23 August 2023 China: A Message from Russia By Gwynne Dyer The Ukrainians have been cheering themselves up recently by sending drones to hit targets in Moscow’s business district and the more exclusive western suburbs. (The Russians, who bomb Ukrainian cities and kill civilians almost every night, refer to this as ‘terrorism’.) On Monday evening …
10 July 2023 NATO Summit 2023 By Gwynne Dyer When NATO held its annual summit in Brussels two years ago, all 31 presidents and prime ministers of the alliance’s member states dutifully showed up, but their hearts weren’t really in it. France’s President Emmanuel Macron had publicly declared NATO “brain-dead” in 2019, and nobody could …
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 …
24 Jun 2023 Prigozhin’s Revolt By Gwynne Dyer The Don is a much bigger river than the Rubicon, but Yevgeny Prigozhin and his army crossed it anyway on Friday. Not being classically educated, the boss of the Wagner mercenary army probably did not mutter ‘Alea iacta est’ to himself – ‘The die is cast’ – …
11 June 2023 Ukraine: The Counter-offensive Begins By Gwynne Dyer The furious speculation on whether the Ukrainian counter-offensive will succeed has been ongoing for several months already, so the first thing I must tell you is that I don’t know. Nobody knows, not even the Ukrainians. They know that the big prize is a southward …
24 May 2023 Russia: The Least Bad Option? By Gwynne Dyer Let us suppose that the current Russian regime collapses, with or without a Ukrainian military victory to give it a final shove. Who would be the least objectionable candidate to take over in Moscow? What we should look for, in this exercise, is not …
25 April 2023 Ukraine: What the Global South Thinks By Gwynne Dyer There is a deep and growing rift between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ about the need to resist and defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is because it is really a war in defence of sovereignty, which ought to be something every …
4 April 2023 Before the Great Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer Monday’s stunt, where Yevgeny Prigozhin held a Russian flag in his hands and declared that his ‘Wagner’ mercenary soldiers have finally conquered the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, probably marks the end of Russian winter offensive. It was just a charade, of course. The footage …
19 March 2023 ICC Arrest Warrant on Putin By Gwynne Dyer Although the arrest warrant issued on Russian President Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court last week was welcome, there was a certain puzzlement about the actual crime he is being charged with. This is a man who launched an unprovoked invasion of a …