World

‘We are living the end of an era of abundance,’ according to Emmanuel Macron, ‘the end of the abundance of products and technologies, the end of the abundance of land and materials, including water.’ It is hard to see how water has become less abundant, being the ultimate renewable resource, which evaporates before falling back to Earth as rain. Rewind a year and people in parts of Europe, you may remember, were complaining about a super-abundance of water – in the form of the Rhineland floods. But let’s leave that aside and assume that Macron’s remarks were more immediately prompted by a shortage of energy. France, in common with other

Japan is reversing its avowedly anti-nuclear stance, restarting idled plants and looking to develop a new generation of reactors, announced Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday. This major policy shift from the world’s third biggest economic power underlines both the seriousness of the global energy crisis and points to the most likely way ahead. This announcement would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which saw the plant flooded and led to three separate hydrogen explosions. Then prime minister Naoto ordered those living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to be evacuated as the Fukushima area was designated a contaminated wasteland. I well remember the

Addressing the vexed question of who is winning the war in Ukraine, six months on, is a task to challenge military strategists, geopolitical analysts – and semanticists, because so much depends on what ‘winning’ means. On one level, after all, one could suggest everyone is losing. That said, we cannot escape the fact that both Moscow and the West had essentially written Ukraine off at the start of the war. The conventional wisdom was that it would take perhaps a fortnight for Vladimir Putin’s much-vaunted war machine, the product of two decades of heightened military spending, to defeat its Ukrainian counterpart.  Instead, the Ukrainians proved determined and disciplined in the

In the spring of 1994, year three of the Bosnian war, Ana, the daughter of the Bosnian Serb Lieutenant Colonel General Ratko Mladic, took a pistol from her father’s room in Belgrade – the special silver pistol with which he’d intended to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild – and shot herself in the head. She was 23 years old. Ana Mladic hadn’t been herself, it was said, since returning from a study trip to Moscow where, people guessed, she had read in a newspaper about her father’s war crimes at Sarajevo. Or had been alerted to them by the cold-shouldering of fellow students. Her suicide was something Ratko

Car bombs used to be a fixture of gangland feuds in 1990s Russia but have since fallen out of fashion. This makes it all the more striking when, as happened on Saturday night, such a device rips through a car just outside Moscow, killing Darya Dugina, daughter of the controversial nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. She was a prominent figure in her own right, a journalist working for an outfit Washington says is owned by Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin – under sanctions in the West for being the godfather of both the Wagner mercenary group and the infamous social media ‘troll farms’ – who had been a cheerleader for the war in

Forget fund-raising concerts donating spare clothes and offering your spare room to a refugee family. There’s a better way of showing your sympathy for Ukrainians: you can now sponsor weapons, and arm it with your very own message. For up to £2,500, Brits can send a personalised message to the crowdfunding site Sign My Rocket, who will then write it on a missile destined for the Russian army. Sending hostile messages to the enemy, of course, is not new, and may be as old as war itself. Dropping black propaganda leaflets from planes for the benefit of the enemy beneath has long been standard practice. Nor was it unusual for

This morning, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a moratorium on energy prices – so while gas bills are rising all over Europe, Ukraine will remain unaffected. This honours a pledge he made on his election. Freezing energy bills is a standard populist policy in Ukrainian politics (in a country where temperatures can reach -25ºC and the elderly can’t afford to buy medicine, it’s hard to win without making such promises). But there are now serious worries about whether it could bankrupt a government that needs all the money it can get to fight a war. Energy prices will be frozen until six months after martial law ends in Ukraine: the pledge is