Ukraine

One thing you learn about war, if you are close enough for it to touch you, is that it splits the atom. Situations and relationships that have grown over time and seem to have deep roots – a life in fact – can be blown apart in a day. Now, over two years on from the start of Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ (which came at a time when I was living in Rostov-on-Don, an hour or two from the Ukrainian border), I’m still in touch with several Russians I knew back then. We find common ground, avoid certain topics and continue the conversation. But other friendships were killed stone dead,

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas. The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia’s but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’. The news was shocking but not surprising. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, recently claimed that the Ukrainian army had suffered over 160,000 casualties during counter-offensive last year. Such Russian updates on

The news about Alexei Navalny’s death came as a shock to anti-Putin Russians like myself – he’d been a central figure of opposition in Russia for more than 15 years. Yet in other ways, not a surprise at all – for three years he’d been in the claws of a regime with a long-established history of getting rid of its better-known opponents. Navalny himself was realistic about his chances, saying in court he was ‘under the total control of men who adore applying chemical weapons to everything, and no one would bet three kopecks on my life now.’ But still, with Navalny you held onto the irrational hope it might

It’s fair to say today that Boris Johnson and Tucker Carlson don’t like each other much. After the invasion of Ukraine, Boris, the former journalist and Prime Minister, accused Carlson, the journalist often tipped to be a future president of the United States, of ‘intimidating’ Republicans who might otherwise help the West stand up to Russia. He’s called Carlson a ‘tool of the Kremlin.’ Carlson, for his part, has called Johnson a ‘terrified old woman.’ Carlson called Johnson a ‘terrified old woman’ Things have only got nastier. Earlier this month, Boris suggested Carlson’s now infamous interview with Vladimir Putin was straight out of ‘Hitler’s playbook’. Carlson, never one to shrink

In the early hours of Saturday morning, police in Paris shot dead a Sudanese man who had threatened them with a meat cleaver. The motive for his actions has yet to be revealed but the incident happened a day after Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni warned her government that Europe faces a new migrant crisis because of the brutal war in Sudan that has displaced millions of people. Among the 157,00 migrants who arrived in Italy in 2023, 6,000 came from Sudan but Meloni believes that number will increase significantly this year. The repercussions of last summer’s coup d’etat in Niger are also starting to be felt in Europe. One

Despite a little eleventh-hour drama, Boris Nadezhdin’s bid to become the only genuine opposition candidate in March’s Russian elections has been blocked. What’s interesting is not that he was barred, but what this whole process says about the evolution of ‘late Putinism.’ Once, after all, it was marked both by a – limited but real – degree of genuine pluralism, especially at a local level, and also dramaturgiya, a theatrical facsimile of genuine democratic politics. The elections were stage-managed, of course, and the so-called ‘systemic opposition’ knew that their job was to put on a show rather than actually challenge the regime. Nonetheless, the showrunners appreciated the importance of spectacle, both

Is he out or not? After a night of claim, counter-claim, rumour and speculation, it appears that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has decided not to dismiss his commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny. Tension, however, clearly remains between the two – and this is bad news for Ukraine. Ukrainian news outlets were the first to begin claiming that General Zaluzhny had either been dismissed or was about to be. Insider sources contacted by well-connected Western journalists were, on balance, also apparently confirming rather than denying the claims. Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksy Goncharenko asserted that Zaluzhny had resigned and had refused the offer of an ambassadorial position in Europe. Quickly, though, the pendulum of reporting

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war ready to be exchanged. Around 11 a.m. local time this morning an Il-76 transport aircraft crashed in a fireball near the Russian village of Yablonova in the Belgorod Region, some 35 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Everyone on board was killed. It appears that, perhaps alongside a military cargo, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs – if the claims of the Russian defence ministry are to be believed. As is always the case in this war, multiple and contradictory explanations

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

Investigative journalism has often been deadly for the careers of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, with stories leading to resignations and even imprisonment. Now, under the conditions of martial law (including the closure of public data services) and limited opportunities for society to control the actions of the authorities, Ukrainian journalists became the main watchdogs over the government. This week they found out they were being watched, too. Bihus.info, an investigative team exposing corruption among Ukrainian officials, came under attack. A questionable media outlet named People’s Truth released a video showing some Bihus employees (camera operators and social media managers) allegedly ordering and taking drugs at a New Year’s party. The