Russia

Boris Bondarev’s Twitter profile sums up his past, present and future in three short phrases: ‘Russian diplomat in exile. Stop the war. The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – a quote from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 denunciation of patriotic hypocrisy. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 42-year-old Bondarev quit his job as an arms control expert at Russia’s diplomatic mission to Geneva in protest. None of his colleagues in Geneva, or anywhere else, followed suit (at least not publicly). Does that make Bondarev the only Russian diplomat with a conscience? ‘It’s not about conscience,’ Bondarev tells me by Zoom from an undisclosed Swiss location where he now

On a Russian Telegram channel, Svetlana from Samara is making a public plea. She has not heard from her brother since the shelling of Makiivka on 31 December, which may have killed up to 400 Russian soldiers. Enquiries to the military registration, the city governor, the Ministry of Defence have apparently turned up nothing. ‘After all my appeals, requests, calls, I became desperate that no one was listening to me. Ordinary, simple people are not needed by anyone.’  Another, older woman, Valentina, posts from the same region. ‘Please help me find my son,’ she says. ‘He was in Makiivka on 31 December. Since then, there’s been no news. He is neither [registered

So, one granite-faced general has been replaced by another. The announcement that, after just three months in post, General Sergei Surovikin is being succeeded as overall commander of Russia’s war in Ukraine by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov may sound like appointing a new captain for a hull-breached Titanic. But it is significant in what it says, not just about the war, but Putin’s relationship with his generals. Surovikin becomes one of Gerasimov’s three deputies, in what is being sold not as a demotion but simply a reflection of the need for an ‘increase in the level of leadership’ because of the ‘amplified range of tasks’ and the

Bakhmut is not of immense strategic importance. It’s a backwater, empty of almost all civilian life, and largely in ruins. But the city is where Ukraine’s war of self-defence has been at its most intense for months.  The defenders are suffering, under a hail of artillery fire and under constant threat of attack. But the Russians are losing more. Almost daily, it seems, Putin’s forces advance without cover across a moonscape torn with shell-holes. They are cut down in their tens every time. The front line has barely moved in weeks. Russian bodies, uncollected in the cold, litter the surrounding fields.   To Ukrainians and their allies, these suicidal attacks are no longer simply foolish. They

Two years ago, 13-year-old singer Maléna was rehearsing for Eurovision Junior when war broke out. While her rivals battled in Warsaw on stage, she stayed home in Armenia. Young men picked up AK-47s to fight against their Azerbaijani neighbours in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. More than 4,000 never returned. A year later, Maléna re-entered Eurovision Junior and won, giving her country the right to host Eurovision Junior in December 2022. Armenian authorities staged celebrations in the capital, Yerevan. Crowds huddled around outdoor televisions in the central square to watch the show. A group of young musicians from Nagorno-Karabakh joined the party in Yerevan, coming into the capital on the

‘War is the realm of uncertainty’, said the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, and this would seem to apply very well to affairs in Russia at the moment. Following September’s shock ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours have swirled around since of another mass-mobilisation due imminently. Having got Russian New Year (the country’s main December celebration) out of the way, there were fears that Putin might announce the conscription of several hundred thousand more men.  This assumption was based on several factors, not least Putin’s original refusal to limit the mobilisation and the predictions of Ukrainian intelligence – who said 5 January was earmarked for a second wave. A public demand, recently

At one minute past midnight on 1 January, as Putin uttered the last words of his new year’s address, Ukraine sent six Himars rockets into the Russian-occupied territory of Donetsk. Four landed on a vocational school in the town of Makiivka, which had been acting as a temporary Russian military base, reducing its buildings to rubble. The domestic fallout for Russia is proving messy. From the moment they announced news of the strike, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has made considerable efforts to downplay the death toll and pin the blame for the incident on the dead Russian soldiers themselves. They, the MoD says, are the reason Ukraine knew where to find them. On 2 January,

Watching Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a Christmas tradition for many. But this year, people are being urged to stay away: Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko published an open letter earlier this month asking the West to boycott Tchaikovsky and wider Russian culture until the war in Ukraine is over. ‘This war,’ he said, ‘is a civilisational battle over culture and history’.  He’s right: since February, the Russian state is doing its best to annihilate Ukrainian culture in every possible way: banning and seeking to destroy the Ukrainian language, artists, authors and music. But how far should we go in response? Is a crackdown against Russian culture a wise idea, or does it play into Putin’s hands? The Kremlin

December is usually a busy month for Vladimir Putin, but not this year. In the run-up to Christmas, Russia’s president typically holds his annual press conference. But this time the event has been cancelled. Putin’s annual presidential address to the Russian federal assembly – that was pushed back from the summer – has also been canned. And Putin will also be absent from the traditional New Year’s Eve ice hockey game on Red Square. Putin’s yearly telethon, where ordinary Russians can phone in and have a chat with the president (indefinitely postponed from earlier in the year), too has been axed. Such events in the Kremlin calendar are annual touchstones

Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there was a narrow but clearly defined space for Russia’s opposition media. The fearlessly anti-Kremlin Novaya Gazeta – whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year – was not only tolerated but funded by a regime-friendly oligarch at the behest of the deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration Sergei Kiriyenko. Radio station Ekho Moskvy was owned by Gazprom media but regularly aired scathing criticisms of the regime. And the independent Dozhd TV (‘TV Rain’, motto: The Optimistic Channel) continued to broadcast online from increasingly cramped Moscow offices as advertisers and landlords were pressured to pull their support. Even as the

Fewer than one in 100 defendants in the Russian court system get acquitted. Even in the best of circumstances then, Ilya Yashin’s chances looked poor. As the last of Russia’s high-profile opposition politicians who remains alive and isn’t in prison or in exile, there never was any question as to whether he was going to be convicted. Today, he was predictably found guilty in Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court under Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code, on the deeply-questionable charge of ‘spreading false information about the Russian military’. His crime was to raise the allegations of systematic human rights abuses in the Ukrainian town of Bucha on his YouTube channel in