Saturday 25 April 2026 The European Union’s mutual assistance clause, contained within Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union, has long been treated as a constitutional curiosity rather than a central pillar of European defence. Drafted in an era when reliance upon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was assumed to be perpetual and unquestioned, she was conceived as a political statement of solidarity rather than an operational war-fighting commitment. Yet the shift

Saturday 25 April 2026 Winters are colder, summers are hotter. The question of whether Ukraine is suffering from climate change is on its face almost too simple — for it invites a binary answer to a phenomenon that is gradual, uneven and often obscured by the far more immediate violences of war. Yet beneath the thunder of artillery and the bureaucratic speed of reconstruction lies a quieter transformation of the land itself, one that has begun to reshape Ukraine’s agriculture

Saturday 25 April 2026 The war in Mali — now well into its second decade — has evolved from a regional insurgency into a dense and troubling intersection of jihadist violence, military authoritarianism and great power competition. It is in many respects a conflict that illustrates how the withdrawal of one external power does not end a war but merely alters its character. Whereas once France and the United Nations stood as the principal foreign actors, today the Russian Feder

Saturday 25 April 2026 The Southern Interconnection pipeline, now emerging from the bureaucratic fog of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s fragmented governance, is no ordinary infrastructure project. It is a line of steel and gas that traces not merely a geographic route across the western Balkans, but a fault line between competing systems of power — between Brussels and Washington, between formal legal order and personalised political influence, and between the European Union’s regu

Saturday 25 April 2026 Ukraine does not immediately present herself as a conventional destination for the solitary traveller. She does not advertise ease. She does not promise comfort. She does not wrap herself in curated experiences or predictable itineraries. And yet for those who arrive alone, carrying little more than a laptop and a willingness to observe, she reveals herself with an intensity that few countries can match. One begins perhaps in Lviv — a city that feels at