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 …
9 February 2022 Ukraine: The Invasion Never Comes By Gwynne Dyer On 18 January US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “our assessment has been that (a Russian invasion of Ukraine) could happen any time between mid-January and mid-February.” On 28 January US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said that the United States …
16 Jan 22 Will Russia Play The ‘Cuban Card’? By Gwynne Dyer After a week of intense discussions about ‘security’ between Russia and the NATO countries, this is the week when the Western allies will send their written replies to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Various pundits, some of whom have actually been to Russia, warn …
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 …