May, 2022

• 6 May

  Turkey’s inflation surges to 70%, putting Erdogan in bind

  Turkey’s annual inflation jumped to a two-decade high of 69.97% in April, according to data on Thursday, fuelled by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and rising energy and commodity prices after last year’s lira crash. The surge in prices has badly strained households just over a year before presidential and parliamentary elections …

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• 6 May

  Jihadists kill seven villagers in northeast Nigeria

  Jihadists attacked a village in northeast Nigeria, killing seven people and looting supplies, shortly after UN chief Antonio Guterres arrived in the troubled region for a visit, local sources said on Wednesday. Fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), arriving on motorbikes and in trucks fitted with machine …

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• 5 May

  Russia’s gas blackmail: Putin is bringing a knife to a gun fight

  

  By weaponising gas exports, Putin is digging the grave of Russia’s economy. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin escalated the geo-economic war between his country and the West by suspending gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria, citing the two countries’ refusal to pay in Russian roubles. The move, decried by …

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• 5 May

  Europe scrambles for long-term fix after Putin cuts off gas

  

  European energy providers open Russian rouble accounts for gas, challenging bloc’s united front against Moscow. As Poles and Bulgarians worry their cookers and heaters will run dry, the rest of Europe is scrambling to respond after Vladimir Putin’s latest chess move over the Ukraine conflict – cutting off the gas …

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• 5 May

  Will Vladimir Putin succeed in seizing southwestern Ukraine?

  

  After failing to capture the capital Kyiv and northern Ukraine, Russia now focuses on completing its conquest of the south. It took several cruise missiles to destroy a bridge that linked southwestern Ukraine with Romania – and stood hundreds of kilometres away from the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war. …

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• 5 May

  Turkey: NATO’s Pro-Putin Ally

  

  Western leaders shrugged it off when, in 2016, Erdoğan said in plain language that Turkey did not need to join the European Union “at all costs” and could instead become part of a security bloc dominated by China, Russia and Central Asian nations. Erdoğan’s popularity, since he came to power …

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• 5 May

  Finland’s New Frontier

  

  Will Russia Seek to Disrupt Helsinki’s NATO Bid? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the 30-year post-Cold War order in Europe. Among its most significant and unexpected geopolitical effects is that Finland, long a nonaligned country, will likely soon join NATO, probably followed by its similarly nonaligned neighbor, Sweden. Finland …

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• 5 May

  The War Over Ukrainian Identity

  

  Nationalism, Russian Imperialism, and the Quest to Define Ukraine’s History Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as …

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• 5 May

  The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy

  

  America Can’t Support Democracy Only When It’s Convenient “The invasion of Ukraine is a paradigm shift on the scale of 9/11,” British Foreign Minister Liz Truss told an audience in Washington on March 10. “How we respond today will set the pattern for this new era.” Truss’s comments capture the …

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• 5 May

  Neo-Colonialism: Born in the USA!

  

  While the meaning and practice of “colonialism” hardly needs to be described, the meaning of “neo-colonialism” is far less understood. This is because neo-colonialism is much less evident to the eye, unless, that is, one cares to look for it. Let us begin our search with the dictionary definition of …

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