Russia
I can feel my heart hardening as the war goes on
Palm Sunday in Perugia. Umbrians were scuttling around with twigs and leaves, but I was in town to celebrate another…
The rise and fall of the Tsarist legal system
St. Petersburg University in Russia is (desperately?) inviting scholars worldwide to a conference in September celebrating Mikhail Speransky. It was…
Why so many African leaders support Putin
Why so many African leaders support Putin
‘Putin still has a lot left to lose’: Niall Ferguson and David Petraeus in conversation
Niall Ferguson and David Petraeus on Russia’s mistakes, Xi’s plans and the lessons of Iraq
How Putin weaponised the Russian Orthodox church
How Putin weaponised the Russian Orthodox church
Cross to bear: can Russia ever atone for Putin’s sins?
Can Russia ever atone for Putin’s sins?
The next phase of the Ukraine war will be bloody
The war in Ukraine is about to enter an even deadlier stage, one in which both Kyiv and Moscow will…
Russia’s dark path towards the death penalty
In Russia these days, the reintroduction of the death penalty has a grim inevitability about it. There has been a…
Is this the birth of a Nordic Nato?
In the past six weeks, Finland and Sweden’s security policies have changed more than they have over the past six…
Zelensky has snubbed Germany’s President
When Volodymyr Zelensky told the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier yesterday that he did not want to see him in Kyiv,…
Is Putin using chemical weapons in Ukraine?
In 1942, as Hitler’s forces swept through the Soviet Union, the Red Army went underground. Outside the city of Kerch…
Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine’s energy sector
We are seven weeks into the war and the level of destruction in Ukraine is mounting. Every single day we…
The Russian army is running out of options
So much had been written about the Russian armed forces’ modernisation and improvement over the last decade that that it…
Boris and Scholz parade the new Europe
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed Europe forever. That was the argument that Boris Johnson made on Friday when he…
Portrait of the week: Covid fines, cancelled flights and sunflower oil shortages
Home Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s business spokesman, said that the government should be preparing for energy rationing, but Grant Shapps, the…
Will put you in mind of Lost in Translation: Compartment No. 6 reviewed
Compartment No. 6 is set aboard a long train journey across Russia, a country we don’t hear much of these…
The Russians aren’t the first to rewrite history
Historians in Russia have a long and craven record, now going back centuries, of being economical with the truth about…
Europe’s last dictator: Lukashenko’s fate depends on Ukraine
The fate of Lukashenko depends on Ukraine
Putin’s war is a disaster for Russia
Strasbourg Europhobes will never have a better argument against European integration than the seat of the European parliament in…
Can Imran Khan cling on to power in Pakistan?
Can Imran Khan cling on to power in Pakistan?
Spies shouldn’t be political
Now that events in Ukraine are restoring a sense of proportion about the difference between aggressive autocracies and free countries,…
Russia ‘realists’ have very little to say about evil
‘Every way of a man is right in his own eyes’, the Book of Proverbs says: it makes us feel…
The view from Ukraine: world war three has already started
I saw the first Russian bombs land from my balcony in Chernivtsi. They hit a military depot 50 miles away…
Viktor Orbán is no friend of the West
Viktor Orbán‘s victory speech in Budapest on Sunday night took a curious turn. Speaking after a fourth landslide win, he…
Russia’s ‘denazification’ project is only just beginning
Truth, infamously, is the first casualty of war. But the truth, in modern Russia, was critically wounded before it got…
