Owen Matthews

Pope Francis has made a statement on the Ukraine war that has sparked fury among many of Kyiv’s supporters. Asked by a Swiss television interviewer whether the Ukraine should ‘raise the white flag’ Francis replied, ‘When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate,' adding that he believed that ‘the stronger one is the one who… thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag.’  Blessed are the peacemakers. But Pope Francis was addressing the wrong side After a storm of criticism, the Vatican press service put out a clarification.

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many dared to hope that defeat on the battlefield would force Russians to finally accept that they are no longer a great global superpower and confront their imperialist assumptions.

I knew and greatly respected Alexei Navalny. The news (as yet not independently confirmed) that he died in prison came today as a physical blow – sickening, but at the same time tragically unsurprising. Navalny’s passion, his intelligence and his refusal to make compromises with the Putin regime made him a colossus in a world of opposition politicians filled with moral pygmies. The Soviet Communist party once claimed to be the ‘intelligence, the honour and the conscience’ of the Russian people. But that title properly belongs to Navalny, whose life and career were living proof that Putin had not yet entirely extinguished Russians’ spirit of freedom and defiance, even in the face of terrifying odds.

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new ‘back-channel diplomacy’ to reach out to senior officials in the Joe Biden administration. Putin’s message: to signal that he could accept a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along current lines. Reactions to the story have been furious. Some Ukrainians, sheltering from Russia’s biggest-ever missile and drone assaults of the war over Christmas, saw it as evidence of a nefarious Washington insider plot to sell Kyiv down the river. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Putin’s initiative as disingenuous, saying that he saw ‘no sign’ Russia genuinely wanted to negotiate. ‘We just see brazen willingness to kill,’ he told the New York Times.

Yevgeny Prigozhin died, as Macbeth almost said, as one that had been studied in his death. In the last three minutes of its existence, Prigozhin’s private Embraer Legacy jet climbed fast towards the sun, reaching the giddying height of 8,800 meters before parabolically returning to earth, spinning slowly in flames before hitting the ground at a speed of 768 feet per second. In what must be the least surprising story of the year, Prigozhin’s rise from violent criminal to billionaire caterer to mercenary leader to mutineer who dared mount an armed challenge to Vladimir Putin ended in a fatal, flaming fall.  Both Russian state media and the Wagner Group’s Telegram channels have proclaimed Prigozhin dead, even though there is no independent verification.