20 March 2022 Ukraine: Lessons for Taiwan, Lessons for China By Gwynne Dyer Almost a month in, China is still being extremely coy about its attitude towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The regime is acutely aware that there are many parallels between the Russian-Ukrainian relationship and the Chinese-Taiwanese one, and that the Russian attempt …
16 March 2022 A Complicated Deal: Iran, Nukes, Israel, Oil, Russia By Gwynne Dyer As with most re-marriages between the same partners, the participants are not exactly starry-eyed. They have just figured out that the old deal was better than no deal at all. The news that the obscurely named Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action …
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14 March 2022 Ukraine’s Nuclear Mistake By Gwynne Dyer Would Vladimir Putin’s Russia have invaded Ukraine three weeks ago if it had 1,900 nuclear warheads on 176 ICBMs and 2,600 tactical nuclear weapons? Of course not. He wouldn’t have invaded if Ukraine had even one nuclear missile capable of reaching Moscow. When the Soviet Union …
27 February 2022 The Real World Order By Gwynne Dyer Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last Thursday many people have expressed their shock and horror at Vladimir Putin’s violation of international law and the death of the ‘rules-based world order’, but there’s actually no reason for surprise. Those people just never understood what the …
14 February 2022 World War 2.1? By Gwynne Dyer Columnists are not supposed to write about the same subject twice in a row, and only last week I wrote my umpteenth piece saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not going to invade Ukraine. But US President Joe Biden just gave us a hard date …
9 February 2022 Ukraine: The Invasion Never Comes By Gwynne Dyer On 18 January US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that “our assessment has been that (a Russian invasion of Ukraine) could happen any time between mid-January and mid-February.” On 28 January US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said that the United States …
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 …