Moscow’s imperialist strongman believes decadent European democracies can be cowed. Our job is to prove him wrong
Vladimir Putin is escalating both his full-scale war against Ukraine and his shadow war against the rest of Europe. His main purpose in the shadow one is to break European support for Ukraine so he can subjugate that country, something he regards as existential for Russia’s future and his own. While we in the rest of Europe must prepare as best we can to defend ourselves against every kind of hybrid attack, the central thrust of our response should be to redouble our support for Ukraine. Ukraine is his main target. It’s there, and only there, not in a contest of a thousand hybrid pinpricks, that Putin’s Russia can in a meaningful sense be defeated and deterred.
In a powerful new book, Warum Russland nicht aufhören wird (Why Russia Won’t Stop), the German historian Martin Schulze Wessel shows how Putin’s policy fits into a much older Russian tradition of territorial expansionism and striving for hegemony, combined with a religiously infused imperial ideology. He reminds us that in 2016 Putin said “Russia’s frontier ends nowhere” and in 2025, “wherever the boot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours”. West Europeans, fondly imagining that we have consigned such brute territorial imperialism to the dustbin of history, tend to think there must be some other explanation (eg something we did “wrong”, like the eastward expansion of Nato). Finns, Estonians and Poles know better. Despite Russia’s weaknesses, the author concludes, it is “the most dangerous country in the world”. Some in Asia might question that large claim, but certainly Russia is the most dangerous country for Europe.
As archaeologists find treasure trove along new floodplain, conservationists say another Nova Kakhovka would be ecocide
On a warm September day, a group of underwater archaeologists and researchers were boiling water for tea on their campfire on the banks of the Dnipro River, tents pitched on the sandy shoreline. They were three weeks into an archaeological expedition of the waters around Khortytsia – a rocky island 12.5km long and 2.5km wide that lies just downstream of the city of Zaporizhzhia, in south-eastern Ukraine.
High above the island, a Shahed drone whined on its way. A Ukrainian interceptor, and small-arms fire from the ground, tried, unsuccessfully, to bring it down. The archaeologists ignored it. This is life as normal, 28 miles (45km) from the combat zone in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
US president says agreement needed to lower American fuel prices, but move likely to create fresh crisis with Ukraine and Nato allies
Donald Trump was on a fresh collision course with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and European allies after a stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel, upending years of US and western pressure on the Kremlin to end its four-and-a-half year war against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy reacted furiously to Trump’s announcement of the deal with Vladimir Putin, calling it “absolutely terrible” and “not fair and not honest”.
Login
