18 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Russian President Vladimir Putin will almost certainly not be in power three years from now. The war he foolishly began in Ukraine has fatally undermined his political credibility among the Russian elite (and among a large though mostly silent part of the population). One way or another, he will …
16 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer It’s easy to imagine Vladimir Putin coming into the shop marked ‘Sweden’, breaking some fine china accidentally on purpose, and growling: ‘Nice little shop you’ve got here. It would be a pity if something happened to it.’ But Sweden is not a pottery shop, Putin is not a Mafia …
4 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer We were talking recently about how clever the Ukrainians had been to call the invading Russian troops ‘Orcs’ even before all the atrocities in the Russian-occupied towns around Kyiv came to light. Then Tina said: “If Putin’s troops are Orcs, then he must be Sauron.” You can guess what …
27 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Two months ago, when Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, every message from Washington or NATO about the invasion included a prominent passage saying what the western alliance would not do. It would not send NATO troops to help Ukraine. It would give Ukraine some ‘defensive’ weapons but no …
20 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Last Sunday Vladimir Soloviev, the anchor of Russia’s most popular current affairs show, ‘Sunday Evening’, was delivering his usual ‘all is going splendidly’ take on the war in Ukraine when he suddenly went off-piste. The United Kingdom, he suggested, is planning to use nuclear weapons against the Russian forces …
17 April 2022 By Gwynne Dyer It’s generally bad form to quote another journalist, but Stewart Lee’s day job is stand-up comedian, so we can make an exception just this once. Writing in The Observer on Sunday, Lee offered a summary of Britain’s Conservative government as its twelve-year reign stumbles towards its close. The Conservative …
13 April 2022 Ukraine: The Second Russian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer Ukraine wants more offensive weapons including modern tanks, self-propelled artillery and combat aircraft from NATO countries for its war with the Russian invaders, but it won’t be getting them from the United States in the latest tranche of American military aid. There is a …
30 March 2022 Do the Russians Have War in Their Blood? By Gwynne Dyer The geopolitical views of my grandmother, Florence O’Driscoll, could have been summed up in seven words: ‘The Germans Have War in their Blood’. Even as a child I suspected that the world must be more complicated than that, but I never …
28 March 2022 Hungary: Fooled Again? By Gwynne Dyer Russian President Vladimir Putin may not be able to save himself, but he may already have saved another despot, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. There’s an election in Hungary next Sunday, and it looks like Orbán may actually win it. A month ago he was trailing …
23 March 2022 Ukraine: What Next? By Gwynne Dyer Russian troops are stalled for the third week outside most of the major cities of eastern and central Ukraine, but they have failed to surround and cut off any of them except Mariupol, the big port on the Black Sea that has become the Ukrainian ‘Stalingrad’. …