World

In 2023, I had coffee with the celebrated Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, on Yaroslaviv Val Street in the ancient heart of Kyiv. The modern city is built over the ruins of the rampart built by Yaroslav the Wise, the eleventh-century Grand Prince of Kyiv, to keep out invaders. Now, on the third anniversary of the most recent invasion of Ukraine, Kurkov, whose novels are known for their dark humour, is in a much more sombre mood. Donald Trump’s savage and surreal attacks on president Zelensky have left the country reeling. ‘Of course, Ukrainians are shocked and upset,’ he says. ‘If two weeks ago Russia considered Americans and Poles their main

For a country that is notorious for its lack of connection to the outside world, North Korea is one of the world experts in cyberwarfare. Only this week, North Korean hackers managed to steal $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, in what is the largest cryptocurrency hack on record. The fact that the stolen money is just over 5 per cent of the country’s GDP does not mean the profits will be going to the North Korean people or economy though. After all, nuclear weapons and missiles hardly come cheap. There has been a deluge of North Korean cyberattacks in the 21st century. The country even has its own state-run

It would be a stretch to describe Emmanuel Macron’s meeting with Donald Trump as a ‘bromance’, but there were plenty of warm handshakes and even warmer words, with the French president at one moment addressing his host as ‘Dear Donald’. Macron had flown to Washington on Monday to press the case for Europe in the upcoming negotiations between the USA and Russia over the war in Ukraine. The two presidents had a two-hour virtual meeting with leaders from the G7 along with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Macron and Trump then held a press conference during which the President of France declared that ‘after speaking with President Trump, I fully

In the Oscar-nominated movie The Holdovers, one of the characters says in a moment of frustration: ‘I thought all the Nazis ran away to Argentina.’ This line got a big laugh in cinemas in Buenos Aires. But while the events this joke alludes to now lie far enough in the past for today’s Argentines to chuckle at, the flight of Nazis to its shores remains an extremely uncomfortable period in the history of the South American country. Many former Nazi officers and party members fled Europe for South America in the years after the war and Argentina became a popular destination. Estimates for how many Nazis settled in the country

The orca killer whale is known for playing with its prey before killing it, always with a smile. An image that came to mind on Monday when French President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the White House to plead the cause of Ukraine to a grinning President Donald Trump. The French media is dutifully repeating the Elysée line that Macron had rekindled a bromance with the American president, but this is disconnected from reality. Macron returns to Paris today with, as far as I can tell, nothing but platitudes.  This was nothing like Macron’s visits to Washington during the Biden administration, when the French president used to deal with Biden’s sympathetic secretary