Owen Matthews

The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture ‘has shifted decisively westward’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin ‘may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine’. Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept.

Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s failure to shut that export business down has, so far, been the single most important factor behind Putin’s continued military resilience. Economic sanctions were supposed to be the West’s superpower to punish the Kremlin for invading Ukraine in February 2022. So how come Russia now exports more oil by sea than it did at the beginning of the war?

Two of Ukraine’s most famous ballet dancers face dismissal, cancellation and possible mobilisation into the army. Their crime? They dared to dance a segment of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake during a European tour. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture slammed Serhiy Kryvokon and Natalia Matsak’s performance as ‘promoting the cultural product of the aggressor state’. The National Opera of Ukraine cancelled Kryvokon’s next scheduled performance – as well as his exemption from compulsory military service and permission to travel. If the dancer returns to his homeland, he will not be able to leave again.

Representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the US will meet today in Abu Dhabi to push forward a peace deal, the first time Moscow and Kyiv have spoken formally since April 2022. The surprise announcement of the tripartite talks came after a flurry of shuttle diplomacy, with White House envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner meeting with Putin in the Kremlin while Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky rushed at short notice to Davos for a face-to-face meeting with Trump himself.

What exactly is the ‘platinum security guarantee’ that Donald Trump is pushing Volodimir Zelensky to accept? While the full details remain confidential, the deal is described as an ‘Article 5 style’ guarantee after the clause in Nato’s charter that states that ‘an armed attack against one Nato member shall be considered an attack against all members’ and triggers ‘an obligation for each member to come to its assistance.’  Sounds reassuring. Except that little weasel word ‘style’ covers an abyss of real-world back-pedalling and caveats. For a start, Nato’s charter does not oblige members to actually take military action if one is attacked but instead leaves that decision to individual states.