28 June 2023 Russia: Aftermath of Folly By Gwynne Dyer “I said to Putin: ‘We could waste [Prigozhin], no problem. If not on the first try, then on the second.’ I told him: ‘Don’t do this’,” said Aleksandr Lukashenko, long-ruling dictator of Belarus, clearly delighted at having upstaged his arrogant Russian counterpart. The worm had …
25 June 2023 Russia: What Just Happened? By Gwynne Dyer What just happened? Up until late afternoon Moscow time on Saturday, Russia was in a state of acute crisis, with Yevgeny Prigozhin pulling his ‘Wagner’ army of mercenary soldiers out of Ukraine and sending some of them racing up the highway towards Moscow instead. Their …
24 Jun 2023 Prigozhin’s Revolt By Gwynne Dyer The Don is a much bigger river than the Rubicon, but Yevgeny Prigozhin and his army crossed it anyway on Friday. Not being classically educated, the boss of the Wagner mercenary army probably did not mutter ‘Alea iacta est’ to himself – ‘The die is cast’ – …
11 June 2023 Ukraine: The Counter-offensive Begins By Gwynne Dyer The furious speculation on whether the Ukrainian counter-offensive will succeed has been ongoing for several months already, so the first thing I must tell you is that I don’t know. Nobody knows, not even the Ukrainians. They know that the big prize is a southward …
24 May 2023 Russia: The Least Bad Option? By Gwynne Dyer Let us suppose that the current Russian regime collapses, with or without a Ukrainian military victory to give it a final shove. Who would be the least objectionable candidate to take over in Moscow? What we should look for, in this exercise, is not …
9 October 2022 Ukraine: The Focus Shifts By Gwynne Dyer Moscow is not blaming the latest Ukrainian attack on careless Russian smokers, as it previously tried to do with suspicious explosions on airbases in Russian-occupied Crimea and on a Russian warship in the Black Sea. The blast that brought down sections of the Kerch Bridge …
11 September 2022 Ukraine: The Risk of a Ceasefire Dwindles By Gwynne Dyer Two months ago John Bolton wrote an article in ‘The Hill’, the leading politics website in Washington, warning against a Russian ‘October Surprise’. He suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin might suddenly stop military operations and declare a ceasefire – which would …
24 August 2022 Might Russia Use Its ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Weapons? By Gwynne Dyer On 25 August the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, announced that the country’s combat aircraft have been ‘upgraded’ by the Russians to carry nuclear weapons, and Belarusian pilots are being trained to deliver them. It got a single paragraph, or no notice …
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6 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Four years after the Soviet Army fought its way into Berlin in 1945, Moscow built a huge memorial in Treptower Park to the 80,000 Russian and other Soviet soldiers who died taking the city. (5,000 of them are actually buried in the park.) And Berliners instantly took to calling …
30 March 2022 Do the Russians Have War in Their Blood? By Gwynne Dyer The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence O’Driscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: ‘The Germans Have War in their Blood’. Even as a child I suspected that the world must be more complicated than that, but I never …