Section: The Economist (The United Kingdom)
Ukraine’s leaders may be giving up on reuniting the country
Square peace agreement, round war FROM her roadside stall in eastern Ukraine, Svetlana Tsymbal watches the cars creep past the Mayorsk checkpoint. This used to be a peaceful provincial highway. Now it is a border crossing at the front line of a conflict that has left some 10,000 people dead. Parents return home “to the other side” after visiting...
As America and Russia talk, Ukraine fights
Tanks for calling THE timing was ominous. A day after the first, seemingly cordial telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the residents of Avdiivka, a small town on the Ukrainian side of the conflict line with Russian-backed separatists, heard the echoes of heavy artillery fire. The conflict that Russia started in Ukraine...
Igor Sechin, head of Rosneft, is powerful as never before
Burning bright “HELLO, you’ve called Rosneft,” goes a joke making the rounds in Moscow. “If you have an oil asset and you don’t plan to sell, press the hash key.” The Russian word for hash key, reshetka, also means “bars”, as in jail—where those who cross Rosneft’s head, Igor Sechin, tend to land. Mr Sechin is one of the most...
Estonia counts on NATO, but worries about Donald Trump
Airiin, get your gun THE morning after celebrating her husband’s birthday earlier this month, Barbel Salumae rose at 6am, donned fatigues, and made for a compound outside Tallinn to practice her marksmanship. “I tell my children it’s my hobby,” says Ms Salumae, a member of Estonia’s volunteer Kaitseliit, or Defence League (EDL)....
A tale of two Vladimirs
Vlad the Great, hint-hint VLADIMIR PUTIN has a new neighbor: a 16-metre-tall bronze monument to Vladimir the Great, a tenth-century Slav prince. The statue stands just outside the Kremlin’s red walls. “In Soviet times it would have been Lenin,” says the sculptor, Salavat Shcherbakov. The monument’s backers claim it commemorates the...
Front man
Unacknowledged legislator THE crowds in Mariupol, a factory town on the front line in eastern Ukraine, began lining up at six in the morning. It was late spring, and the rock group Okean Elzy were playing. “You might only see them once in your life,” said a young boy in line. Some 30,000 people turned out to see the band and its front man,...
Russia is negotiating with Germany and France over Ukraine
ON THE morning of October 19th thousands of people in Donetsk, the main city occupied by the Russian-backed separatists of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, attended the funeral (pictured above) of a notorious warlord assassinated two days earlier. Arsen Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was a Russian irregular who boasted of killing...
Duma-day machine
SINCE Russia’s last parliamentary election in 2011, when widespread fraud triggered mass protests, millions of Russians have fallen into penury. Wages have plunged, and labour protests are on the rise. Vladimir Putin’s forces are fighting openly in Syria and secretly in Ukraine. Polls show that 33% of Russians believe the country is...
Fighting for position
Putin spends rubles, makes rubble AS COLUMNS of soldiers marched through the centre of Kiev to mark 25 years of Ukrainian independence this week, Larissa Nikitina could not help but think about the price of sovereignty. Some 9,500 Ukrainians have been killed in fighting in the country’s east since early 2014, and there are more casualties...
The cruellest month
A familiar sight IN RUSSIA, history tends to take cruel turns in August. There was the failed coup of 1991 (August 19th); the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 (August 31st); and the start of the war in Georgia in 2008 (August 1st). On August 10th, the alarm bells rang again, when Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it...
