Ukraine

Just days after Ukraine’s President Zelensky declared his intention to start EU membership negotiations by the end of this year, the bloc’s former president Jean-Claude Juncker has poured cold water on the idea, branding it a country ‘corrupt at all levels of society’. In an interview with the South German regional Augsburger Allgemeine paper, Juncker accused current EU officials of making ‘false promises’ to Ukraine and ‘telling Ukrainians that they can become members immediately’.  The Ukrainian government admitted that only two of the seven EU membership conditions had been met ‘Despite its efforts, it is not eligible to join and needs massive internal reform,’ he said. ‘We have had bad experiences with

I first came to Russia as a travelling English literature-lecturer in the late 1990s. This wasn’t a job given to me but one I’d devised myself, sending off snail-mail begging letters to different university departments all over the Former Soviet Union – Barnaul to Minsk – outlining my services and occasionally, weeks or months later, being taken up on the offer. With a rucksack full of books, I’d catch a train – sometimes a days-long journey – to the next destination, where I’d be given a list of students to teach, a guided tour of the city and three weeks in a student hall of residence. Here cockroaches could outnumber

Poland has said it will no longer supply Ukraine with weapons, that it may cut aid to refugees and that it could restrict the import of a larger number of agricultural products. Polish president Andrzej Duda has compared Ukraine to a ‘drowning man’ capable of dragging his country ‘into the depths’. A month ahead of the Polish elections, it’s worrying language for Ukraine from a country that has, for so much of the war, been one of its staunchest allies. Ukraine needs Poland more than Poland needs Ukraine. Since the onset of the full-scale war, Poland has spent more than £2.5 billion to support Ukraine with weapons and financial aid, often prioritising

A year before Russia launched its brutal campaign to subjugate Ukraine, I visited a wintry Moscow. It was striking to see how far the capital had moved away from celebrating the cult of the old communist leadership that had dominated the then Soviet Union with an iron fist. The tomb of Lenin by the Kremlin was, of course, still doing good business with tourists. But the bust of Joseph Stalin, standing on guard outside his old boss’s gaudy vault, resembled a forgotten relic. The sorry state of these statues was no accident. After the failed coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991, First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s power drained away. As

Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Vladimir Putin accused Britain of being behind attempted nuclear terrorism, rhetorically asking whether the government was ‘trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations’ or whether the British Prime Minister even ‘knows what his secret services are doing in Ukraine?’ Needless to say, no evidence is forthcoming to support Putin’s claims that a number of Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ had been intercepted and detailed by Russia’s Federal Security Service on their way to break the power lines at an unnamed Russian nuclear

Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness. What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See John Paul was born and baptised in Poland before the second world war and rose to become Archbishop of Kraków before being elected to the Papacy. He had spent decades under communist rule and experienced the brutal ways of Soviet imperialism. He knew his Russian history.

Well it took two months, but the inevitable happened this week: Yevgeny Prigozhin, one time chef and later war-criminal extraordinaire for Vladimir Putin, was publicly executed in the most extraordinary way. While flying on his private jet with the upper echelon of his Wagner Group, he was shot down by a Russian military operated anti-air system. For a short period there were the weird but expected rumours circulating, asking if Prigozhin was faking his own death, or asking if the Ukrainians did it. The answer seems clear, however. Putin had Prigozhin executed for his armed mutiny two months ago. Always go with the simplest explanation. Not pressing Russia fully because

In the early hours of this morning, Ukraine launched 42 unmanned drones at the annexed territory of Crimea, the Russian ministry of defence has claimed. Announcing on Telegram that the attack had been ‘thwarted’, the Russian MoD said nine of the drones had been shot down, while the remaining 33 were electronically jammed and downed ‘before they reached their target’. If the number of drones Russia claims to have been attacked with is correct, this would amount to the largest Ukrainian air attack on Russian-held territory since the beginning of the war. This could amount to the largest Ukrainian air attack on Russian-held territory since the beginning of the war. Mikhail

President Zelensky has announced that he is dismissing the heads of all Ukraine’s regional military recruitment offices and replacing them with veterans who had served on the front line. He used a video address to say that a state investigation had turned up widespread corruption, including bribe-taking and help for draft dodgers to flee abroad.  As a war leader, he has, in effect, autocratic power, beyond anything he would enjoy as an elected leader in peacetime – and he has shown himself willing to use it Sounding a notably tough note, Zelensky said: ‘This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and

As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Just once, before now, I have plunged into the heart of a war, when, with a photographer friend, we persuaded a reluctant cab driver to take us from Beirut to south Lebanon during one of the Israeli invasions. As soon as we arrived, in a small mountain town called Machgharah, we were seized

In the last few weeks, words like ‘slow’, ‘grinding’ and even ‘failure’ have been used to describe the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that Ukrainian forces have not broken through Russian lines and indeed have only liberated a relatively small amount of Ukraine’s occupied territory after seven weeks (though to be fair, they’ve taken about as much as the Russians were able to seize in seven months), has led some to cast doubt on the course of the counteroffensive. It has been argued that the Ukrainians launched their main offensive in early June, failed, and since then have struggled mightily to deal with Russian defences, particularly dense Russian minefields.  Actually,