8 December 2021 Ukraine: No Invasion By Gwynne Dyer I must admit that I googled the plot of the 1997 film ‘Wag the Dog’ before starting to write this. It’s a dark comedy about a US president facing a sex scandal whose staff invent a completely fictional war in the Balkans to draw the media’s …
28 November 2021 “There is a threat today that there will be war tomorrow. We are entirely prepared for an escalation,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday. His head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, warned that around 90,000 Russian troops are now deployed in the vicinity of Ukraine, and could invade “from several directions” …
25 May 2021 Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism.” Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, agreed, warning that “this outlandish act by Lukashenko will have serious implications.” And US Secretary …
3 March 2021 By now Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will have reached Correctional Facility No. 2 (IK-2), where he will be spending the next two-and-a-half years in one of the harshest penal colonies in the Russian prison system. At least it’s in Pokrov in the Vladimir district, 100 km east of Moscow, and not …
28 June 2020 “The very existence of an opportunity for the current president (to be re-elected in 2024), given his major gravitas, would be a stabilising factor for our society,”, said Valentina Tereshkova, former Soviet cosmonaut, first woman in space, and now, at 83, a member of the Russian Duma (parliament). She was talking about …
Turkey has not won a war against Russia since the 1600s, although there have been at least half a dozen of them. You would think that even the most aggressive Turkish leader would try to avoid another one, but you would be wrong. President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey for the past seventeen …
After Monday’s first encounter between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Paris, there were the inevitable accusations that Putin had taken the inexperienced Zelenskiy to the cleaners. After all, what chance did an ex-television comedian have against a wily former intelligence officer? Wrong question. It’s not about how clever the players …
6 January 2019 If you live long enough, almost anything is possible. It is now possible, for example, to hear the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, describe a former KGB agent and avowed atheist as a “miracle of God”. The miracle in question, Vladimir Putin, made his career in the Soviet secret …
Salisbury is a nice old English town with a fine cathedral, only an hour and a half from London by train, but it doesn’t see many Russian tourists in wintertime. It’s not as cold as Moscow, but Russians tend to prefer Mediterranean destinations for holiday breaks in early March – unless, of course, they are …
Four years into a stalemated war, it takes something very big or very bizarre to get Ukraine back into the headlines. Even the news in April that the United States has started delivering lethal weapons (Javelin anti-tank missiles) to Ukraine didn’t do the trick, but the non-assassination of Arkady Babchenko last week did just fine. …