Ukraine

Every time I hear a politician speak of Munich, I suspect that something is amiss. Last week, President Zelensky accused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of living in the ‘deep past’, and demanding that ‘a part of Ukraine be given to Russia’. ‘It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead of 2022’, Zelensky said. He wasn’t alone: figures from the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the former chess champion Garry Kasparov put themselves on the record timidly or violently disagreeing with Kissinger. I wasn’t at Davos, but I learned of Kissinger’s revelations through Twitter. A major newspaper had declared that he ‘came close to

In his own inimitable way, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has unleashed his dogs of war on Vladimir Putin and once again he’s pulled off a propaganda coup. The Russian President has in the past not been averse to using animals to his advantage; he posed topless on horseback, making the pulse race of every red-blooded Russian woman, and in 2007 he famously brought his pet labrador, Konni, to a meeting with Angela Merkel, fully aware that the then German chancellor had a fear of dogs. Zelensky is more a Jack Russell guy and earlier this month he decorated one of Ukraine’s bravest of the breed – Patron, which means ‘ammo’

A couple of weeks ago Ursula von der Leyen portentously announced a further package of EU sanctions against Russia – the sixth, in case you had lost count. No doubt an underling immediately told Vladimir Putin. Most likely, that adviser will have been waved away; Vladimir has more important matters to think about. Much of the announcement was small beer. Putin won’t be shaking in his shoes at the thought that a few more of his top brass are being sanctioned, the odd bank removed from Swift, three broadcasters silenced in the EU, and a bar on the EU supply of corporate services like accountancy to Russian companies. True, there were

For a man who likes to present himself as a Jupiter-like statesman, gliding across the world stage, Emmanuel Macron’s efforts at diplomacy have fallen remarkably flat in recent months. While Britain spent the weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifting weapons to Kyiv – to demonstrable effect now – Macron instead responded to the troop build-up by going on a doomed diplomatic mission to Moscow. Unsurprisingly, his face to face with Putin, across an absurdly long table in the Kremlin, did not work out. Undeterred, Macron has spent the weeks following the invasion keeping up a close relationship with Putin, and has spoken a number of times to the bloated

Angela Merkel left the German chancellery at the end of last year with a bunch of flowers, a standing ovation in the Bundestag, a fist bump from her successor Olaf Scholz, and an approval rating of 68 per cent. Rarely for a national leader, she left office on her own terms, remaining Germany’s most popular politician until the week she stepped down, set to become the country’s elder stateswoman. Less than three months later, Russia invaded Ukraine – immediately throwing her legacy into doubt. The 21st-century Germany she built is extraordinarily dependent on Russian energy thanks to years of dovish engagement with Vladimir Putin’s regime, placing German business interests firmly

Berlin, Germany Germans have a complex relationship with their Erinnerungskultur, or ‘culture of memory’. Whenever the word appears, it almost invariably refers to how the country thinks about its difficult past. Determined never to forget the horrors of the Nazis, Germans have spent decades reflecting on the evil that their forbears unleashed upon the world. And yet this process isn’t helping us understand our present. As a German-Canadian whose grandparents spent their childhoods in bomb shelters, I’ve long respected German memory culture. But events in Berlin on VE Day this past Sunday have shaken my faith. Today, Ukraine is revealing how little we actually understand about our history in Germany. Ukraine’s

This idolisation of the Soviet military is Russia’s modern tragedy. Not least because it is crucial to Putin’s way of controlling the country. Russians are prodded to believe in a golden thread linking the achievements of an unsullied Red Army with what their soldiers are perpetrating in Ukraine today. This is why it was entirely to be expected that at today’s Victory Day parade Putin again couched his so-called ‘special military operation’ in terms of a fight against ‘Nazis’. It’s also why the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has compared Ukraine’s Jewish president to Hitler. And why the hi-tech killing equipment trundling across Red Square this morning was led by