Russia

The main thoroughfare of Rostov-on-Don is today crawling with military vehicles and masked soldiers carrying automatics, and the entrance to that circus – which backs onto the Rostov military headquarters – is blocked aggressively by a tank. The city is now controlled by the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private army out on the rampage and rebelling against the Russian military high command. It is a city now under occupation, and many of its citizens, under ‘official advice’, are staying home. Telegram channels report that all civilian vehicles have been placed at a standstill, the city governor is arranging food deliveries for those caught in traffic jams, and in Rostov prisons

As Ukraine pushes forward its long-anticipated counteroffensive, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu seems more concerned with reeling in his institutional rivals, not least the wildcard Wagner group. But internecine institutional tensions are not the only affliction plaguing Russian occupation forces. As temperatures rise and the Ukrainians press the frontline, infectious diseases remain another challenge for Russian forces. In Wagner’s assault on Bakhmut, the self-proclaimed ‘most powerful army in the world’ made a slow, eight-month advance and suffered soaring casualties, of which 90 per cent were reportedly prisoner recruits. One in five of the 50,000 Wagner prisoner recruits who made up the bulk of their assault on Bakhmut were HIV positive – and a staggering 80 per cent

Lately Vladimir Putin has been strikingly unwilling to subject himself to any serious debate about his war in Ukraine. On Tuesday, he came the closest yet, spending more than two hours talking to war correspondents working for either the state media or nationalist social media channels. It was hardly an inquisition, but there were some interesting insights into his thinking to be gleaned. Despite the clear evidence of a steady contraction in the Kremlin’s aspirations and expectations from the original intent to conquer the whole of Ukraine, he refused to accept that the goals of the ‘special military operation’ had changed in any way. Rather, he asserted, that although they

How many memorable quotes has the Russia-Ukraine war produced so far? Along with Snake Island’s defiant ‘F*** you Russian warship’, we’ve had president Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv at the beginning of the war with the words: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ We also have his ‘Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to lead you to victory’ and his ‘No one’s going to break us. We are strong. We are Ukrainians’, though these are perhaps less interesting; the first a bit like something from a Disney poster (two kittens find their way home across the desert), the second awkwardly conjuring up memories of the Rocky films. Better,

You only have to hear the words of Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President and Vladimir Putin’s long term chief sidekick, to realise just how far Russia has propelled itself from the circle of civilised nations. Putin’s Russia not only uses state assassinations as an instrument of policy, but jokes and boasts about it too Dmitry Medvedev has recently made a habit of outdoing even his boss in blood curdling rhetoric. His latest outburst is typical: a direct threat to the lives of British officials. Britain, he declared, is waging an ‘undeclared war’ on Russia through its support for Ukraine, and because of that all British officials have now become ‘legitimate

Russian drones attacked Kyiv last night, the 17th such assault this month. But this time there was a difference: just after 4 a.m, Moscow came under what seemed to be a retaliatory attack. Most of the 25 drones were shot down by the city’s air defences, but three managed to get through. As Russia has found in Ukraine, this ratio is not unusual for drone attacks.  Of the drones that did succeed in flying over Moscow, one failed to detonate but the other two hit buildings in the New Moscow area of the city. Footage has surfaced on Russian social media purporting to show drones flying over Moscow suburbs in

Something strange is happening to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The chief of Vladimir Putin’s mercenary army in Ukraine has begun withdrawing his forces from Bakhmut, has all but conceded defeat in one of his most bizarre interviews yet, and, to top it off, now the journalist who interviewed him has been fired. ‘We came in boorishly, trampling all over Ukraine’s territory in search of Nazis. And while we searched for Nazis, we fucked up everyone we could,’ Prigozhin told the pro-war political journalist Konstantin Dolgov in an interview on Tuesday. ‘The special military operation was done for the purpose of ‘denazification’…But we ended up legitimising Ukraine. We’ve made Ukraine into a nation

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

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

Prior to Russia’s invasion in February 2022, few westerners knew much about Ukraine, and even less about Kazakhstan. We all suffer from Moscow-centred perceptions and the bad habit of equating the Soviet Union with Russia.  But now we know that Putin is driven by spurious historical theories, in which Ukraine has no right to exist, one needs to ask how they might apply to other ex-Russian provinces. Nowhere is more affected than European Russia’s eastern neighbour, Kazakhstan, which separates Muscovy from China, in the same way that Ukraine and Belarus divide it from the EU and Nato.   Ukraine is half as big again as France or Germany. But ‘KZ’