Thursday 28 May 2026 The latest intervention by Tony Blair into British politics has been received with a mixture of irritation, admiration, nostalgia and alarm. That alone is evidence of his significance. Nearly two decades after leaving office, Blair remains one of the few British political figures capable of altering the national conversation merely by publishing an essay and giving a series of interviews. His critics insist that he belongs to another age, associated with

Thursday 28 May 2026 For much of the post-Cold War era, the presence of United States troops in Europe seemed to many observers to be a historical relic. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Warsaw Pact had dissolved, and the principal military threats facing the United States appeared increasingly concentrated in the Middle East and Asia. American bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom were often discussed less in terms of warfighting than as symbols of enduring allia

Thursday 28 May 2026 For much of the war in Ukraine, the Russian Federation has attempted to persuade her population that the conflict remained distant, abstract and manageable. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has worked tirelessly to cultivate the impression that military operations in Ukraine were occurring somewhere beyond the horizon of ordinary Russian life, insulated from the domestic economy and from the daily routines of civilians. Yet wars of attrition have a way of

Thursday 28 May 2026 There is something profoundly Russian about a celebrated artist standing before the world, addressing the Kremlin as though the Kremlin were both executioner and father. When the Russian film director Andrey Zvyagintsev accepted the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for his latest film Minotaur, he used the moment not to celebrate cinema but to implore Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. “Put an end to this carnage”, he declared, insisting that

Tuesday 26 May 2026 Russia’s warning that foreign diplomats and civilians should leave Kyiv immediately before a new wave of “systematic strikes” marks another evolution in the Kremlin’s conduct of war. Moscow is no longer merely fighting Ukraine militarily. Increasingly she is attempting to wage psychological war against the entire Western alliance system that supports Ukraine — through intimidation, uncertainty, diplomatic coercion and the cultivation of fear. The immediate

Tuesday 26 May 2026 The contemporary Ukrainian music scene is undergoing a transformation of extraordinary speed and intensity. War, migration, technology and cultural rediscovery have combined to produce a musical environment unlike any Ukraine has experienced since independence in 1991. What is emerging is not merely a collection of successful performers or fashionable genres, but an entire cultural ecosystem in which questions of national identity, trauma, memory and moder