Latest news with #Bolshevik
The Sun
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Sun
Kyrgyzstan dismantles Central Asia's tallest Lenin statue
BISHKEK (Kyrgyzstan): Russian ally Kyrgyzstan on Saturday quietly dismantled Central Asia's tallest monument to Vladimir Lenin, the revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union. Ex-Soviet states across the region are seeking to strengthen their national identities, renaming cities that have Russian-sounding names and replacing statues to Soviet figures with local and national heroes. Russia, which has military bases in Kyrgyzstan, is striving to maintain its influence there in the face of competition from China and the West and amid its invasion of Ukraine. Officials in the city of Osh -- where the 23-metre (75 foot) high monument stood on the central square -- warned against 'politicising' the decision to 'relocate' it. Osh is the second largest city in the landlocked mountainous country. The figure was quietly taken down overnight and is set to be 'relocated', Osh officials said. The decision 'should not be politicised,' city hall said, pointing to several other instances in Russia 'where Lenin monuments have also been dismantled or relocated.' 'This is a common practice aimed at improving the architectural and aesthetic appearance of cities,' it said in a statement. Despite some attempts to de-Sovietise the region, memorials and statues to Soviet figures are common across the region, with monuments to Lenin prevalent in the vast majority of cities in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan was annexed and incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th century and then became part of the Soviet Union following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. It gained independence with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Price of Wartime Ambivalence
A relatively young Ukrainian state, having freed itself from Moscow's grasp, is trying to find its place as an independent nation in a changing world order. Moscow, however, decides to reclaim what it lost and sends an army to take Kyiv. An outnumbered Ukrainian force intercepts the Russian soldiers just north of the city. Ukraine's fate hangs in the balance. This is a description not of February 2022 but of January 1918, when the Bolsheviks advanced on Kyiv to crush the Ukrainian People's Republic. The country was only months old, and fell quickly. In the ensuing two years, Kyiv changed hands multiple times among competing Tsarist, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and German armies, but in the end, Moscow prevailed. It is during these turbulent years that the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov has set his Kyiv mysteries, an ongoing series of crime novels that follows the policeman Samson Kolechko as he negotiates bandits, speculators, and roaming soldiers of various stripes in his quest to keep order amid the chaos caused by war. Kurkov's mysteries contain enough of the typical tropes of crime fiction to keep fans of the genre satisfied. There is the melancholic police officer with a traumatic origin story (Samson's father was murdered by Cossacks during the revolution); there is the long-suffering love interest (level-headed Nadezhda is the perfect foil to anxious Samson); there are eccentric villains (an ailing Belgian thief steals silver in order to make himself a new skeleton); there are chases, shootouts, and puzzles aplenty. Kurkov's crime capers are deceptive, however. They lure you into seemingly safe generic territory only to subtly undermine your expectations. In the first novel, The Silver Bone, Samson doesn't even join the police force until about a third of the way in, leaving the reader suspended in the tense atmosphere of occupied Kyiv waiting for the story to begin. In the series' second book, The Stolen Heart, which has recently been published in Boris Dralyuk's English translation, the central crime—the illegal sale of pig meat—seems trivial, except that the Bolshevik secret police, or cheka, consider such 'sabotage' punishable by death. These novels are more than detective thrillers: They are studies in the surprising ambivalence that people living under occupation may feel, even when those in power go to extraordinary lengths to cement their rule through violence, manipulation, and terror. And they are important today not just for their insight into the past but also as a guide for surviving the present. [Read: Zombie history stalks Ukraine] Samson despises the lawlessness that accompanies the breakdown of states, and he yearns for the restoration of order; less important to him is the ideology of the party in power. In a job interview with his soon-to-be commanding officer, he is asked whom he supports: the Tsarists, the Ukrainian nationalists, the German-backed government, or the 'workers' regime'? He answers, 'I sympathize with you.' He knows this vague answer can be interpreted as ideologically acceptable. But the inhabitants of a police state can drift in ambivalence for only so long before they are compelled to make a moral choice. Samson realizes that arresting speculators and burglars on behalf of the Bolsheviks will not bring back the stability of his middle-class, prerevolutionary youth. Indeed, he isn't immune to the police's aggression simply because he works for them: His furniture, including his late father's beautiful writing desk, is confiscated, and two Red Army soldiers are billeted in his apartment. There are echoes here of Kurkov's Kyivan literary predecessor, Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard, published in 1925 and set at the same time, is an elegy for Tsarist Kyiv that detests both Ukrainian national aspirations and Bolshevik rule. (Curiously, its theatrical adaptation was a favorite of Stalin's, a fact that kept its author employed through the terror of the 1930s.) The White Guard hinges on the contrast between the cozy bourgeois home of the Turbin family, based on Bulgakov's family home on Kyiv's most picturesque street, and the barbarism unfolding outside. In The Stolen Heart, Samson sees Red Army soldiers violently dispossessing a middle-class family on that same street. At moments like this, Samson begins to doubt his decision to serve the occupation regime: Yes, order is being established, but at what cost? And is order based on legalized violence and theft really order? Bulgakov would have had little time for a Bolshevik lackey like Samson. His protagonists are uncompromisingly loyal to class and empire, and, in this sense, less interesting than Kurkov's more hesitant characters. As a writer born in Russia who built his career in Ukraine, Kurkov understands what it means to be caught between fiercely competing political and cultural projects (as, indeed, do several million Ukrainians living in areas now occupied by Russia). Many of Kurkov's other books examine how the instinct not to take sides often conflicts with the moral imperative to do so. The protagonist of his 1996 breakthrough novel, Death and the Penguin, for instance, naively thinks he can work for the Mafia while remaining an innocent civilian. The more recent Grey Bees, which is set in the aftermath of Russia's original assault on eastern Ukraine in 2014, revolves around the inhabitants of the no-man's-land between the Ukrainian and Russian armies and their attempts to remain neutral. In the end, keeping your head down is usually unsustainable, and Kurkov's protagonists tend, eventually, to locate their moral backbones. In this regard, another early-20th-century influence besides Bulgakov lurks in The Stolen Heart: Mykola Khvylovy. The Ukrainian modernist died by suicide in 1933 in protest of Stalin's arrests of Ukrainian writers. His books were banned for decades, and, unlike Bulgakov's, they rarely reached the outside world in translation. His most famous story, 'I (a Romance),' is about a cheka officer who discovers his mother among a group of counterrevolutionaries and is forced by his superiors to execute her. Khvylovy never did such a thing, but he did fight for the Bolsheviks during the Ukrainian wars of independence that followed the 1917 revolution, and in the end he despaired at what the Russians did to his country and his culture. The story ends with the bewildered officer trudging across the war-torn steppe into the uncertain future, haunted by the moral vacuum within. Near the end of The Stolen Heart, Samson is ordered by a cheka officer to sign an execution warrant for the pork speculator, whom he has finally apprehended. When he refuses to do so, the officer takes Samson's hand, dips his thumb in red ink, and guides it toward the order, leaving a fingerprint in place of a signature: 'The firm red thumbprint looked strange in this rectangle, like that of a criminal,' Samson reflects. That night, he awakens, weeping, from a dream in which he sits beside the coffin of a man with a seeping bullet wound. Looking at his hands, he notices that 'his fingers were smeared with red ink, as if with blood. He knew it wasn't blood. The ink had a chemical scent. The red lines of the verdict issued earlier that day kept rising up in his memory, and a whisper from the darkness kept on repeating, repeating, 'Samson, repent.'' The price of being part of the occupation bureaucracy has become clear. [Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia] In his translator's note for The Silver Bone, Dralyuk (who handles Kurkov's wry tone and the novels' historical fabric with characteristic dexterity) writes of contemporary Ukrainians that 'the Samsons of today have a far clearer sense of who they are and where they stand.' This is perhaps why Kyiv did not fall in 2022 as it did in 1918: Ukrainians understood that the 'order' imposed by an occupation would come at the price of their freedom. They chose freedom, even if it brought instability, even at the cost of their safety and, for some, their life. That lesson is relevant far beyond Ukraine, wherever ordinary people face the threat of becoming cogs in the machinery of malevolent administrations. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
5 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Price of Wartime Ambivalence
A relatively young Ukrainian state, having freed itself from Moscow's grasp, is trying to find its place as an independent nation in a changing world order. Moscow, however, decides to reclaim what it lost and sends an army to take Kyiv. An outnumbered Ukrainian force intercepts the Russian soldiers just north of the city. Ukraine's fate hangs in the balance. This is a description not of February 2022 but of January 1918, when the Bolsheviks advanced on Kyiv to crush the Ukrainian People's Republic. The country was only months old, and fell quickly. In the ensuing two years, Kyiv changed hands multiple times among competing Tsarist, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and German armies, but in the end, Moscow prevailed. It is during these turbulent years that the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov has set his Kyiv mysteries, an ongoing series of crime novels that follows the policeman Samson Kolechko as he negotiates bandits, speculators, and roaming soldiers of various stripes in his quest to keep order amid the chaos caused by war. Kurkov's mysteries contain enough of the typical tropes of crime fiction to keep fans of the genre satisfied. There is the melancholic police officer with a traumatic origin story (Samson's father was murdered by Cossacks during the revolution); there is the long-suffering love interest (level-headed Nadezhda is the perfect foil to anxious Samson); there are eccentric villains (an ailing Belgian thief steals silver in order to make himself a new skeleton); there are chases, shootouts, and puzzles aplenty. Kurkov's crime capers are deceptive, however. They lure you into seemingly safe generic territory only to subtly undermine your expectations. In the first novel, The Silver Bone, Samson doesn't even join the police force until about a third of the way in, leaving the reader suspended in the tense atmosphere of occupied Kyiv waiting for the story to begin. In the series' second book, The Stolen Heart, which has recently been published in Boris Dralyuk's English translation, the central crime—the illegal sale of pig meat—seems trivial, except that the Bolshevik secret police, or cheka, consider such 'sabotage' punishable by death. These novels are more than detective thrillers: They are studies in the surprising ambivalence that people living under occupation may feel, even when those in power go to extraordinary lengths to cement their rule through violence, manipulation, and terror. And they are important today not just for their insight into the past but also as a guide for surviving the present. Samson despises the lawlessness that accompanies the breakdown of states, and he yearns for the restoration of order; less important to him is the ideology of the party in power. In a job interview with his soon-to-be commanding officer, he is asked whom he supports: the Tsarists, the Ukrainian nationalists, the German-backed government, or the 'workers' regime'? He answers, 'I sympathize with you.' He knows this vague answer can be interpreted as ideologically acceptable. But the inhabitants of a police state can drift in ambivalence for only so long before they are compelled to make a moral choice. Samson realizes that arresting speculators and burglars on behalf of the Bolsheviks will not bring back the stability of his middle-class, prerevolutionary youth. Indeed, he isn't immune to the police's aggression simply because he works for them: His furniture, including his late father's beautiful writing desk, is confiscated, and two Red Army soldiers are billeted in his apartment. There are echoes here of Kurkov's Kyivan literary predecessor, Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard, published in 1925 and set at the same time, is an elegy for Tsarist Kyiv that detests both Ukrainian national aspirations and Bolshevik rule. (Curiously, its theatrical adaptation was a favorite of Stalin's, a fact that kept its author employed through the terror of the 1930s.) The White Guard hinges on the contrast between the cozy bourgeois home of the Turbin family, based on Bulgakov's family home on Kyiv's most picturesque street, and the barbarism unfolding outside. In The Stolen Heart, Samson sees Red Army soldiers violently dispossessing a middle-class family on that same street. At moments like this, Samson begins to doubt his decision to serve the occupation regime: Yes, order is being established, but at what cost? And is order based on legalized violence and theft really order? Bulgakov would have had little time for a Bolshevik lackey like Samson. His protagonists are uncompromisingly loyal to class and empire, and, in this sense, less interesting than Kurkov's more hesitant characters. As a writer born in Russia who built his career in Ukraine, Kurkov understands what it means to be caught between fiercely competing political and cultural projects (as, indeed, do several million Ukrainians living in areas now occupied by Russia). Many of Kurkov's other books examine how the instinct not to take sides often conflicts with the moral imperative to do so. The protagonist of his 1996 breakthrough novel, Death and the Penguin, for instance, naively thinks he can work for the Mafia while remaining an innocent civilian. The more recent Grey Bees, which is set in the aftermath of Russia's original assault on eastern Ukraine in 2014, revolves around the inhabitants of the no-man's-land between the Ukrainian and Russian armies and their attempts to remain neutral. In the end, keeping your head down is usually unsustainable, and Kurkov's protagonists tend, eventually, to locate their moral backbones. In this regard, another early-20th-century influence besides Bulgakov lurks in The Stolen Heart: Mykola Khvylovy. The Ukrainian modernist died by suicide in 1933 in protest of Stalin's arrests of Ukrainian writers. His books were banned for decades, and, unlike Bulgakov's, they rarely reached the outside world in translation. His most famous story, 'I (a Romance),' is about a cheka officer who discovers his mother among a group of counterrevolutionaries and is forced by his superiors to execute her. Khvylovy never did such a thing, but he did fight for the Bolsheviks during the Ukrainian wars of independence that followed the 1917 revolution, and in the end he despaired at what the Russians did to his country and his culture. The story ends with the bewildered officer trudging across the war-torn steppe into the uncertain future, haunted by the moral vacuum within. Near the end of The Stolen Heart, Samson is ordered by a cheka officer to sign an execution warrant for the pork speculator, whom he has finally apprehended. When he refuses to do so, the officer takes Samson's hand, dips his thumb in red ink, and guides it toward the order, leaving a fingerprint in place of a signature: 'The firm red thumbprint looked strange in this rectangle, like that of a criminal,' Samson reflects. That night, he awakens, weeping, from a dream in which he sits beside the coffin of a man with a seeping bullet wound. Looking at his hands, he notices that 'his fingers were smeared with red ink, as if with blood. He knew it wasn't blood. The ink had a chemical scent. The red lines of the verdict issued earlier that day kept rising up in his memory, and a whisper from the darkness kept on repeating, repeating, 'Samson, repent.'' The price of being part of the occupation bureaucracy has become clear. In his translator's note for The Silver Bone, Dralyuk (who handles Kurkov's wry tone and the novels' historical fabric with characteristic dexterity) writes of contemporary Ukrainians that 'the Samsons of today have a far clearer sense of who they are and where they stand.' This is perhaps why Kyiv did not fall in 2022 as it did in 1918: Ukrainians understood that the 'order' imposed by an occupation would come at the price of their freedom. They chose freedom, even if it brought instability, even at the cost of their safety and, for some, their life. That lesson is relevant far beyond Ukraine, wherever ordinary people face the threat of becoming cogs in the machinery of malevolent administrations.
New European
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Imelda Staunton and Jenny Seagrove, the great pretenders
George Bernard Shaw was born about the same time as Oscar Wilde in Dublin, but his plays have not worn as well as those of his flamboyant contemporary. What might have seemed shocking social commentary in Bernard Shaw's day now seems often rather twee, whereas the appeal of Wilde's work endures because really good humour transcends the generations. The director Dominic Cooke has, however, pulled out all the stops to try to make Mrs Warren's Profession – all about a woman who discovers her supposedly well-to-do family's wealth has been based on prostitution – as interesting as it possibly can be. The focus of this is the casting of Imelda Staunton in the title role with her real-life daughter Bessie Carter (by the Downton Abbey actor Jim Carter) playing her daughter on stage. Staunton is great – she is shaping up to be one of our great grand dame actresses in the manner of the late Maggie Smith – and her daughter Bessie is a proper actress in her own right and acquits herself well. There is a wonderful scene-stealing turn from Sid Sagar as a young beau and good old pros like Robert Glenister – playing a seedy older man who fancies his chances with Mrs Warren's daughter – do their stuff admirably. It's all played out on Chloe Lamford's set that delightfully evokes summer days and genteel living, but, for all their best efforts, there is a reason Mrs Warren's Profession is seldom revived in the West End. What might have seemed shocking at the turn of the last century – it was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain – can seem awfully boring in 2025. Jenny Seagrove and Simon Shepherd in The Anastasia File. Photo: Simon Vail Meanwhile, Jenny Seagrove has chosen wisely for her long-awaited return to the stage with Royce Ryton's The Anastasia File. She brings a wonderful mix of aristocratic hauteur and vulnerability to the part of Mrs Manahan, the woman who claimed to her dying day to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, supposed survivor of the massacre of his family by Bolshevik revolutionaries. It's a cleverly constructed piece with a fine ensemble that includes Simon Shepherd as a persistent police inspector inquiring into her story, Rosie Thomson as a possible in-law and Ashley D Gayle as her doctor. Roy Marsden recognises as director that the story is strong and intriguing enough to be told without any unnecessary flourishes and leaves it to his excellent cast to do their stuff. One of those plays where you're forever wondering what's going to happen next. In the case of the production itself, I hope a West End transfer.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's frantic week of peace brokering hints at what he really wants
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." So supposedly said the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The diplomatic whirlwind that has surrounded US President Donald Trump this week suggests the old Bolshevik might have been onto something. For the protectionist president, who promises always to put America First, has in recent days instead been busy bestriding the world stage. He and his team have done business deals in the Gulf; lifted sanctions on Syria; negotiated the release of a US citizen held by Hamas; ended military strikes on Houthi fighters in Yemen; slashed American tariffs on China; ordered Ukraine to hold talks with Russia in Turkey; continued quiet negotiations with Iran over a nuclear deal; and even claimed responsibility for brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan... The pace has been breathless, leaving allies and opponents alike struggling to catch up as the US diplomatic bandwagon hurtled from issue to issue. "Just, wow!" remarked one London-based ambassador. "It is almost impossible to stay on top of everything that's going on." So what is going on? What have we learned in this frantic week about the US president's emerging foreign policy? Is there something approaching a Trump doctrine - or is this just a coincidental confluence of global events? A good place to start, perhaps, is the president's visit to the Gulf where he set out - in word and deed - his vision for a world of interstate relations based on trade, not war. In a speech in Riyadh, Trump said he wanted "commerce not chaos" in the Middle East, a region that "exports technology not terrorism". His was a prospect of a breezy, pragmatic mercantilism where nations did business deals to their mutual benefit, a world where profit can bring peace. As he enjoyed the flattery of his Saudi hosts and the obeisance of visiting dignitaries, the president signed - with his fat felt tip pen - deals that the White House claimed represented $600bn of investment in the US. This was Trump in all his pomp; applauded and rewarded with immediate wins he could sell back home as good for American jobs. Some diplomats privately questioned the value of the various memorandums of understanding. But the show, they said, was more important than the substance. Absent from Trump's speech was any mention of possible collective action by the US and other countries; no talk of multilateral cooperation against the threat of climate change, no concerns about challenges to democratic or human rights in the region. This was a discourse almost entirely without reference to ideology or values except to dismiss their significance. Rather, he used his speech to Saudi leaders to make his clearest argument yet against Western interventionism of the past, attacking what he called "the so-called nation-builders and neo-cons" for "giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs". To the applause of his Arab audience, he said these "Western interventionists" had "wrecked more nations than they built", adding: "Far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins. "I believe it's God's job to sit in judgement. My job is to defend America." That reluctance to intervene was on show in recent days when it came to the fighting between India and Pakistan. In the past, the US has often played a key role seeking to end military confrontations in the subcontinent. But the Trump White House was initially cautious about getting involved. Vice-President JD Vance told Fox News the fighting was "fundamentally none of our business… We can't control these countries". In the end, both he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio did make calls, putting pressure on both nuclear powers to de-escalate. So too did other countries. When the ceasefire was agreed, Trump claimed US diplomacy had brokered the deal. But that was flatly dismissed by Indian diplomats who insisted it was a bilateral truce. The centrality of Trump to US foreign policy has also become apparent this week. This is more than just a simple truism. On show was the lack of involvement of other parts of the US government that traditionally help shape US decision-making overseas. Take the president's extraordinary decision to meet Syria's new president and former jihadist, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and lift sanctions on Syria. This showed the potential advantage of having foreign policy in one man's hands: it was a decisive and bold step. And it was clearly the president's personal decision, after heavy lobbying by both Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It was seen by some diplomats as the quid pro quo for the diplomatic fawning and investment deals Trump received in Riyadh. Not only did the decision surprise many in the region but it also surprised many in the American government. Diplomats said the State Department was reluctant to lift sanctions, wanting to keep some leverage over the new Syrian government, fearful it was not doing enough to protect minorities and tackle foreign fighters. Diplomats say this pattern of impulsive decision-making without wider internal government discussion is common in the White House. The result, they say, is not always positive. This is due, in part, to Trump's lack of consistency (or put simply, changing his mind). Take the decision this week to do a deal with China to cut tariffs on trade with the US. A few weeks ago Trump imposed 145% tariffs on Beijing, with blood thirsty warnings against retaliation. The Chinese retaliated, the markets plunged, American businesses warned of dire consequences. So in Geneva, US officials climbed down and most tariffs against China were cut to 30%, supposedly in return for some increased US access to Chinese markets. This followed a now-familiar pattern: issue maximalist demands, threaten worse, negotiate, climb down and declare victory. The problem is that this "art of a deal" strategy might work on easily reversible decisions such as tariffs. It is harder to apply to longer term diplomatic conundrums such as war. Take Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On this, Trump's policy has been fluid, to put it mildly. And this week was a case in point. Last Saturday the leaders of the UK, France, Poland and Germany visited Kyiv to put on a show of support for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. And in a group call with Trump on French President Emmanuel Macron's phone, they spelled out their strategy of demanding Russia agree an immediate 30-day ceasefire or face tougher sanctions. This was Trump's policy too. The day before he wrote on social media: "If the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions." But then on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin suggested instead there should be direct talks between Ukraine and Russia in Turkey on Thursday. Trump immediately went along with this, backtracking on the strategy he had agreed with European leaders a day earlier. "Ukraine should agree to (these talks) immediately," he wrote on social media. "I am starting to doubt that Ukraine will make a deal with Putin." Then on Thursday, Trump changed his position again, saying a deal could be done only if he and Putin were to meet in person. This puzzles some diplomats. "Does he genuinely not know what he wants to do about the war in Ukraine?" one remarked to me. "Or does he just grasp at what might offer the quickest resolution possible?" Into this puzzling mix fell two other decisions this week. First, Trump agreed a ceasefire after a campaign bombing Houthi fighters in Yemen for almost two months. There have been questions about the effectiveness of the hugely expensive air strikes, and the president's appetite for a long military operation. He repeatedly told his Arab hosts how much he disliked war. Second, Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, held his fourth round of talks with Iran over efforts to curb their nuclear ambitions. Both sides are hinting that a deal is possible, although sceptics fear it could be quite modest. Talk of joint US-Israeli military action against Iran seems to have dissipated. What unites both issues is that the United States was acting directly against the wishes of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu may have been the first world leader invited to the Oval Office after Trump's inauguration, but in recent days, he seems to have been snubbed. Trump toured the Middle East without visiting Israel; he lifted sanctions on Syria without Israel's support. His Houthi ceasefire came only days after the group attacked Tel Aviv airport. Diplomats fear Netanyahu's reaction. Could the spurned prime minister respond with a more aggressive military operation in Gaza? So after this week of diplomatic hurly burly, how much has changed? Perhaps less than might appear. For all the glitz of Trump's tour through the Middle East, the fighting and humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues unresolved. A fresh Israeli offensive seems imminent. One of Trump's chief aims – the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia - remains distant. For all the talks about ending the war in Ukraine, there is no greater likelihood of the guns falling silent. Putin's ambitions seem unchanged. And for all the deals to cut US tariffs, either with the UK or China, there is still huge global market instability. We do have a clearer idea of Trump's global ideology, one that is not isolationist but mercantilist, hoping optimistically that capitalism can overcome conflict. We also have a clearer idea of his haste, his desire to clear his diplomatic decks – in the Middle East, Ukraine and the subcontinent – so he can focus on his primary concern, namely China. But that may prove an elusive ambition. If there are weeks when decades happen, there are also weeks when nothing happens. Joe Biden on Trump: 'What president ever talks like that? That's not who we are' Americans used to be steadfast in their support for Israel. Those days are gone Xi's real test is not Trump's trade war Top picture credit: Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
