sentence for fraud into a prison term on the grounds that Navalny had missed probation hearings — dismissing as frivolous his excuse that he was lying in a Novichok-induced coma in a Berlin hospital bed at the time. In one sense, Navalny has achieved what he set out to do. Two weeks of street protests in 85 cities across Russia followed his arrest after a voluntary return from his German convalescence — the most serious overt

It might be a bit late, but the supply will come on tap eventually. France’s Sanofi has partnered with Pfizer to start manufacturing its vaccine. BioNTech has just bought a factory in Marburg, Germany from Switzerland’s drugs giant Novartis to retrofit into a vaccine plant. With plenty of money being splashed around, production will arrive soon. Making vaccines is tricky, but not that tricky. By the summer, Europe should have enough Covid-19 shots to jab everyone who wants one. Crisis over, right? Ursula von der Leyen can get back to setting diversity targets, or making climate pledges, or whatever it was she was up to before people started asking why

Despite its evident distaste for fair elections, the Kremlin is highly sensitive to public opinion — Vladimir Putin even has his own secret service polling agency, which he uses to weigh up policy decisions and gauge his popularity. The Kremlin combines these tools with state-of-the-art propaganda to promote Putin’s cult of personality, which naturally imposes on Russians his singular ability to protect them from internal and external enemies. Whenever Putin’s popularity is threatened, state media amplifies and heightens such narratives. We have seen that in the last couple of weeks, as Russia has been gripped by nationwide protests against corruption and in support of opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. With the

Countries around the world are in a race against time to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19. But there is one particular region which appears to have a growing problem with vaccine scepticism: Central and Eastern Europe. As a British expat living in the Czech Republic, I have noticed the lack of eagerness with which many Czechs discuss the vaccine rollout. This may in part be due to the country’s floundering and much-criticised vaccination programme. But it is noticeable that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common – and gets much more attention – here than in the UK. Ex-President Václav Klaus recently told a large anti-lockdown rally in Prague that vaccines are

Last week, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of UK born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who was accused of kidnapping and beheading the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The verdict came after Sindh High Court overturned the death penalty for Sheikh and three alleged abettors last year, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to find them guilty of murder and stating that they had served their sentence for their role in the kidnapping. The decision has outraged Washington, with Joe Biden’s new State Department chief Antony Blinken dubbing it an ‘affront to terrorism victims everywhere’ and announcing his readiness to prosecute Sheikh in the US. As the Pearl family prepares to appeal

The number of Brits who have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine hit 9.2million yesterday. But not everyone is impressed at the pace of the rollout. Step forward, France’s Europe minister, Clément Beaune, who has followed the example set by his boss Emmanuel Macron in criticising the British approach. The UK has taken ‘a lot of risks’ in its vaccine programme, Beaune told reporters:  ‘The British are in an extremely difficult health situation. They are taking many risks in this vaccination campaign. And I can understand it, but they are taking many risks. They have spaced – and the scientists have told us not to – they have

The latest French opinion poll puts Marine Le Pen on around 26 per cent, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron on 23 per cent when it comes to voting intention for the 2022 presidential race. This reverses Macron’s 2017 first-round score of 24 per cent and Le Pen on 21.3 per cent. Of course, Macron won the second round convincingly with 66.1 per cent because mainstream voters could not bring themselves to vote for Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. So does this poll change the outlook for the elections in 16 months? Ever since Macron’s presidential victory, polls have consistently shown a second-round run-off between Macron and Le Pen. The French left remains ignominiously divided, with no

According to ancient Moorish legend, when the world was created each land was given five wishes. Spain’s first four wishes – for clear skies, seas full of fish, good fruit, and beautiful women – were all granted, but the fifth, for good government, was denied on the grounds that to grant that too would create a paradise on earth. Certainly over the last couple of centuries, good government in Spain has tended to be conspicuous by its absence. Philosopher Ortega y Gasset summed up Spain’s tragic history and its desire to become more like the liberal democratic European countries in his famous phrase: ‘Spain is the problem and Europe the

Only half a year ago the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was a non-person on Russian state media, and Putin’s opulent palace built on the Black Sea was largely unheard of inside the country. Navalny had his loyal base of supporters who followed him on YouTube, and the palace had been discussed in the West for a decade. But for the overwhelming majority of Russians, both were unknown. Today, Navalny is everywhere on the Russian media. Vladimir Putin himself may still not be willing to name ‘that man’ – which after a certain point begins to look downright strange – but the President’s loyal army of pundits, news anchors and state