Ukraine

There’s a very different tone coming from Kyiv these days. Speaking to Time magazine, Volodymyr Zelensky had just returned from Washington after failing to make another impassioned public address on Capitol Hill, and not even managing to get on Oprah. The Ukrainian president sounded angry. The constant struggle to maintain international support seems to be taking its toll. ‘Nobody believes in our victory like I do. Nobody,’ he insisted, but added that dragging Ukraine’s allies along with him ‘takes all your power, your energy… It takes so much of everything.’ Meanwhile, in the Economist, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, and another icon of national resilience,

It’s not easy to say this, but Ukraine’s offensive to retake lost territory has fizzled out. Autumnal weather has turned the rolling steppe into a sea of mud. Like last winter, the conflict has entered a renewed phase of static, attritional warfare. It means that any new attempt to break through Russian lines will need to wait until at least April of next year. Ukraine’s failure is easy to explain. First, Russia’s defensive line has proved to be much more impenetrable than anyone expected, with minefields that run nearly a mile deep in places. Second, although the West has donated a number of armoured vehicles, including Leopard 2 main battle

Who is to blame for the shocking pogrom in the Dagestani city of Makhachkala, where a mob of hundreds stormed the local airport in search of Jews on a flight from Tel Aviv? Vladimir Putin has offered a predictable answer: the West. In a meeting with Russia’s security council and law enforcement agencies, president Putin said the actions of the anti-Semitic mob in Dagestan were ‘inspired through social media, including originating from Ukraine, created at the hands of agents of Western intelligence services’.  Putin is trying to present his invasion as an existential fight against encroaching Western influence Putin then went further, suggesting that the US could also be blamed for war in

There has never been any doubt that Ukraine was the focus of an intelligence war as much as a physical one. But the extent of Western assistance, as well as growing concern at some Ukrainian tactics, is only now becoming clear. On Monday, the Washington Post ran a lengthy examination of the level of CIA assistance for the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and military intelligence (HUR) that bore all the hallmarks of being facilitated by the US government. It acknowledged that since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Americans has invested ‘tens of millions’ of dollars in training and technical assistance for their Ukrainian counterparts, even building new headquarters

America’s ATACMS long-range missiles were a potential ‘game changer’ to the war in Ukraine to some, a potential source of escalation to others. Now, with no real sense that either has proved true following Zelensky’s confirmation this week they were used for the first time, what does that tell us? The MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) undoubtedly offers Kyiv new capabilities. It can deliver a 500-pound warhead or hundreds of cluster bomblets very accurately to a range of up to 190 miles. Unlike the Anglo-French Storm Shadows already in use, the two-ton missile is fired from a tracked HIMARS launcher rather than an aircraft and thus can respond very

Vasyl, a burly, tattooed infantry commander who lost a leg to a Russian mine on the eastern front, sits swinging his remaining leg on the edge of the treatment table in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic in Lviv. He’s been inside the Russian trenches 50 times, he tells me. His stories are reminiscent of the first world war. I ask him what Ukraine needs for victory. Answer: ‘Motivated people.’ His T-shirt proclaims ‘no sacrifice, no victory’. After we shake hands and I wish him luck, he suddenly jumps off the table and starts skipping at amazing speed, his blue skipping rope whizzing around under his one foot, while he looks at

Russia’s latest offensive has exacted a heavy toll on its forces. They have lost 127 tanks, 239 armoured personnel vehicles and 161 artillery systems in the past week, according to Kyiv, with the casualties reaching more than 3,000 military personnel. Vladimir Putin is trying to change the narrative, framing Russian forces’ actions as ‘active defence’ rather than ‘active combat operations’. While Putin tries to temper expectations of major frontline gains, the battle for Avdiivka persists, albeit with waning intensity. ‘I hope that these dirtbags who settled in Avdiivka will be levelled with three-ton bombs in a similar way Israel is levelling Gaza right now’, said Sergey Mardan, a Russian state

Just days after Ukraine’s President Zelensky declared his intention to start EU membership negotiations by the end of this year, the bloc’s former president Jean-Claude Juncker has poured cold water on the idea, branding it a country ‘corrupt at all levels of society’. In an interview with the South German regional Augsburger Allgemeine paper, Juncker accused current EU officials of making ‘false promises’ to Ukraine and ‘telling Ukrainians that they can become members immediately’.  The Ukrainian government admitted that only two of the seven EU membership conditions had been met ‘Despite its efforts, it is not eligible to join and needs massive internal reform,’ he said. ‘We have had bad experiences with

I first came to Russia as a travelling English literature-lecturer in the late 1990s. This wasn’t a job given to me but one I’d devised myself, sending off snail-mail begging letters to different university departments all over the Former Soviet Union – Barnaul to Minsk – outlining my services and occasionally, weeks or months later, being taken up on the offer. With a rucksack full of books, I’d catch a train – sometimes a days-long journey – to the next destination, where I’d be given a list of students to teach, a guided tour of the city and three weeks in a student hall of residence. Here cockroaches could outnumber

Poland has said it will no longer supply Ukraine with weapons, that it may cut aid to refugees and that it could restrict the import of a larger number of agricultural products. Polish president Andrzej Duda has compared Ukraine to a ‘drowning man’ capable of dragging his country ‘into the depths’. A month ahead of the Polish elections, it’s worrying language for Ukraine from a country that has, for so much of the war, been one of its staunchest allies. Ukraine needs Poland more than Poland needs Ukraine. Since the onset of the full-scale war, Poland has spent more than £2.5 billion to support Ukraine with weapons and financial aid, often prioritising

A year before Russia launched its brutal campaign to subjugate Ukraine, I visited a wintry Moscow. It was striking to see how far the capital had moved away from celebrating the cult of the old communist leadership that had dominated the then Soviet Union with an iron fist. The tomb of Lenin by the Kremlin was, of course, still doing good business with tourists. But the bust of Joseph Stalin, standing on guard outside his old boss’s gaudy vault, resembled a forgotten relic. The sorry state of these statues was no accident. After the failed coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991, First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s power drained away. As