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 …
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 …