Nato

Not all of Germany is against Vladimir Putin. Sahra Wagenknecht, a Left party MP, recently defended him, saying he is not ‘the mad Russian nationalist’ of caricature and sending weapons to Ukraine was a ‘US-driven policy’ which played a role in provoking his invasion. Her views are quite common in East Germany and not only among the left. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has most of its support in the East, opposes sanctions and providing weapons. A recent opinion poll asked whether Berlin should ‘be tough on Russia’: half of West Germans agree, but just a third of East Germans do. Some 58 per cent of East Germans want Berlin to take an approach that doesn’t ‘provoke Russia’. Only 40 per cent of West Germans agree.

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

Driving a hard bargain is the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief survival skill – one that has kept him in power for nearly as long as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. And the basic principles of bargaining are twofold: never give something away for nothing, and make your threats to walk away convincing. No surprise, then, that Erdogan’s buzz-killing announcement last week that Turkey would oppose Swedish and Finnish membership of Nato was made in characteristically blunt terms. Speaking of a planned visit of Nordic diplomats to Ankara, Erdogan asked: ‘Are they coming to convince us? Excuse me, but they should not tire themselves.

Boris Johnson has travelled to Stockholm to sign a mutual defence pact with Sweden to tide the country over until it enters Nato. He'll then travel to Finland to agree similar terms. This is quite significant for a few reasons. To the Prime Minister, the 'global Britain' post-Brexit strategy means signing global new trade and defence relationships: with European and global partners. In other words, showing that Brexit Britain has not turned in on itself but is keen to make new and global alliances - stepping up as an ally at times when even America is reluctant. This is one of those times. In theory, the European Union has a mutual defence clause (Article 42.

“Victory Day” is one of the most solemn events on the Russian calendar. Every year on May 9, the country gets together to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany in what Russians call “the Great Patriotic War,” in which as many as 26 million Soviet troops and civilians perished. It’s a time for reflection, for an appreciation of history, and, yes, for pomp and circumstance, with Russian troops decorated in dazzling uniforms marching in unison throughout Moscow's Red Square. This year’s Victory Day celebrations, however, had much of the world on edge. In next-door Ukraine, Russian forces were taking a beating, with smaller but nimbler and more determined Ukrainian units continuing to mount stiff resistance against a Russian military offensive in the Donbas.

After an embarrassing two-month start to its war in Ukraine marked by pictures of abandoned armored personnel carriers, destroyed tanks and stalled armored columns outside Ukraine’s major cities, the Russian army is re-tooling and re-arming itself for a more manageable fight in the east. I use the word “manageable” not because the battle in the Donbas will be easy for Russian forces, but because the objective of expanding Russian control over the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk is more realistic than overthrowing the Ukrainian government and occupying the entire country. Capturing, let alone holding, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv would have entailed a massive number of personnel and a long-term commitment Russia doesn't have the resources to sustain.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the best thing to happen to NATO since 1989. No amount of cajoling by American presidents could get the Germans to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, as the alliance asks. The Russian president found a way to persuade them. Putin has also persuaded Finns and Swedes that joining NATO is a good idea. Not for the first time, a war is having the opposite of the effect its instigator intended. Putin may yet get what he demanded from Ukraine and the West right before his invasion. NATO membership may be on the table for everyone else but not for Ukraine. Russia wants its possession of Crimea to be acknowledged by Kyiv, and that too is within Putin’s reach.

The beginning of the year has not gone as well as it could have for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Mostly because he is now dead, but also because Zhirinovsky, a Russian politician of the “managed” (pro-Kremlin) opposition, predicted and vigorously supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Zhirinovsky were able to follow the campaign from his hospital bed, it could not have met his expectations. The imperial Russia of his imagination ought to have come into glorious existence, but its armed forces instead suffered reversal and humiliation. Zhirinovsky was the long-time leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party — a grouping that, as many wags have separately concluded, was under his leadership neither liberal nor democratic nor, in some lights, a party.