Putin’s shadowy ‘foreign legion’ expands his geopolitical influence
By subcontracting high-risk and experimental operations in fragile states to the Wagner Group, the Kremlin obtains a screen of plausible...
Belarus weaponising migrants against the EUROPEAN UNION
The UN refugee agency is ‘very worried’ by the scenes at the border, where people are dying of hypothermia and...
China’s worldwide web of repression, control is facing pushback
Freedom House concluded that China’s campaign of global repression and control is unprecedented in human history. But there are signs...
Turkey is creeping into Russia’s orbit and NATO is worried
Deep strains have developed in Erdogan’s relationship with his NATO partners because of his cuddling up to Russia and his...
Nuclear North Korea raises the prospect of war on the peninsula
China, or its ally Pakistan, likely passed the warhead design, or the warhead itself, to North Korea. China also contributed...
Weapons may not deter Xi, but computer chips will
Taiwan has been preparing for possible conflict with China for a long time. The recently published Quadrennial Defence Review revealed...
The impossible dilemma facing Afghanistan’s Taliban government
The Taliban and Al Qaeda are joined at the hip. From its founding by Osama bin Laden in 1986, Al...
One remarkable woman’s battle for justice against Vladimir Putin
The Soviet Union had a long tradition of assassinating enemies, but following its collapse, under Yeltsin assassinations stopped and Moscow’s...
Why today’s German elections are important for India
More than 1,700 German companies are active in India and provide some 700,000 jobs in the country. There are also...
Winning elections, the Putin way
The three days of Russia’s parliamentary elections have been shaping up over many months to be the least free since...
Are Taliban aware of the humanitarian catastrophe looming?
With banks closed for weeks and ATMs out of cash, even those Afghans with savings haven’t been able to take...
Spies and jihadists, has America learned anything from 9/11?
9/11 was a wake-up call for the Bush administration to correct the endemic fault lines within the US intelligence community....
Xi Jinping weighs up his opportunities in Afghanistan
For China, the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan redraws Asia’s geopolitical map and hands it an opportunity to further project Beijing’s...
Taliban victory will be a bed of nails for Pakistan
When the religious militancy, the seed of which was sown by Islamabad, heads towards Pakistan, it will be catastrophic. ‘The...
Iran escalates the nuclear threat, or is it just bluff?
Independent analysts believe that Iran is not in a crash programme to create nuclear weapons, but the enrichment process is...
How long can Europe’s last dictator survive?
Belarus has been rocked by months of opposition protests after the rigged elections last August. More than 35,000 people have...
If vaccine refusniks win, forget about beating Covid
Some of the evangelicals have linked coronavirus vaccinations to ‘the mark of the beast’, a symbol of submission to the...
Are China and Russia turning to diplomatic brain-cooking?
One possible clue could come from the work of an American company, WaveBand Corporation, which in 2006 developed a prototype...
No jab-no job, as Covid-19 surges in Russia
Officials ruled that 60% of workers in ‘customer-facing’ service sector roles must be fully vaccinated by mid-August. Although workers are...
Agony in Afghanistan, while China waits in the wings
John Sopko, the brutally honest US inspector general for reconstruction in Afghanistan, has been sounding the alarm for years about...
Iran’s proxies are a threat to peace in Middle East
Teheran has created a network of allies among more than a dozen major militias across the region, some with their...
Iran’s hanging judge will now be the President
In 1988, at the age of 28, he became one of four people on the infamous Panel of Death that...
Bye-bye, Bibi, for now?
Although his political agility got him out of so many tight spots that even his detractors called him a magician,...
What happens when Joe meets Vlad?
Many see the summit on Wednesday as a critical moment in the attempt to revive the poor relations between the...
