Russia

‘A giant step for German and European security,’ is how Chancellor Olaf Scholz described his government’s €100 billion cash injection for the country's depleted military. But while Germany’s newfound commitment to its own defence is welcome, its commitment to Ukraine’s is still questionable at best.   Over the weekend, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that it had seen documents showing that Berlin had reduced military support for Ukraine to ‘a minimum’. According to inside sources, only two German weapon deliveries have reached Ukraine since the end of March. Both contained light equipment such as mines, hand grenades and spare parts for machine guns.

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’ in Ukrainian.

Ah, well, it was a lovely idea, born of the age of liberal-democratic triumphalism that was the 1990s: the ‘Golden Arches theory’, which held that no two countries that had McDonald’s franchises had ever been – or would ever go – to war. Remarkably, it wasn’t the product of McDonald’s PR department but the work of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He argued that the arrival of McDonald’s signified a society that had become so consumerist that enough people had enough invested in economic stability to ever risk a war. Armed conflict ain’t good for the hamburger trade The final nail in the coffin of the Golden Arches theory has come with the news that McDonald’s is to abandon Russia permanently.

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 authoritarian on the phone.

During the Cold War, the Soviets would place defectors from the West under house arrest as soon as they arrived in Russia. The assumption was that, as soon as they realized what a dump the USSR was, they would try to sneak back home. And they were probably right. Still, it’s a credit to the Soviet propaganda machine that they showed up in the first place. Back then, Russia did a great job of marketing itself. They paid top dollar to seduce high-ranking scientists and intelligence officials, while young radicals lined up to do the Kremlin’s bidding. Their disinformation was second to none. And today? Well, put it this way. Last week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a Nazi.

It is a story of ingenuity, cunning and farce that would have done credit to Mr. Toad, escaping his prison bondage by dressing as a washerwoman. Lucy Shtein, one of the members of the Russian protest art collective Pussy Riot, recently revealed how she managed to flee the country while dressed in the bright green attire of a food delivery company. Along with her constant familiar Mr. Rat — a pet rodent who, as is often the way of these things, has become a social media breakout star — Shtein managed to leave her flat in central Moscow, where she had been under house arrest for more than a year.