Ukraine

It didn’t take long for the Kremlin to exploit the news that Britain will be supplying depleted uranium armour-piercing anti-tank ammo to Ukraine. On Tuesday, Putin said that ‘Russia will have to respond accordingly, given that the West collectively is already beginning to use weapons with a nuclear component.’ While on Wednesday, Russia’s Ambassador to the US said that the West had ‘irrevocably decided to bring humanity to a dangerous line, beyond which a nuclear Armageddon is looming ever more distinctly.’  Both remarks are part of a long-standing Russian attempt to suggest that the Ukraine conflict might lead to nuclear escalation. The aim is to disrupt international support for Ukraine.

In my hometown we have three Orthodox churches, two of which are formally aligned with the Moscow patriarchate. They mostly say Russian prayers but, growing up, this was not seen as important. My family would go to both and see them as interchangeable: you’d stand, pray, kiss icons, take communion. Many Ukrainians never gave it much thought. This all changed when Vladimir Putin invaded last year. Only then was it clear just how he had been using the Russian church as a tool of his state: not just in Russia, but in Ukraine too. Previously neutral priests publicly prayed for Putin’s success, telling their parishioners how to help the invading

After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand guard over the world order based on international law’. This statement came closer than ever before to articulating his view that a normative struggle is going on between a western-dominated order, and one more suited to Beijing’s interests. As he departed yesterday, he went further: ‘Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.’ Having positioned himself as a potential peacemaker, Xi clearly believes the war in Ukraine presents him with a win-win situation ­­­–

Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary issue. In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands 80 years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war

As Wagner mercenaries are being deliberately expended by the regular military as cannon-fodder in the battle for Bakhmut, their backer, Evgeny Prigozhin, is learning a hard lesson in Kremlin politics: it doesn’t matter how useful you were yesterday, what matters is how useful you may be tomorrow. Last year, the Russians were desperately short of soldiers. Ukraine was fully mobilised, but Vladimir Putin was unwilling for political reasons to follow suit, only launching a partial mobilisation in September. His generals simply lacked the soldiers they needed. In politics, as in economics, the laws of supply and demand meant that whoever had soldiers to offer – such as Prigozhin – could

Protests that broke out in Tbilisi against adopting a controversial Russian-style law have turned into a pro-European movement with political demands. The law could have seen media and non-government groups which take funding from abroad classed as ‘foreign agents’. Although the Georgian government has released all arrested protesters and dropped the proposed law, which copied repressive Russian legislation and threatened to ban NGOs and independent media from operating in the country, the opposition is now demanding the resignation of the current Georgian government – along with early elections.  Looking at the EU flags raised by upset Georgians, Ukrainians are comparing the rallies in Tbilisi with the 2014 Maidan revolution in Kyiv.

It has long been suspected that Russia was going to mount a renewed military offensive in Ukraine as spring approached. This fear was realised overnight. From midnight to 7.a.m., Ukraine suffered one of the worst barrages of Russian bombing this year: some 81 missiles were fired at residential buildings and critical infrastructure from air, land and sea, including several hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. Some 34 missiles were intercepted in total, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine was not able to down many, as it does not yet have the Patriot system that can intercept them. The commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, said eight Iranian-made drones were also launched; four were

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has some awkward explaining to do to Vladimir Putin after a Russian military plane, being stored in Belarus, was reportedly blown up last weekend by Belarusian rebels.  According to reports, one of the nine working Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs) owned by the Russian military was attacked at the Machiulishchy airfield, just under eight miles from the capital Minsk, where it had been kept since early January this year. The aircraft, said to be worth £274 million, was capable of detecting and targeting air defence systems and formed a key part of Russia’s battlefield strategy. A day after what sounded like two

Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential threat and reassuring distance: the Russian president portrays the conflict as a struggle to preserve the nation from a hostile West and its Ukrainian proxy, but one fought safely outside its borders. Increasingly, Kyiv seems to want to bring the war to Russia, though, in a gamble which could go either way. A drone identified as a Ukrainian-made Ukrjet UJ-22 Airborne, capable of carrying up to 20kg of explosives, crashed close to a gas distribution station 60 miles southeast of Moscow yesterday. This is more than 300 miles from the

The first hint that my audience with Volodymyr Zelensky might not be what I’d hoped for came with the emailed invite. A few days before I’d been told I’d made the shortlist for a select presidential news conference marking the anniversary of the war. Not quite an exclusive interview, granted, but given current Zelenskymania, a decent second best. Images of a cosy roundtable in the secret presidential bunker beckoned. Alas, when the email from his office finally arrived, it was notably bereft of the cloak and dagger one might expect. No orders to leave my phone at home. No secret rendezvous with a blacked-out van. Just an order to report at