Ukraine

Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Vladimir Putin accused Britain of being behind attempted nuclear terrorism, rhetorically asking whether the government was ‘trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations’ or whether the British Prime Minister even ‘knows what his secret services are doing in Ukraine?’ Needless to say, no evidence is forthcoming to support Putin’s claims that a number of Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ had been intercepted and detailed by Russia’s Federal Security Service on their way to break the power lines at an unnamed Russian nuclear

Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness. What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See John Paul was born and baptised in Poland before the second world war and rose to become Archbishop of Kraków before being elected to the Papacy. He had spent decades under communist rule and experienced the brutal ways of Soviet imperialism. He knew his Russian history.

Well it took two months, but the inevitable happened this week: Yevgeny Prigozhin, one time chef and later war-criminal extraordinaire for Vladimir Putin, was publicly executed in the most extraordinary way. While flying on his private jet with the upper echelon of his Wagner Group, he was shot down by a Russian military operated anti-air system. For a short period there were the weird but expected rumours circulating, asking if Prigozhin was faking his own death, or asking if the Ukrainians did it. The answer seems clear, however. Putin had Prigozhin executed for his armed mutiny two months ago. Always go with the simplest explanation. Not pressing Russia fully because

In the early hours of this morning, Ukraine launched 42 unmanned drones at the annexed territory of Crimea, the Russian ministry of defence has claimed. Announcing on Telegram that the attack had been ‘thwarted’, the Russian MoD said nine of the drones had been shot down, while the remaining 33 were electronically jammed and downed ‘before they reached their target’. If the number of drones Russia claims to have been attacked with is correct, this would amount to the largest Ukrainian air attack on Russian-held territory since the beginning of the war. This could amount to the largest Ukrainian air attack on Russian-held territory since the beginning of the war. Mikhail

President Zelensky has announced that he is dismissing the heads of all Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices and replacing them with veterans who had served on the front line. He used a video address to say that a state investigation had turned up widespread corruption, including bribe-taking and help for draft dodgers to flee abroad.  As a war leader, he has, in effect, autocratic power, beyond anything he would enjoy as an elected leader in peacetime – and he has shown himself willing to use it Sounding a notably tough note, Zelensky said: ‘This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and

As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Just once, before now, I have plunged into the heart of a war, when, with a photographer friend, we persuaded a reluctant cab driver to take us from Beirut to south Lebanon during one of the Israeli invasions. As soon as we arrived, in a small mountain town called Machgharah, we were seized

In the last few weeks, words like ‘slow’, ‘grinding’ and even ‘failure’ have been used to describe the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that Ukrainian forces have not broken through Russian lines and indeed have only liberated a relatively small amount of Ukraine’s occupied territory after seven weeks (though to be fair, they’ve taken about as much as the Russians were able to seize in seven months), has led some to cast doubt on the course of the counteroffensive. It has been argued that the Ukrainians launched their main offensive in early June, failed, and since then have struggled mightily to deal with Russian defences, particularly dense Russian minefields.  Actually,

Although Western support to Ukraine’s defence effort continues unabated, the honeymoon between Kyiv and even its staunchest allies is decidedly over. In a recent interview, President Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Ukraine sees Poland as its close friend ‘until the end of the war.’ Then, he added, ‘competition between the countries will begin.’ The quote, which was immediately seized upon by Russian propaganda as evidence of a fracture in Ukraine’s key relationship, came off the back of a spat between Warsaw and Kyiv over the ban on imports of Ukrainian grain to Poland. The policy is due to remain in place until at least mid-September, even as Ukraine’s maritime export infrastructure is

Alexei Navalny – the most high-profile figure of Russia’s political opposition – has just been sentenced to 19 years in a ‘special regime prison colony’. This was no surprise. Navalny himself predicted the ‘Stalinist’ sentence for a variety of criminal charges, some relating to ‘extremism’, in a blog post the day before the sentence was handed down: ‘The formula for calculating it is simple: the prosecution’s request minus 10–15 per cent. They asked for 20 years, so I’ll get 18 or something.’ This latest verdict adds prison time to the sentence he is already serving in the Melekhovo prison colony – around five hours east by car from Moscow – which also served as the location

Sir Richard Moore, head of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – follows the tradition of only giving one public address a year, so it is inevitably scrutinised carefully for signs and portents. His speech at the UK embassy in Prague, inviting Russians to spy for Britain, required no particular reading between the lines. After a suitable preamble noting Britain’s strong relationship with the Czech Republic, he pivoted from Moscow’s brutal suppression of the liberal Prague Spring in 1968 to Soviets, the bravest of whom, seeing ‘the moral travesty of what was being done…acted on their convictions by throwing in their lot with us, as partners for freedom.’ This was