Russia

What’s going to happen to British volunteers captured while fighting Russian forces? According to Ukrainian analysts, there is intelligence to suggest that Russia is planning to parade them through Red Square. You read that correctly: Putin is planning to march 500 captured soldiers in the annual 9 May victory parades. Wasn’t this kind of thing always going to happen if British volunteers joined the Ukrainian war effort? And should Foreign Secretary Liz Truss really have said that she 'absolutely' backed anyone who travelled to the country to fight Russian troops? Unprepared veterans and untrained civilians really aren't that much help in the war effort.

Vladimir Lenin famously said that there are “weeks where decades happen.” He was talking about the Bolshevik Revolution, but the panic-stricken weeks after Vladimir Putin shocked even his own people by invading "brotherly" Ukraine will also be remembered as an intensely transformative period in Russia’s history, when the ground shifted and Moscow was yanked back to its Soviet past. Those crazy weeks when my phone rang non-stop now feel like decades in retrospect, especially from the perspective of New York. The changes were apparent even after the first mad days of the "special operation." Anti-war Russians had panicked at Putin’s cruel gambit and fled the country by the tens of thousands, along with thousands of Western expats.

I have temporarily taken in two Ukrainian refugees and suddenly find that, for very little sacrifice, my stock has soared. People who have regarded me as a hard-nosed, right-wing bastard are suddenly confused and struggling to readjust. A woke young relative who has despaired of my ignorant, reactionary views on Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender and so on suddenly sees a halo above my head. My mother-in-law on the Costa Brava reports mentioning that her daughter and son-in-law have Ukrainian refugees is like being sprinkled with gold dust. Her social circle is in awe. Never have I received so much praise for doing hardly anything at all.

The reluctance of chancellor Olaf Scholz to provide heavy weapons to Ukraine is now coming under increasing fire from abroad and within Germany itself. Prominent politicians from the liberal FDP and the Greens, the coalition partners of Scholz’s Social Democrats in Berlin, have criticised the chancellor for his lack of leadership, and complain that Germany is lagging behind other major western powers in supplying weapons. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the flamboyant chairwoman of the defence committee in the German parliament, hit out at the chancellor’s ‘deafening silence’ on the subject.

The chaos abroad that has marked Joe Biden’s presidency is accelerating. Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine is rolling from winter into late spring; Iran and its proxies are launching missiles into Iraq and Saudi Arabia; China is menacing Taiwan and other Asian neighbours, and North Korea is preparing to revive its nuclear programme. Meanwhile, long-time US friends like Saudi Arabia and newer partners like India are starting to hedge their bets by cosying up to these regimes. Is the post-Cold War, US-led world order fracturing? It certainly looks like it. America’s enemies no longer fear her — and her friends don’t wholly trust her.

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.