19 December 2021 Humouring Putin By Gwynne Dyer The geopolitical question of the moment is: how important is it to humour Russian leader Vladimir Putin? The answer is: not very. Throw him a fish or two, because he’s running a bluff and you don’t want to humiliate him, but there’s no need to placate him …
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” …
Five years ago somebody posted photographs on the internet showing a man who looked a lot like Vladimir Putin in photographs from 1920 and 1941. In both shots he was in military uniform, defending the interests of the Russian people then as he still does today. But how can this be? He wasn’t even born …
After Monday’s first encounter between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Paris, there were the inevitable accusations that Putin had taken the inexperienced Zelenskiy to the cleaners. After all, what chance did an ex-television comedian have against a wily former intelligence officer? Wrong question. It’s not about how clever the players …
“No promises, so no disappointments,” said Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky during the election campaign that made him the president last May. It was a daring, even cynical thing for a politician to say, but then he’s not a politician. Zelensky is a television comedian who really doesn’t have much in the way of policies yet – …
Ukraine has a new president, and he’s a comedian! Oh, wait a minute, that’s not such a big deal. Guatemala was the first country to elect a comedian as president: Jimmy Morales, back in 2015. Although Morales turned sort of serious once he took office: he’s a right-wing nationalist who supports the death penalty and …
Unlike comedian Alec Baldwin, who is famous for his impersonation of President Trump on Saturday Night Live, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is famous for playing the anti-president, an accidental hero who sweeps into the presidency of Ukraine and cleans up all the corruption. He used to play it for laughs, and now he’s playing it for …
6 January 2019 If you live long enough, almost anything is possible. It is now possible, for example, to hear the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, describe a former KGB agent and avowed atheist as a “miracle of God”. The miracle in question, Vladimir Putin, made his career in the Soviet secret …
The Russian-Ukrainian naval clash in the Black Sea is not going to end up in a world war. Ukraine would love to be part of NATO, but the existing members won’t let it join. Why? Precisely because that might drag them into a war with Russia. Russia doesn’t have any real military alliances either. Various …
Four years into a stalemated war, it takes something very big or very bizarre to get Ukraine back into the headlines. Even the news in April that the United States has started delivering lethal weapons (Javelin anti-tank missiles) to Ukraine didn’t do the trick, but the non-assassination of Arkady Babchenko last week did just fine. …