Ukraine

As Wagner mercenaries are being deliberately expended by the regular military as cannon-fodder in the battle for Bakhmut, their backer, Evgeny Prigozhin, is learning a hard lesson in Kremlin politics: it doesn’t matter how useful you were yesterday, what matters is how useful you may be tomorrow. Last year, the Russians were desperately short of soldiers. Ukraine was fully mobilised, but Vladimir Putin was unwilling for political reasons to follow suit, only launching a partial mobilisation in September. His generals simply lacked the soldiers they needed. In politics, as in economics, the laws of supply and demand meant that whoever had soldiers to offer – such as Prigozhin – could

Protests that broke out in Tbilisi against adopting a controversial Russian-style law have turned into a pro-European movement with political demands. The law could have seen media and non-government groups which take funding from abroad classed as ‘foreign agents’. Although the Georgian government has released all arrested protesters and dropped the proposed law, which copied repressive Russian legislation and threatened to ban NGOs and independent media from operating in the country, the opposition is now demanding the resignation of the current Georgian government – along with early elections.  Looking at the EU flags raised by upset Georgians, Ukrainians are comparing the rallies in Tbilisi with the 2014 Maidan revolution in Kyiv.

It has long been suspected that Russia was going to mount a renewed military offensive in Ukraine as spring approached. This fear was realised overnight. From midnight to 7.a.m., Ukraine suffered one of the worst barrages of Russian bombing this year: some 81 missiles were fired at residential buildings and critical infrastructure from air, land and sea, including several hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. Some 34 missiles were intercepted in total, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine was not able to down many, as it does not yet have the Patriot system that can intercept them. The commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, said eight Iranian-made drones were also launched; four were

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has some awkward explaining to do to Vladimir Putin after a Russian military plane, being stored in Belarus, was reportedly blown up last weekend by Belarusian rebels.  According to reports, one of the nine working Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs) owned by the Russian military was attacked at the Machiulishchy airfield, just under eight miles from the capital Minsk, where it had been kept since early January this year. The aircraft, said to be worth £274 million, was capable of detecting and targeting air defence systems and formed a key part of Russia’s battlefield strategy. A day after what sounded like two

Vladimir Putin has sold his Ukrainian war to the Russian people by trying to find the sweet spot between existential threat and reassuring distance: the Russian president portrays the conflict as a struggle to preserve the nation from a hostile West and its Ukrainian proxy, but one fought safely outside its borders. Increasingly, Kyiv seems to want to bring the war to Russia, though, in a gamble which could go either way. A drone identified as a Ukrainian-made Ukrjet UJ-22 Airborne, capable of carrying up to 20kg of explosives, crashed close to a gas distribution station 60 miles southeast of Moscow yesterday. This is more than 300 miles from the

The first hint that my audience with Volodymyr Zelensky might not be what I’d hoped for came with the emailed invite. A few days before I’d been told I’d made the shortlist for a select presidential news conference marking the anniversary of the war. Not quite an exclusive interview, granted, but given current Zelenskymania, a decent second best. Images of a cosy roundtable in the secret presidential bunker beckoned. Alas, when the email from his office finally arrived, it was notably bereft of the cloak and dagger one might expect. No orders to leave my phone at home. No secret rendezvous with a blacked-out van. Just an order to report at

Many have weighed in on how Vladimir Putin’s reign will end. Now it is the turn of Volodymyr Zelensky, asserting that he will be killed by his own. But is this wishful thinking, prediction or trolling? The Ukrainian president was speaking in a documentary, when he said that There will definitely be a moment when the fragility of Putin’s regime will be felt inside the state and then the predators will devour a predator. It is very important, and they will need a reason to justify this. They will remember. They will find a reason to kill the killer. Will it work? Yes. When? I don’t know. There is often

Andriy Zagorodnyuk was Ukraine’s minister of defence from 2019 to 2020. He is Chairman of the Centre for Defence Strategies and is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. To mark the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, he spoke with Russian Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko. The pair disagreed on Russia’s objectives, the possibility of a negotiated outcome, what a Ukrainian victory might look like, and the fate of Crimea. Sergey Radchenko: Thank you for joining me today, Andriy. I’d like to start by asking: where are we in this war a year on? Andriy Zagorodnyuk: Russia is still attempting to pursue its original goal of

Growing up as a Ukrainian means being acquainted with death when you are too young to know much about life. When I was a teenager, I saw dozens of coffins being brought to my hometown from Vladimir Putin’s war in the Donbas. Now, I am seeing my friends go to war – and, like so many thousands of Ukrainians, die. One was buried last month: Maksym Burda, a 25-year-old wedding photographer. Another friend went to war this week. This friend, an artist, had just five weeks of accelerated training: now he’s an infantry soldier in one of the hottest spots on the Dobas front. He has been provided with a

Kyiv General Valeriy Zaluzhny, stocky, forceful, apple-cheeked, sits at the desk in Kyiv from which he commands all Ukraine’s armed forces. I ask him what they need from the West. First, air defence. With a twinkle in his eye, he unzips his khaki fleece to reveal a garish T-shirt demanding ‘F-16s!’ Next on his list are long-range missiles such as the American ATACMS and the Franco-British Storm Shadow, so they can hit Russian targets beyond the range of their current armoury. Now the General jumps up, disappears behind a glass-fronted office cupboard into an improvised sleeping area, and returns with another T-shirt, this time calling for missiles. It seems he

Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in either dogged stalemate or vicious urban fighting for towns and cities in the Donbass and in the north of the country throughout winter. As the bitter Ukrainian winter thaws, the war will soon take on a more deadly momentum as the spring rains of the Rasputitsa give way to better weather for mobile units. This week marks a year since Vladimir Putin’s invasion. The campaign has been calamitous for Russia: 86,000 soldiers have been killed and wounded. The death toll will rise in the coming weeks. Yet Putin’s regime still not only manages to keep a lid on internal dissent, but continues