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 …
8 March 2023 ‘General Winter’ Missed the Bus By Gwynne Dyer “The cold is coming soon,” gloated former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last June. He predicted that the citizens of the European Union, deprived of the Russian gas that normally supplied about 40% of their energy, would be freezing in their homes when ‘General Winter’ …
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 …
1 January 2023 The Next Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer It’s still unseasonably warm in Ukraine, but there’s a chance of a hard freeze next weekend. By mid-month it should be reliably below zero almost all the time: the ground will be hard and the smaller streams will have frozen over. Expect the next Ukrainian …
13 November 2022 Ukraine: Where Next? By Gwynne Dyer The recovery of the city of Kherson is the third big victory for the Ukrainian armed forces in three months: first, the reconquest of all of Kharkiv Oblast (province) in September, then the partial destruction of the Kerch Strait bridge linking Crimea with Russia in October, …
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 …
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 …