Ukraine: Democracy and Corruption By Gwynne Dyer “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” said Mihaylo Fedorov, until recently Ukraine’s defence minister. “We must find a legal, safe and realistic mechanism which will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war.” Seven years after the last election, […]
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
17 June 2026 Assassination as State Policy By Gwynne Dyer Britain’s soon-to-be-ex prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is so harmless and ineffectual that it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to kill him, but somebody in Russia apparently did. On Monday two foreign construction workers were found guilty in London’s Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court) of
A Politico opinion poll conducted in the four biggest NATO countries in February revealed almost identical popular expectations about the likelihood of a global war in the next five years. In every one – the US, the UK, France and Germany – they think it is quite likely. Forty-six percent of Americans think that, and
The US president, Donald J. (for Jesus) Trump, is a showman, and he knows how to keep the world’s attention by offering journalists shockingly good copy. He threatens a genocide: “A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”. He writes “Fuckin’ Strait” on a presidential post. (Note the tastefully dropped ‘g’ in Fuckin’ to show that he’s
Donald Trump is not just Binyamin Netanyahu’s glove puppet, but it is remarkable how much influence the Israeli prime minister has over the American president. If you are seeking a reason why Trump felt the need to attack Iran again only nine months after he declared that he had eliminated any nuclear threat from that
Vladimir Putin is a reckless man who invades countries and has his opponents killed, but he understands that some things are too dangerous to meddle with. That’s why he proposed last September that the United States and Russia should extend their ‘New START’ nuclear arms control treaty for one more year, to gain more negotiating
After two weeks of silence about the mass slaughter of Iranian protesters on 8 and 9 January, the partial restoration of internet services in the country is allowing the first plausible estimates of how bad it was to reach the international media. It was very bad. Even the lowest estimate, issued by the regime itself,
It’s too early to be sure, but it seems likely that we have just seen ‘Peak Trump’. Last week Donald Trump arrived at the Davos conference radiating power and menace. Fresh from his attack on Venezuela, he was going to invade and annex Greenland. If his European allies in the NATO alliance tried to protect
Last week Israel was the first country in the world to establish diplomatic relations with Somaliland. Not Somalia, a wreck of a country on the East African coast that has been mired in civil war for the past thirty-five years, but Somaliland, a different country just north of there that has been peaceful, relatively prosperous