Russia: Home of the Potemkin Nuclear Weapons? By Gwynne Dyer There’s a lot of performative militarism in Russia at the moment, which is unsurprising given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still stalled halfway through the fifth year of the war. The style is more Mussolini than Hitler, however, and the effect is more […]
‘When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp.’ (Not very old folk saying) , Eighty years ago we set out to drain the swamp, because we feared that otherwise we would all be pulled under. At least fifty million people were dead
Russia’s “big concession is they stop fighting, and they don’t take any more land,” US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, when asked what Russia was conceding in the thinly disguised surrender document he was trying to shove down Ukrainian throats. He truly is a 19th-century man at heart. Those were the good old days,
The Goal is to Destroy the International Rule of Law Read More »
13 February 2025 Ceasefire in Ukraine? By Gwynne Dyer It’s taking Donald Trump a little longer than the 24 hours he said he would need to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, but his 90-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday comes as no surprise. Neither does the fact that no Ukrainian was on the
14 January 2025 Vintage Tonnage By Gwynne Dyer The name is brilliant: ‘vintage tonnage’. It evokes 17th-century pirate vessels flying the skull-and-crossbones, 18th-century ships-of-the-line bristling with cannons, or even 19th-century clipper ships in full sail bringing tea to England and America. The images are always romantic and often beautiful . Whereas the reality is just
3 April 2024 Russia: The Really Dangerous Ones Are Sane By Gwynne Dyer There are plenty of crazies in Russian politics who make bizarre claims about their country’s victim status (“the evil West made us do it”) and issue blood-curdling but implausible threats about using nuclear weapons on their enemies. But the really dangerous ones
18 February 2024 Navalny Murder By Gwynne Dyer Vladimir Putin’s regime had been assassinating Chechen warlords, defectors from the Russian intelligence services and sundry wayward oligarchs for years, but its first political murder was the hit on high-profile journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her Moscow apartment in 2006 — and so it
23 July 2023 Why Won’t Putin Go To South Africa? By Gwynne Dyer Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he won’t be going to South Africa for next month’s summit of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), although all the other leaders will be there. In fact another couple of
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