Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Digital warfare will erode the distinction between the state and civil society
As Boris Johnson announced an extra £16bn for the Ministry of Defence, the potential costs of modern combat to our democracy have never been higher. Asked to picture a battle tank, most people will probably think of a Russian T-72. First produced in 1971, the T-72 is still the mainstay of armies in the former Soviet Union, although it has...
The UK must embrace a European future or accept isolation and decline
As the world divides into regional superpowers – the US, China and the EU – Britain cannot stand alone. Brexit has become a roulette wheel with just three slots: no deal, thin deal or the abject humiliation of the Conservative Party. The deal currently being negotiated gives the UK such meagre access to the European Single Market, say reports,...
How unrest from Kyrgyzstan to Belarus is challenging Russia’s Soviet legacy
A turbulent year in the former USSR is exposing the limits of Moscow’s power. On 6 October, Kyrgyzstan awoke to a revolution almost no one had expected. Overnight, a crowd of demonstrators protesting allegedly rigged parliamentary elections fought off riot police to seize government buildings in the heart of Bishkek, the capital. In images...
America and the politics of pain
Gravely ill in hospital with sepsis, our writer had a revelation on how Donald Trump transformed the US’s inequalities into a suicidal tribalism. Why has the American government acted in a way that has left more than 200,000 of its citizens dead? Coronavirus has killed more Americans than the Wehrmacht, or the Japanese imperial army, or...
Letter of the week: Image of hope for Yemen
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman. Generally, New Statesman readers write letters about articles. However, we should not forget the consistent quality of your photographs. In the 16 October issue, the photograph by Ahmad al-Basha...
When Chinese influence fails
How the rise and fall of a Chinese corporate giant turned the Czech Republic against Beijing. In 2015, Chinese president Xi Jinping invited his Czech counterpart, the ostentatiously pro-China Milos Zeman, to a military parade in Beijing commemorating the end of the Second World War. Both leaders watched as thousands of troops from the elite units...
Donald Trump’s taxes: will the $750 revelation matter?
Why a report releasing the President’s tax details might fail to land a blow to his re-election campaign. On Sunday, the New York Times published a story that had been kept from the American people for years: that of Donald Trump’s tax returns. When he ran for office in 2016, the president broke recent tradition by not releasing the...
“Nobody feels it’s equal”: how Israel’s second lockdown is widening the religious-secular divide
A lack of agreement over new Covid-19 restrictions indicates a lack of trust in the nation’s government. Having been one of the first countries to impose a second national lockdown, Israel has announced further restrictions today, after the country’s health ministry reported a record level of almost 7,000 new cases of Covid-19 the...
The struggle for a democratic Ukraine goes on, 20 years after my father’s abduction
The anti-corruption journalist Georgiy Gongadze was murdered two decades ago. Young Ukrainians must not give up his mission. Curiously my father, Georgiy Gongadze, an icon of Ukrainian journalism, was born not in Ukraine but in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, in 1969. In the early 1990s he became a youth activist, travelling through the...
Bored of Covid rules, Russians are kicking back on the Black Sea
With little appetite to return to self-isolation, and social-distancing fatigue setting in, many in Russia now see the pandemic as a closed issue. Nothing typically happens in Russia in August. As a rule, the final month of summer is when the big cities empty out, their inhabitants making for their dachas or to seaside resorts, leaving their...
