Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about… Read More ALFRED MCCOY: China Is Digging Its Own Grave (and Ours as Well)
Vladimir Putin anticipated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by writing screeds about the essential one-ness of Russians and Ukrainians, united as they were, in his view, by a common origin in the medieval principalities of Kievan Rus. Putin insisted that Ukraine had no real tradition of independent statehood and blamed Lenin and the Bolsheviks for inventing… Read More Mukul Kesavan: Ukraine – a conflict between two transnational entities / Vladimir Sorokin: Putin sits atop a crumbling pyramid of power
History shows that it’s much easier to start a war than to end one. That’s certainly true of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. And it might turn out to be the same for President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. There’s an old axiom that military plans never survive the first… Read More Jonathan Beale – Ukraine: Is Russia's invasion going as expected?
This afternoon, when I walk down to the opticians, I will pass some large, unconvincingly spontaneous graffiti that recently appeared on someone else’s wall. It reads: “There is no Russian interference in elections.” (Kids, eh?) Next, I will pass two vast houses that I know to be owned by oligarchs – one of whom is Roman… Read More Marina Hyde: Putin’s tale of two cities–London for his oligarchs, Kyiv for his bombs / Oliver Bullough: Butler to the World
NB: The article below is provocative. Readers may consider the implications. But two points need to be made about the author’s last few sentences. One, the phrase ‘Putin’s imperial nostalgia’ is misleading unless post-USSR geo-politics are examined carefully. Two, the world’s ‘liberal democracies’ don’t seem very committed to liberal democracy these days, and neither (to… Read More Ukraine: India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion / Prominent Russians join protests against Ukraine war amid 1,800 arrests
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business,… Read More Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold
Concerns have been raised that unregulated pro-Moscow lobbyists at the heart of Westminster are using their links to Tory MPs to gain influence and respectability. A group formerly known as the Conservative Friends of Russia (CRF) is advertising its first in-person conference for two years next week, despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday. Now called the Westminster… Read More Tory lobbying row over unregulated ‘Westminster Russia Forum’ / Donald Trump can't stop praising Vladimir Putin
Early in the morning of 17 December 2004, I woke up to a phone call from a Western diplomat. She asked me what I had heard about Deyda Hydara, a journalist and a mutual friend. “No, I am just back from an overseas trip and I have not yet spoken to him,” I replied. “Anything the… Read More How I remember my friend, the brave journalist Deyda Hydara
Like most things in Mahatma Gandhi’s life, his ashram in the Indian city of Ahmedabad was simple and austere. Yet between 1917 and 1930, these modest white bungalows, set on the bank of the Sabarmati river in the state of Gujarat, were the beating heart of Gandhi’s non-violent freedom struggle against British rule and his… Read More ‘A flashy theme park’: outcry over Modi’s plans for the Gandhi ashram
With his incursion into Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin has broken international law and destroyed the best negotiating track, the Minsk agreement. That is clear. What is also clear is why he did it. An increasing number of politicians and media analysts claim Putin may be mentally unstable, or that he is isolated in a… Read More Jonathan Steele: Understanding Putin’s narrative about Ukraine is the master key to this crisis / Oliver Stone: American Exceptionalism Is on Display in Ukraine / Mariia Shynkarenko: Not about NATO
After the truth-shower 