War

Thursday

Svitlana Morenets

The recapturing of Snake Island shows what Ukraine can do

After days of missile strikes, Ukrainian forces have forced Russia off Snake Island in the Black Sea. ‘The enemy hastily evacuated the remnants of the garrison in two speedboats and left the island’, according to the Ukrainian Operational South Command. Russia’s defence ministry appeared to concede defeat, saying that ‘Russian forces have completed the assigned tasks and withdrew as a step of goodwill’. The retreat is huge news in Ukraine, as Snake Island is not only important strategic territory, but has acquired a cult status as a representation of Ukraine’s resistance. Snake Island became world famous on the first day of the war when Ukrainian troops broadcast a message saying:

Tuesday

Svitlana Morenets

Is Russian Orthodoxy dying in Ukraine?

Ivano-Frankivsk has just become the first city in Ukraine to have no Russian Orthodox Church, amid a mass defection of churches away from the Moscow patriarchate and towards the breakaway Orthodox Church of Ukraine.  At the start of the invasion in February, almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches were still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church whose leader – Patriarch Kirill – is a close ally of Putin. Until recently, the Russian Orthodox Church claimed dominion over Ukraine for centuries. The 2014 invasion of Crimea dampened its appeal. In 2019 a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognised by Patriarch Bartholomew – the archbishop of Constantinople and the de facto leader

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Why I’ve spent £68,500 on a tank

Buying a tank is not as easy as you might think. When we started looking for one, people delighted in telling us: ‘Oh, you should have bought one in the 1990s. There were hundreds available for practically nothing!’ Well, not anymore. Especially not if you are picky about what sort of tank you want. I’m collecting artefacts for a new museum of totalitarianism and wanted a T-54 or T-55, two models which are pretty much the same as each other with just a few alterations and which are the most-produced tanks in history. They were used by the Soviet army to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; they were deployed

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

The sin of neutrality

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And while western countries pour billions of dollars of food aid into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, the weapons flooding those states originate mainly from Russia, China, Belarus – and Ukraine. In response to an article I recently wrote in The Spectator about why I think so few African governments condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin’s war is a cross to bear for all Russians

‘The photographs of murdered civilians, their hands tied behind their backs, shot in the head and tossed like animals on to the street… we will not forget, and no one will let us forget,’ wrote Russian journalist and author Yevgenia Albats last week. ‘The guilt for this will lie on our children and grandchildren. Bucha, Irpin, Motyzhin – we will now have to live with them for ever.’ Powerful words and moving nostra culpa for Russian atrocities in Ukraine. But they raise a vital question. Who, exactly, is the ‘we’ who is to bear the blame, guilt and punishment? All Russians? The 70 per cent of Russians who official polls

David Abulafia

Bitter harvest – how Ukraine’s wheat has always been coveted

Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat remaking the world, was no doubt devised to appeal to readers in the United States. It is not really appropriate: for ‘American’, read ‘Ukrainian’. The focal point of Oceans of Grain lies very far from the vast wheat fields of North America. This is mainly a book about Ukraine and the Black Sea, and the importance of Ukrainian grain in world history. Its appearance during the current war is extraordinarily timely. Scott Reynolds Nelson insists that grain supplies have lain at the heart of millennia of conflict. He describes the

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Our children are at breaking point – and it’s our fault

I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every generation more anxious than the last – and anxious younger, too. There’s a record number of British children diagnosed with anxiety, and a record wait – two years – for therapy, though I’m not at all sure the therapy as it is helps much. The usual idea is that if the kids are troubled, it’s the world that’s to blame: smartphones, Instagram, the constant comparing; Trump, Putin, the existence of Tories; Covid, global warming. No wonder they have the heebie-jeebies. But I think in fact that we’re doing it to

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

War, wine and the brilliance of Beychevelle

If only toasts and good wishes were weapons of war. At every serious repast I have attended since the invasion began, someone has raised a glass to the heroes – and heroines – of Ukraine. The rest of us have responded with a blend of solemnity and moist-eyed emotion. One’s emotions are strange. I can read about the deaths of warriors on the battlefield, now riding with the Valkyries on their way to Valhalla, and merely respond with a dry-eyed salutation. But hearing of some old girl who had been living in hunger and squalor and terror in a cellar for days and indeed weeks, with the regular crump of

Robert Taylor

40 years on, war still casts a shadow over the Falklands

For the Falkland islanders, the war in Ukraine brings back haunting memories of their own trauma four decades ago. Having themselves experienced a barbaric invasion by a big bully next door, they understand all too well what the people of Ukraine are going through. ‘I still feel that gun in my back,’ one islander told me recently, describing the day Argentine troops landed on Pebble Island and brutally rounded up the locals. Much has changed in the Falklands since 1982, nearly all of it for the better, yet the war remains seared in the memory. This year’s 2 April is, therefore, hugely significant – the 40th anniversary of the invasion.

Saturday

Justin Bronk

Why Russian tactics won’t win the war

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, the war has settled into a largely attritional struggle – and the picture is very different across the various fronts. Russian forces have been forced on to the defensive in many areas. The Russian ministry of defence has announced that the ‘first phase’ of the invasion is over, to be replaced with a more limited focus on Donbas in the east of Ukraine. The reason for this is simple: Ukrainian forces have not only stopped the Russian advances around Kyiv in the north and Mykolaiv in the south-west but have begun to regain towns and cut key Russian supply routes. In the

Thursday

Daryna Kolomiiets

Why I’ve stayed in Kyiv

I write this from my Kyiv air raid shelter. It has become my second home, an improvised bedroom, study and kitchen. For food, we eat bread and borscht. It is a spartan existence, but conducive to reflection. I still can’t get used to the siren that sounds five times a day, although I have got used to sleeping on the floor, in hallways, subways or the metro. I keep a bag packed with essentials by the door that I can grab and run with when the alarm sounds. On the first night of the war, I spent the first hours in the subway, along with thousands of Kyivites. Nobody slept.

Nick Newman

How should cartoonists respond to war?

Laughter has always been a coping mechanism for dealing with war. Some of this country’s most memorable cartoons have been born out of conflict. Think of Gillray’s ‘Plumb-Pudding in Danger’, Bairnsfather’s ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it’ or Low’s ‘Very well, alone’ – they are the quintessential images that defined the Napoleonic, first and second world wars. War didn’t stop cartoonists in the thick of the action from making light of their circumstances. Bruce Bairnsfather, a young officer who began sending jokes to the Bystander in 1915, was invalided out of Belgium suffering from shell-shock, but continued to draw. His work was initially dubbed ‘vulgar

Taki

In praise of amateurs

Two weeks ago in St Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and Old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the warzone in Ukraine. Good on them, the Fourth Estate could do with talented amateurs rather than world-weary pros. But don’t get me wrong. By amateurs I mean those who write and photograph for the love of their craft, not because it’s their job. I’ve always insisted that the amateur is superior to the pro because he or she glories in the execution of

Saturday

Justin Bronk

The Russian army is running out of momentum

As the Russian invasion enters its fourth week it is clear that its forces are running out of momentum, although they continue to make limited territorial gains in the south and east of Ukraine. Having been denied a quick victory over Ukraine itself, Putin now needs to force the Ukrainian government to accept a ceasefire agreement that largely freezes the frontlines and allows him to claim a victory domestically. His strategy now appears to be to cut off the Ukrainian forces fighting a desperate battle to hold the line in Donbas in the east against combined Russian and separatist Donetsk and Luhansk forces from the rest of Ukraine, and to concentrate

Thursday

James W. Carden

This is what liberal war fever looks like

In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, ‘there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers’ and became ‘the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault’. Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion.’How else,’ he asked,'[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My oncologist has a new weapon in his arsenal

‘We’re at war!’ said the taxi man as I installed myself for the long drive to Marseille. I put a fist to my mouth and tooted my imaginary bugle. But world war three – as he saw it – was no joking matter. My tootling bugle irritated him and his voice rose by a querulous octave. Didn’t I realise? Everything has changed since this morning! European politics had changed! French politics had changed! Who was now going to vote for a political novice like Zemmour, for example? Horizontal in its dashboard holder, his smartphone was showing a three-cornered TV debate on a rolling news channel. He turned up the volume.

Thursday

Hardeep Singh

Britain is finally remembering its forgotten soldiers of empire

Each year, flowers of remembrance are left on the tomb of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey. The memorial marks the resting place of a nameless British soldier who fell on the battlefields of Europe during the First World War. But this hero is far from alone in his identity being lost to history. More than a century on from the end of the Great War, the contribution of half-a-million Punjabis who fought has been all but forgotten. The Punjab, or ‘land of the five rivers’ – a region now divided between what is post-partition India and Pakistan – remarkably provided more soldiers (Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus) towards the allied

Friday

Francis Pike

Would Japan defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

In a parliamentary debate in early June about Covid, Japan’s prime minister Yoshihide Suga said that Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan had been ‘imposing strong restrictions on privacy rights.’ Whether by mistake or on purpose, Suga had crossed the Rubicon of acceptable China-Japan diplomatic language by implying that Taiwan was a country. If it was a mistake, it was one he repeated several times. China’s response was immediate. A foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, accused Suga of a flagrant breach of ‘the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country.’ It is a precious tenet of China’s foreign policy – indeed it

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Homeric levels of misery: Paradise, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed

The National Theatre has given Sophocles’s Philoctetes a makeover and a new title, Paradise. This must be ironic because the location is hell on earth. The action starts in a dirt circle sprawling with smashed military gear where a group of plump female vagrants are waking up in a clutch of filthy old tents. They’re living on a Caribbean island which also houses a prison for migrants. In a nearby cave dwells an exiled Homeric archer, Philoctetes, who survives by eating squirrels which he kills with his handmade bow. A committed anti-vegan, Philoctetes shuns the plentiful rice, garlic and mangos that grow naturally in the tropics. Enter two British soldiers

Thursday

The Spectator

How many Lilibets are there in the world?

Rare Lili Other than the new royal baby, is there anyone in the world formally called Lilibet? — There are 141 Lilibets in the US. None have been born since 1999 — when 8 were born, according to the US Social Security Administration. — Lilibet Foster, born in the US Virgin Islands in 1965, is a documentary-maker whose film Speaking in Strings, about the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, was nominated in the 72nd Academy Awards. — In answer to a freedom of information request in 2017, the Office for National Statistics refused to provide a full breakdown of the first names of people living in Britain. But it does publish a