Saturday 9 May 2026 The ghost of Richard Nixon hangs heavily over modern American conservatism. Amongst all the twentieth century presidents of the United States, perhaps none would have regarded the political rise of Donald Trump with such a mixture of fascination, envy, alarm and grim recognition. Nixon was a politician forged in the disciplines of the Cold War, bureaucracy and ideological combat. Trump emerged instead from television, celebrity culture and the collapse of

Friday 8 May 2026 The cost of electricity in Ukraine, at first glance, appears stable. The headline tariff — fixed by the government at 4.32 hryvnias per kilowatt-hour — has been extended through much of 2026, a decision framed as a protective measure for households struggling under wartime conditions. Yet beneath this apparent stability lies a quieter, more complex story — one that bears most heavily upon internally displaced persons, those citizens already uprooted by war a

Friday 8 May 2026 The contemporary geopolitics of the Arabian Peninsula are often misunderstood in Western capitals because the Gulf monarchies are habitually treated as a unified bloc. To diplomats in Washington, London or Brussels, the wealthy Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council appear to move in rough synchrony — conservative, pro-Western, heavily armed and fundamentally dependent upon American military protection. Yet beneath the ceremonial summits, coordinate

Friday 8 May 2026 In the Soviet imagination the spy was once a romantic figure. He was the cultivated patriot in a trench coat, speaking several languages, reading Goethe in the original German and quietly defending the Motherland against Western subversion. Soviet cinema elevated intelligence officers into a kind of secular priesthood. The post-Soviet Russian state, under the long shadow of Vladimir Putin, has revived much of this mythology. Yet the modern Russian intelligen

Thursday 7 May 2026 The decision of a Russian court to seize the controlling stake of the agricultural conglomerate Rusagro from its founder, the billionaire Vadim Moshkovich, marks another stage in the quiet but profound transformation of the Russian wartime economy. Moshkovich, once one of Russia’s wealthiest agricultural magnates, now finds himself in pre-trial detention on corruption, bribery and fraud allegations while the Russian state absorbs the assets he spent decade

Wednesday 6 May 2026 Russia’s and Ukraine’s rival unilateral ceasefires in advance of the 9 May Victory Day commemorations reveal less about any serious appetite for peace than about the political and military anxieties of both sides as the war enters yet another dangerous phase. What has emerged over the first week of May 2026 is a peculiar combination of symbolic diplomacy, nuclear signalling, psychological warfare and tactical military manoeuvring, all compressed into a fe