Owen Matthews

Some Turks voted for the devil they knew. More voted for the hero they knew. Either way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in the most fiercely contested election of his career last Sunday was a victory for fear over hope, for security over uncertainty, and of the past over the future.  Erdogan has, over the last five years, seen the economic miracle he helped create collapse into runway inflation, cronyism and gross economic mismanagement. Yet despite a litany of failures that would have demolished the career of any western European politician, it’s easy to see why over 52 per cent of Turks voted to stick with Erdogan. His opponent, the avuncular economist Kemal Kilicdaroglu, may have been the united opposition’s candidate.

Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been missing from public view since being taken ill during a Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May. If Belarus’s dictator dies or is incapacitated Vladimir Putin – his neighbour, patron and only regional ally – will have a vast, even existential, problem on his hands. It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years – echoed with chants of ‘Erdogan, resign’ and ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’. The same weekend, the home crowd of another major Istanbul club, Besiktas, had filled the pitch with a heartbreaking, minutes-long hail of soft toys thrown from the stands in memory of the thousands of children who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake of 6 February.

On the face of it, the protests that rocked the Georgian capital of Tbilisi last week looked a lot like recent regional history repeating itself. Just as in Georgia’s own Rose revolution in 2003 or Ukraine’s Orange and Maidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, vast crowds waving EU flags took to the streets to demand democratic change, to be met with police baton charges, tear gas and water cannons.  The cause of last week’s protests was a law passed by Georgia’s parliament requiring non-governmental organisations that received funding from abroad to register as ‘foreign agents’ – a requirement that looked uncomfortably similar to a longstanding Russian law which has been used by the Kremlin to crack down on civil society organisations and political opposition.

In early October 2021 President Joe Biden, the CIA director William Burns and other top members of the US’s national security team gathered in the Oval Office to hear a disturbing briefing from US military chief General Mark Milley. ‘Extraordinary detailed’ intelligence gathered by western spy agencies suggested that Vladimir Putin might be planning to invade Ukraine. According to briefing notes that Milley shared with the Washington Post, the first and most fundamental problem facing Biden was how to ‘underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order’ against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability ‘without going to World War 3’. Milley offered four possible answers: ‘No. 1: Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the US military or Nato with Russia. No.

Boris Bondarev’s Twitter profile sums up his past, present and future in three short phrases: ‘Russian diplomat in exile. Stop the war. The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – a quote from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 denunciation of patriotic hypocrisy. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 42-year-old Bondarev quit his job as an arms control expert at Russia’s diplomatic mission to Geneva in protest. None of his colleagues in Geneva, or anywhere else, followed suit (at least not publicly). Does that make Bondarev the only Russian diplomat with a conscience? ‘It’s not about conscience,’ Bondarev tells me by Zoom from an undisclosed Swiss location where he now lives with his wife and cat. ‘It’s about courage.