War

Six weeks ago, I invited Ahmed Alnaouq, a young diplomat who recently joined the Palestinian mission in London, to stay for a cricket weekend in Wiltshire. He resisted all entreaties to play the game but was in every other way a delightful guest. On Sunday, Ahmed learnt that his family in Gaza has been wiped out by an Israeli bomb. His father, siblings, and more than 15 nieces and nephews had all been killed. Twenty-three dead, no injuries. Another brother was killed by an Israeli bombing in 2014. His mother died three years ago because, he says, Israel denied her medical treatment. When I sent him a text message saying that

When it comes to disclosing the true cost of the war in Ukraine for Russia, the Kremlin has rarely, if ever, chosen to be honest. But occasionally, things slip out. Last Wednesday, Mikhail Teplinsky, commander-in-chief of the Russian Airborne Forces, congratulated his troops on the anniversary of the division’s founding. He said how proud he was of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and reeled off the number of soldiers honoured as ‘Heroes of Russia’, as well as the 30,000 who had received other honours from the state. A video of his speech, below, was posted to the Russian ministry of defence’s social media channels and website. But the video

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart.  Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the

Forget fund-raising concerts donating spare clothes and offering your spare room to a refugee family. There’s a better way of showing your sympathy for Ukrainians: you can now sponsor weapons, and arm it with your very own message. For up to £2,500, Brits can send a personalised message to the crowdfunding site Sign My Rocket, who will then write it on a missile destined for the Russian army. Sending hostile messages to the enemy, of course, is not new, and may be as old as war itself. Dropping black propaganda leaflets from planes for the benefit of the enemy beneath has long been standard practice. Nor was it unusual for

Is Amnesty International victim-blaming? The Ukrainian military has been endangering civilians, it said, by establishing military bases and putting weapons systems in residential areas. Agnès Callamard, the organisation’s secretary-general, remarked that ‘being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law’. It was a bizarre statement. Russian forces are attacking villages and large cities with dense populations. The Ukrainian armed forces can’t sit in a field, or put their weapons on a boat and sail away from coastal cities. As well as the morality of shifting the blame on to the aggressor, Amnesty’s statement doesn’t recognise the realities of the war situation. It is