World

Wednesday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Ukraine attacks the Church of England’s ‘pro-Russia propaganda’

Perhaps Justin Welby expected gratitude from Ukraine, after the Church of England’s Synod debated the war this week. He certainly didn’t expect a double rebuke from the country, a sacred and secular censure. In letters to Welby that have not been published but have been shown to me, two official Ukrainian bodies have protested at the briefing document that was prepared ahead of the debate. As I argued yesterday, the briefing document is inappropriately even-handed, as if both sides in the conflict are caught up in a tragic muddle, and as if no particular religious body is more culpable than any other. There should be an inquiry into how this deeply

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has embarrassed and embittered his military

Emmanuel Macron is the first president of the Fifth Republic to have never served in the military, and it shows. His bellicose declaration on Monday that the West might deploy ground troops to Ukraine has been roundly rejected by France’s allies. No chance, was the retort of Germany, Britain, Poland and others. Russia also warned that such a deployment would be very unwise. Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces As a result, Macron has been left looking foolish and inexperienced, accused of war-mongering in order to boost his self-esteem after a bruising few weeks domestically. A dismissive editorial in today’s Le Figaro, the newspaper of choice

Amber Duke

Why this Gaza protest vote is dangerous for Joe Biden

Earlier this month, ‘none of these candidates’ turned out to be a political spoiler for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in the Nevada Republican primary. Even though her main rival, former president Donald Trump, opted not to participate in the state GOP’s caucus and Haley was essentially running unopposed in the primary, ‘none of these candidates’ trounced her by 33 points. An unnamed third party showed up on Tuesday night for the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan too, this time against the Democratic incumbent, President Joe Biden. At the time of writing, ‘Uncommitted’ is teetering around 15 per cent of voters in the Michigan primary against Joe Biden. Progressive activists in the state,

Bob Seely MP

The West is being too slow to arm Ukraine

A dangerous truth is emerging from Ukraine. Kyiv is slowly starting to lose the war against Russia because it is running short of ammunition, in large part because promises made by the EU and the USA are not being honoured. Concurrently, Russia has moved to a wartime economic footing, with 40 per cent of government spending now on the military. The result has seen Ukraine start to lose territory. In the east of the country, where I visited last week, talk is turning to which town will fall next. Soldiers are angry that they are dying because they do not have the ammunition – and specifically artillery shells – to return fire

Tuesday

Seth J. Frantzman

There should be no ceasefire in Gaza

Joe Biden appears to be pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. ‘My hope is that by next Monday we’ll have a ceasefire,’ the US president said yesterday. Hamas has said the comments are ‘premature’ and Israeli sources have reportedly said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was surprised by Biden’s remarks. Pressure for a ceasefire would benefit Hamas, which has been demanding a stop in the fighting since mid-October after it attacked Israel and massacred 1,000 people and took 240 hostages. Hamas’ approach in this latest conflict is nothing new: it has often sought to leverage the suffering of Gazan civilians, which it hides behind to fire rockets and build tunnels, to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Macron won’t send troops to Ukraine

French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow, he is now suggesting that western troops might go fight in Ukraine – secure in the knowledge that his bluff is unlikely to be called. At a press conference at the end of a summit in Paris on supporting Kyiv he said: ‘there is no consensus to officially send ground troops. That said, nothing should be ruled out.’ He wouldn’t say any more. He wanted to maintain some ‘strategic ambiguity.’ It is certainly true that manpower is a key Ukrainian constraint. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently admitted that

Niko Vorobyov

How the Netherlands became a narco-state

In a heavily-fortified Amsterdam courthouse known as The Bunker, Ridouan Taghi, the chieftain of the so-called ‘Mocro-Maffia’ (Moroccan mafia), and 16 of his henchmen learned their fate today. The gang were all found guilty of a series of murders that shocked the Netherlands. Taghi’s case is symptomatic of a wider illness within Dutch society. In 2020, police discovered a soundproofed torture chamber in a disused shipping container belonging to one of Taghi’s rivals. Inside was a dentist’s chair with restraints for arms and legs, as well as finger clamps, scalpels, hammers, pliers, gas burners, and duct tape.  While there have always been gangland hits known as ‘liquidations’ and overall crime rates are

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is Macron acting like a ‘warlord’?

Emmanuel Macron has said that the West may have to send ground troops to Ukraine to support their war against Russia. The president of France made his comments on Monday as he hosted a conference at the Elysée palace about how best to support Ukraine. In attendance were more than 20 European heads of state and government, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as representatives from the USA and Canada. The cynic might wonder if Macron’s grandstanding isn’t a last desperate attempt to claw back some authority before June’s European elections Macron admitted that there was not a consensus on deploying ground troops to Ukraine but ‘no option should

Ben Domenech

Trump needs to win over some of Nikki Haley’s voters

The math is clear for Nikki Haley. Even though she outperformed polling expectations in her home state of South Carolina, getting 40 per cent of the vote to Trump’s 60 per cent, her path to the Republican nomination is only going to get harder now. Thanks to significant Republican rule changes that increased the number of winner-take-all states, Donald Trump should have the nomination officially locked up within a month. And while donor money can keep Haley afloat through that moment and perhaps beyond, she has lost the backing of the Koch machine, which is shifting its resources to lower level contests. So what lessons, if any, should we take from Haley’s performance,

Aliona Hlivco

Ukraine’s heroes are losing hope

Ukraine can still win its war against Russia – and it can win it in 2024. All it needs is a speedy supply of artillery rounds, more air defences, long-range missiles, and fourth-generation fighter jets. This list goes on, but the longer the West waits, the higher the cost of this war. The tragedy is that, for Ukraine’s partners, the cost grows in money; for Ukraine, it does so in human lives. The horrors of Russian torture chambers will stay with him for life It’s now been two years since Russia’s tanks invaded; for Ukrainians like me, who live abroad, we live in constant fear of terrible news from back

Monday

Damien Phillips

Netanyahu’s post-war Gaza plan looks dead on arrival

Israel’s government has finally begun to turn its attention to what happens once the war in Gaza is over. The ‘basic contours’ of a hostage deal – and possible second Gaza ceasefire – continue to take shape, with further talks set to take place this week in Qatar’s capital Doha between Israel’s intelligence services, the United States, and Hamas via Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for post-war Gaza has been a long time coming, with his government constantly dogged by the question of what its goals are beyond destroying Hamas and what the endgame for the Palestinians might look like. You would think that with

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France expels Islamists while Britain appeases them

France last week deported an imam after footage emerged of him appearing to preach hate. Mahjoub Mahjoubi, who has lived in France since 1986 and has fathered five children, was put on a plane to his native Tunisia less than 12 hours after he was arrested in his home town of Bagnols-sur-Ceze in the south of France. ‘We will not let people get away with anything,’ declared Gerald Darmanin. The consequence of Britain’s institutional appeasement is now being seen on streets, in parliament and in council meetings across the country The Interior Minister attributed the imam’s expulsion to the recent immigration law, proof in other words, that this is a government that will not

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Will Navalny be given a public funeral?

Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death.  The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released. To truly

Sunday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky: ‘31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far’

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’. The news was shocking but not surprising. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister, recently claimed that the Ukrainian army had suffered over 160,000 casualties during counter-offensive last year. Such Russian updates on

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The fantastical myths that swirl around Vladimir Putin

If there is one man who is probably happiest that Vladimir Putin’s travel schedule has been so heavily curtailed of late, it is probably the Federal Protection Service officer responsible for ensuring the product of the president’s bathroom breaks return to the Motherland. Foreign powers may, after all, go to extreme lengths to test his health. When Putin does travel abroad, it is not just with his own food and drink, his own chefs and his array of bodyguards, it is also with his dedicated porta-potty. This allows his numbers ones and twos to be collected, sealed into special bags, and then put in a briefcase, ready to travel home

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Nikki Haley’s candidacy is Never Trumpism’s last stand

‘I’m a woman of my word,’ said Nikki Haley after another humiliating defeat last night. ‘I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.’  But what, really, is the point? South Carolina is Haley’s home state and she lost by more than 20 percentage points. She lost New Hampshire by 11 points, she came third in Iowa, and, much to Trump’s delight, she lost to ‘none of these candidates’ in Nevada.  Without Trump, Republican voters distrust and detest their party. They haven’t for some time The Republican nomination snoozefest – it’s not a race – will now move to Super Tuesday, on

Thomas Lorman

Viktor Orban is not abandoning Europe

The news that Hungary and China have signed a security pact, following a visit by to Budapest by Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security, has been a long time in the making. In 2012, two years after beginning his second term as Prime Minister, Viktor Orban formally re-orientated Hungary’s economic and foreign policy under the slogan of the ‘Eastern Opening’. Orban understood the frustration that had returned him to power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Two decades of integration with western Europe had made plenty of Hungarians prosperous, but not the majority.  The introduction of the free market in Hungary was accompanied by the mass closure of businesses, and

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why are Japan’s trains so much better than ours?

With six more months of train strikes recently announced it is getting hard to imagine a punctual, anxiety-free railway journey in the UK. Over in Japan it’s hard to imagine the opposite. Japan is one of those blessed countries where people understand the value of a modern, reliable, affordable and extensive railway network. In a 2019 global efficiency survey Japan, unsurprisingly, came out on top. And there hasn’t been a strike since the 1970s. If I had to think of one moment that crystallised all that I admire about Japanese trains it would be when I lost my paper ticket and had to negotiate the exit barrier. An immaculately uniformed

Saturday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How badly will Nikki Haley lose in South Carolina?

Will Nikki Haley defy expectations and only lose by 20 points today? That seems to be closest thing to a point of contention as South Carolina heads to the polls for today’s dodo of a Republican primary.  The polls have shown Trump’s enormous lead shrinking in recent days from well over 30 points to around 25. Some well-informed reporters think that Trump’s lead has diminished because of his rude outburst about Haley’s spouse.  ‘Where’s her husband?’ Trump mused in February, in his off-the-top-of-his-head way. ‘Oh, he’s away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.’ Making jokes about people’s marriages is one thing; insulting

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Two years on, the Ukraine war matters more than ever

There are inevitably voices in the West questioning the value of committing more than £5.5 billion a month in support of the war in Ukraine. It looks for now deadlocked at best, and at worst – in light of the recent Russian capture of Avdiivka – a slow defeat. Yet it is important to realise just how the Ukraine war matters to the world outside that country’s borders, even if perhaps not quite in the ways some would suggest. There is much overheated talk about a Ukrainian defeat leading to a direct threat to Nato. Some presume that this means the whole country falling to Vladimir Putin and Russian troops