20 February 2023 Ukraine War and International Law By Gwynne Dyer Just before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Friday, 24 February), France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted to see Russia “defeated, but not crushed.” That is a very fine distinction, but an important one. Macron is seen as ‘soft’ …
12 February 2023 The Earthquakes and the Blame By Gwynne Dyer If you are trying to dodge the blame for a great disaster, the best policy is to say that it was God’s will. So Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, visiting one of the 6,000 buildings that collapsed on their sleeping residents in eastern Turkey …
29 January 2023 A Bad Case of Cultural Lag By Gwynne Dyer “I wish you a world without Babiš. Forget about Babiš. Try to live without Babiš,” said former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš on Saturday after his campaign for the presidency failed to convince the voters. “Stop waking up in the morning with hatred …
25 January 2023 Ukraine: Will Western Tanks Bring Victory? By Gwynne Dyer On Tuesday they reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. How did they know that Germany would agree to give Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine on Wednesday? Now we’re all doomed! No time to run! Ninety seconds is barely time to …
26 September 2022 Is Putin Bluffing About Nukes? By Gwynne Dyer Vladimir Putin’s desperation was plain in the emergency measures he declared last week: immediate mobilisation of at least 300,000 more troops, the sudden decision to use fake referendums to turn all the occupied parts of Ukraine into Russian territory, and more explicit threats than …
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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14 August 2022 Ukraine War: Mother May I? By Gwynne Dyer “This obviously does not happen because of a thrown butt,” said British Defense Minister Ben Wallace. But the Russian Ministry of Defence insisted that the explosions that destroyed at least eight warplanes at Saki Air Base in Russian-occupied Crimea on 9 August were due …
29 June 2022 Sweden and Finland in NATO By Gwynne Dyer Another fifteen million people joined the NATO alliance on Tuesday. Finland and Sweden, formerly neutral countries but near to Russia, gave in to Turkish blackmail, and that cleared the way for them to join the western alliance. (Every NATO member, including Turkey, has a …
16 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer It’s easy to imagine Vladimir Putin coming into the shop marked ‘Sweden’, breaking some fine china accidentally on purpose, and growling: ‘Nice little shop you’ve got here. It would be a pity if something happened to it.’ But Sweden is not a pottery shop, Putin is not a Mafia …
27 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Two months ago, when Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, every message from Washington or NATO about the invasion included a prominent passage saying what the western alliance would not do. It would not send NATO troops to help Ukraine. It would give Ukraine some ‘defensive’ weapons but no …