Nikolai Patrushev, the man dripping poison into Putin’s ear
If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who scares me the most, it…
Dmitry Medvedev and the weakness of Putin’s Kremlin
It’s a long time since Dmitry Medvedev was last considered a potential liberal hope for Russia. Most recently, after all,…
After his trip to Moscow, Xi Jinping still holds all the cards
After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand…
Wagner’s founder Evgeny Prigozhin is in a fight for his life
As Wagner mercenaries are being deliberately expended by the regular military as cannon-fodder in the battle for Bakhmut, their backer,…
How Russia is dodging sanctions
They might not be the quick knock-out blow their champions misleadingly claimed they’d be, but sanctions are having a serious…
Did the Ukrainians bomb the Nord Stream pipeline?
There’s an uncomfortable fact about covert operations in the information-saturated modern world. Like personal WhatsApp messages, they always leak –…
Ukraine’s drone war on Russia could backfire
Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential…
Why is Zelensky playing deadly mind games with Putin?
Many have weighed in on how Vladimir Putin’s reign will end. Now it is the turn of Volodymyr Zelensky, asserting…
Has Prigozhin pushed his luck too far with Putin?
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, is hardly a man to keep a low profile. He is…
Macron is right about the danger of Russia after Putin
France’s President Macron has raised hackles time and again with his interventions on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. For all his…
Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’
Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly…
Tanks for nothing
Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, has said that if he is to launch a successful counter-offensive, the West will…
Tank warfare: why the West is worried about arming Ukraine
Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, has said that if he is to launch a successful counter-offensive, the West will…
Putin is using fear to mobilise the masses
There was nothing subtle about it, as cranes lifted truck-based Pantsir-S1 air defence systems onto the roofs of the sprawling…
Will Putin’s latest general escalate the war in Ukraine?
So, one granite-faced general has been replaced by another. The announcement that, after just three months in post, General Sergei…
Power play
The age of AI diplomacy
Putin’s hollow dream of a mightier army
Who needs Santa when you have Vladimir Putin? Just in time for Christmas, the Russian president has promised his military…
Putin’s hawks are turning on each other
Feathers are flying and divisions are widening among Russia’s hawks as the degree to which the invasion of Ukraine was…
Ilya Yashin is in jail, but his words will sting Vladimir Putin
Fewer than one in 100 defendants in the Russian court system get acquitted. Even in the best of circumstances then,…
The Viktor Bout hostage swap is a victory for the Kremlin
After a quiet swap in the United Arab Emirates, the American basketball star Brittney Griner is out of a Russian…
Putin’s peace talks bluff has been called out
It is almost as if Vladimir Putin doesn’t mean it when he claims to be open to peace talks with…
Is Putin really to blame for this Belarusian minister’s sudden death?
Saturday’s news of the sudden death of Belarusian foreign minister Vladimir Makei, as well as the rather terse nature of…
Why Ukraine raided a Kyiv monastery
Perhaps it should not have been a surprise to see the camouflaged special forces of the SBU, the Ukrainian Security…
A worrying lesson from the Polish missile tragedy
When what seems to have been a Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile accidentally hit the village of Przewodów in Poland,…
The decline and fall of Sergei Lavrov
First came the claims that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was admitted to hospital in Bali on arriving for the…
