Russia

The West may like to convince itself that it is, in the words of one American diplomat, ‘strangling the Russian foreign ministry’, but it ought to look south for a rather different perspective. On Tuesday, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was in expansive mood as he announced the formation of a brand-new Department of Partnership with Africa. Recognising that for years Moscow had neglected Africa, Lavrov blamed in part the bankruptcy of the late USSR and Russia in the 1990s, when embassies had to be shut down and sold off. I remember one polyglot diplomat who, while serving in Nigeria, had taken to spending his mornings giving English, French and Russian

In theory, the Kursk salient is one of the most militarily insignificant fronts of Putin’s war on Ukraine. However, war is ultimately all about politics, and the presence of Ukrainian troops on Russian soil is sufficiently problematic for President Vladimir Putin that Kyiv has decided to deploy more troops in a bid to reverse the slow recapture of the occupied territory. Having originally seized some 400 square miles in its lightning attack in August 2024, by last month, steady Russian pressure had shrunk Ukraine’s grasp on territory to some 180 square miles. Although Ukraine still held the town of Sudzha – about the only significant settlement in this area –

On the eastern marches of Europe, after nearly three years of slugging it out with its larger, more powerful neighbour for control of a string of unlovely mining towns, Ukraine is approaching exhaustion. Kyiv, which has led a fierce and unexpectedly successful defence of its realm, is contending with a waning supply of weapons, ammunition and money. Worse still, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s war effort is beginning to run out of fighting men. All men aged 25 and over – with the exception of those deemed critical to the war effort, or who have fled, gone into hiding or bribed their way out of the draft – have been dispatched east

Has Vladimir Putin been forced to eat humble pie? Earlier today, the Russian president felt compelled to issue an apology – of sorts – after an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan on 25 December, killing 38 of the 67 passengers on board. The plane had been travelling from the Azeri capital Baku to Grozny, in the Russian region of Chechnya, when it was hit by air defence systems, forcing it to crash-land hundreds of miles off course in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Speaking on the phone to the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, Putin called the crash a ‘tragic incident’ and expressed his condolences to the injured and families of the victims.

The Russian Orthodox Church or state calendar doesn’t recognise 25 December as a special day: their Christmas is 7 January by their old calendar and, in any case, it is New Year’s Eve that is the real blow out. As households prepare the usual staples of Salad Olivier, Herring under a Fur Coat (smothered in mayonnaise), tangerines and champagne, it will be impossible for them to ignore a basic fact: everything is getting more expensive. Indeed, while the headline inflation rate is just under 10 per cent, the price of many basic foods have increased dramatically more. One Russian newspaper estimated that the price of a typical New Year’s Eve

Defence Secretary John Healey has raised the possibility that British military personnel could be deployed to Ukraine to carry out training missions. On a visit to Kyiv this week, he spoke about a five-point plan for increasing the United Kingdom’s support for its beleaguered ally, one aspect of which would be to ‘make the training a better fit for what the Ukrainians need’. When he was asked whether that could encompass undertaking the mission in Ukraine rather than the UK, he was careful not to rule it out: ‘We will look wherever we can to respond to what the Ukrainians want. They are the ones fighting.’ Unfortunately, it’s not quite

It is 00.40 pm, 26 September 1983. Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the duty commander in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union’s early warning satellites designed to identify American missile attacks, is carefully checking his panels. Suddenly, the alarms roar into loud action. The word ‘Launch’ flashes onto his screen in large red letters. For the next 15 seconds, one of the satellites reports that five American Minuteman missiles have been launched and are heading towards the Soviet Union. Based in a secret bunker hidden deep beneath the woods just outside Moscow, Petrov is transfixed and stares at the screen in disbelief and shock. The automatic order to launch in retaliation is also sent to Soviet

The air raid sirens sounded yesterday, the American embassy in Kyiv closed, as did the Italian and Greek. The British and French embassy warned nationals to take care and encouraged staff to work remotely. The Ukrainian air force warned residents of the city to seek shelter from an incoming massive air attack. And then nothing happened. It’s not clear which is more embarrassing. That the Russians seem to have been able to perpetrate a nerve-jangling hoax, not least by circulating messages on social media and messaging apps seeming to come from HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. These claimed that a ‘particularly massive’ airstrike was on the way involving more than 300

Russians are, stereotypically, known as heavy vodka drinkers – a fact that is often celebrated, despite all the bodily perils it entails. What’s rather less talked about is that Russia suffers one of the worst HIV epidemics outside Africa. This is thanks, in no small part, to heroin users sharing needles. But the latest challenge to public health, aside from the meatgrinder in Ukraine, is the synthetic stimulants craze behind which lie an underworld of cyber drug cartels. Russia’s drug problem is nothing new The annual death toll from illicit drugs has more than doubled since 2019 to over 10,000 a year, a gruesome trend that’s likely to continue as the stress of the

Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election is seen as a tragedy for Ukraine. Trump and Ukraine certainly have a troubled history. During Trump’s first term, when he pressured president Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, this effort led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s sympathy for, indeed admiration of, Vladimir Putin is well-known. Trump and vice president-elect JD Vance claim to have a plan to swiftly end the Russian–Ukrainian war, presumably by strong arming Kyiv to cede territory to Russia and abandon its bid for Nato membership. Is Ukraine doomed and headed toward defeat and subjugation by Russia? Putin prefers fighting to a ceasefire and will likely reject any Trump