Gabriel Gavin

A crowd gathered outside Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm on Saturday afternoon to watch far-right politician Rasmus Paludan burn the Quran. Paludan, who leads the anti-Islam ‘Hard Line’ Danish party, was watched by dozens of photographers, police officers and bemused passers-by. Paludan is no stranger to controversy: he has previously been convicted under racism and defamation law. This latest stunt was called to show his party’s opposition to immigration and, he says, to stand up for free speech. Now, though, the stunt has become a diplomatic crisis for Sweden – and there are fears that its bid to join Nato could go up in smoke.

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 only road that links the capital to the breakaway region.

Istiklal Avenue is a picture of chaos at the best of times. Istanbul’s answer to Oxford Street, the bustling pedestrian area is lined with upmarket shops, cafes and overpriced kebab stands. Groups of men sit out till late at night on benches drinking tea and playing chess, while families pushing buggies jostle with tourists for ice cream and pastries. On Sunday, though, that chaos gave way to outright panic when an explosion ripped through the heart of the city, Europe’s largest and home to more than 15 million people. One shopper captured the moment the fireball erupted in the packed crowd, sending women and children scrambling to escape. Meanwhile, pictures taken from offices overlooking Istiklal show mangled bodies and scorched paving stones. https://youtube.

Yerevan, Armenia It was getting dark outside Yerevan Airport when I arrived, but there were still a dozen flights from Russia yet to land. Groups of young men in their twenties and thirties were milling around the terminal building, stacking suitcases onto trolleys, changing money and working out what to do next. Armenia is one of the few countries they can still fly to since much of the western world closed its skies to Russian planes; it is almost alone in not requiring them to have visas. ‘I’m just here for a holiday,’ one weary traveller carrying four heavy bags insists, ‘everything is fine in Moscow.’ Others are more up front about their reasons for leaving.

Sotk, Armenia A group of Armenian soldiers stand guard on the road towards the village. ‘It’s not safe to go ahead,’ one says, slinging his Kalashnikov across his shoulder and motioning for our van to pull over. ‘They were shelling the highway just 15 minutes ago.’ In the distance, there’s the unmistakable thunder of artillery and smoke rising from the side of the mountains. Beyond them is the border with Azerbaijan from where, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a massive barrage was unleashed on towns and cities across Armenia. The offensive is the most dramatic escalation since the two former Soviet republics fought a brutal and bloody war two years ago, leaving more than 5,000 dead on both sides.

Vladimir Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of the Ukraine war was supposed to project power. Instead the Russian president appears to have been left red-faced at a summit in Iran this week after his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, left him waiting in front of the TV cameras. For almost a minute, the man who started Europe’s bloodiest conflict in decades didn’t know where to look as he waited, shifting awkwardly on his feet and pressing his tongue into his cheek, with only the click of camera shutters cutting through the excruciating silence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

‘Nato is surrounding Turkey,’ reads a banner flying in Istanbul’s Kadiköy district, on the Eastern side of the water that divides Europe from Asia. ‘Let’s get out of it.’ The sign, featuring American flags scattered across Europe and the Middle East, from Greece to Syria, has appeared across the country’s second city in the run-up to next year’s presidential and parliamentary votes. Paid for and promoted by the Patriotic party, a fringe left-wing nationalist group founded by several former Turkish army generals, it looks more like Russian propaganda than election literature, even recognising the independence of Abkhazia, a Moscow-backed breakaway region of Georgia.

Belfast, Northern Ireland Phillip Brett was just nine years old the night a neighbour called to say his brother, Gavin, had been shot. Their father raced through the streets of their Belfast estate, arriving just in time to cradle his eldest son as he died. The teenager had been celebrating a friend’s birthday at the local Gaelic football club when he was gunned down by a loyalist gang looking for a Catholic to kill. But they got it wrong – Gavin had been raised Protestant, their parents having married across the sectarian lines that once divided Northern Ireland, with friends from all sides of the mixed community they lived in.