Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
It had to happen, didn’t it? After the railway workers, the train drivers, the nurses, the ambulance crews, the civil servants, and in all likelihood the junior doctors, here come the teachers – although not quite as enthusiastically as their union leaders might have wished. The National Education Union, representing 300,000 teaching staff has announced
UK officials from the Prime Minister downwards have condemned the execution of Iran’s former deputy defence minister, a dual British-Iranian national, in the strongest of terms. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has described it as ‘a callous and cowardly act, carried out by a barbaric regime’. The chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia
The greatest danger presented by the rail strikes – for the Government, that is – has passed. The trade unions, chief among them the RMT, fronted by the alternately reasonable and hectoring Mick Lynch, threw everything they could at ministers in the run-up to the holidays. It did not work. Much the same applies, to a
Today’s strike by nurses may indeed be the biggest action – or inaction – of its kind in NHS history. But there is a distinct sense of having been here before. The nurses’ grievances been a daily theme of news broadcasts for weeks, as though, as a group, they are uniquely affected by the double-digit
If you’ve managed to avoid the dimly-lit pictures of people’s back gardens, count yourself lucky. Yes: snow has arrived in the capital. The Foreign Secretary made a point of thanking London-based diplomats for showing up to his speech in Westminster yesterday – or, as he put it, ‘battling through’ two or three inches of snow
As if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not already presented quite enough dilemmas for other countries, suddenly there is another one. How sympathetic a reception should Russian men trying to avoid call-up in their home country be granted abroad, and specifically in the UK? This quandary has arisen following Vladimir Putin’s announcement of what he
Over the six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the ambitions of President Zelensky and his compatriots have only grown. From an early readiness to engage in talks – first in Belarus and then in Istanbul – Kyiv has progressed to an insistence that Ukraine can win, and from there to a definition of victory that includes not
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,
The theme of the week has to be ‘coming home’: first the women’s football trophy, and now one-time Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, who says he will share his time between the two sides of the Atlantic. He had recently hinted at a return, describing himself as ‘at heart, European’. Some might question this as a
Launching her campaign for party leader and prime minister, Liz Truss said something that barely registered amid the big tax-cutting promises, but made me prick up my ears in a very positive way. She talked about trying to make sure that parents and other carers were not penalised by taking time out of paid work.
Much has been made of the decision to place the Metropolitan Police in what is often referred to as special measures, where it joins five other forces from England and Wales. The many ways in which the Met has fallen short have also been amply aired, from the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving
Boris Johnson has been accused of shamelessly using the war in Ukraine for his own political ends. The timing of his contacts with president Volodymyr Zelensky suggests there is plenty of evidence to support this claim. At the end of last week, within hours of his ethics adviser’s resignation, Johnson ducked out of a planned meeting with Northern
Of all the setbacks for the Conservatives in London, the loss of Westminster Council was probably the least expected and the most emblematic. To be sure, as in much of the capital, the Conservative vote had been declining, but the prospect that control would actually change this year seemed unlikely. But it did, and as
National symbols are usually proudly emblazoned for all to see. That’s the point of them. One, though, seems rather to have crept up on us in recent weeks, being flashed almost like a secret tattoo and then quickly covered up again. It is the letter ‘Z’ that Russians have started using to denote national solidarity and support
Russia is now as closed off to the world as the Soviet Union was before Mikhail Gorbachev made his first tentative steps towards glasnost more than 40 years ago. Pretty much all the progress that post-Soviet Russia had made towards becoming a ‘normal’ country has been reversed within the space of two weeks. Vladimir Putin’s presumed legacy –
We’re just ten days into Russia’s assault on Ukraine and the western world has painted itself in Ukraine’s colours. Cities and towns have hung out Ukrainian flags and lit their public buildings in blue and gold. The BBC has changed the pronunciation of the Ukrainian capital from Kiev to Kyiv. Tesco is driving the supermarkets’
One of the reasons why I judged — wrongly — that Vladimir Putin would not order an all-out invasion of Ukraine was the likelihood of a protracted war. But another was the possibility of popular protest in Russia, which could have potentially destabilising effects on the Kremlin. After sporadic protests in the hours immediately after the
35 min listen
In this week’s episode: What does Putin really want for Russia? For this week’s cover story, Niall Ferguson writes about how Putin seems to be trying to recreate the Russia of the Past, while this week’s diary by Timothy Garton Ash says the West has misunderstood his intentions, Niall and Timothy join the podcast along
Ukraine, as is periodically observed, means borderland. Geography will forever influence its destiny as an independent state. With tensions between East and West again rising, however, Kiev might well conclude that Ukraine is more accurately translated as ‘on the margins’. Foreign leaders and ministers have, to be sure, been punctilious in making courtesy visits to
Western warnings of an ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine have grown more insistent in recent weeks with different voices, from the media to politicians, needlessly stoking the fires of war with their aggressive and inaccurate rhetoric. Time and again, Putin’s words have been twisted or misconstrued in a way that fits and reinforces western preconceptions
