US president Donald Trump’s pledge to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is proving somewhat trickier to fulfil than he had expected. So far two tentative deals have been agreed - sort of - by both sides but neither appears to have actually come into force. 
 
Russia’s Vladimir Putin - wily old fox that he is - is playing a cunning game, offering a semblance of agreement to proposals then adding so many conditions that any accord becomes impossible to implement. While Trump congratulates himself on reaching a deal, he appears not to notice that the Kremlin keeps kicking his ball into the long grass.
 
First there was Ukraine’s 11 March agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire if Russia also accepted the terms. Such was Putin’s obfuscation that some media outlets initially reported that he had agreed, while others said he refused, and the whole idea seems now to have dropped off the discussion agenda.
 
Following the shuttle negotiations in Saudi Arabia earlier this week, both sides undertook to halt attacks on energy infrastructure and on maritime operations in the Black Sea. But interpretations of the agreements differed between the Russian, Ukrainian and US versions in several key elements. 
 
Russia claimed the ban on energy strikes began on 18 March and said it had recalled its warplanes, but then launched fresh attacks before the ink was even dry; it has struck Ukraine’s energy sites on eight separate occasions since. Its commitment to the Black Sea deal is also in doubt after it later imposed conditions relating to the lifting of sanctions on its agricultural exports before agreeing to implement it. 
 
It’s worth noting that both pledges made so far benefit Russia more than Ukraine. Kyiv has achieved notable success over the past year or so in pushing Russia out of the western part of the Black Sea to facilitate its own grain exports, and in targeting Russian oil refineries and military energy facilities in long-range attacks. Even if fully implemented, neither deal would affect the war on the front lines or diminish the relentless Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.
 
Putin is dragging his feet in the negotiations precisely because he has no desire to settle for peace just yet. What he really wants out of any potential peace deal is territory. The Kremlin is stepping up its efforts to consolidate control over the four Ukrainian regions it partially occupies - which amount to about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. 
 
A decree that Putin signed on 20 March is the latest step in the Russification of the illegally occupied regions. The decree mandates that Ukrainian citizens “illegally” staying in Russia must obtain Russian documents or leave. In other words, Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian passports and citizenship will be kicked out, or to put it another way, the regions will be ethnically cleansed. 
 
The issue of the occupied Ukrainian territory was something the Russians were keen to discuss with the US delegation in Saudi Arabia this week, as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and chief Russia negotiator, unwittingly revealed in an interview with the far-right political commentator Tucker Carlson on 21 March.
 
“They’re Russian-speaking…There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of people indicated they want to be under Russian rule,” Witkoff said, parroting Russian disinformation. Displaying a shocking ignorance for someone involved in such high-level negotiations, Witkoff was unable to name the four regions in question, referring to “these so-called four regions - Donbas, Crimea… and there’s two others”. He didn’t even get the first two right: the four regions that Russia illegally annexed in 2022 are Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
 
Witkoff also muddled the concept of Russian-speaking Ukrainians with ethnic Russians, and made the assumption that those who speak Russian would ally themselves with Russia, which is far from the case. Equating Russian speakers with Russians who support the war, and using language as a motivation for the war, is an oft repeated chapter in the Russian playbook. My own Ukrainian relatives are Russian speakers; they most definitely are not Russian sympathisers.
 
The referendums that Witkoff referred to, held in September 2022, were a sham, secured by the Russian military amid widespread voter intimidation - often at gunpoint, and contravened both Ukrainian and Russian law. Freedom of speech and assembly were denied, no procedures were in place to guarantee the safety and confidentiality of voters. Many pro-Ukrainian voters were persecuted, some were even murdered. No independent observers were present and there were no systems to prevent voter fraud.
 
The BBC reported at the time that in some towns, Russian soldiers with guns stood with a ballot box in the main square to collect votes. Elsewhere, they went door to door. "You have to answer verbally, and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it,” one woman recounted.
 
Voting was hastily organised in a matter of days and took place only in the parts of the four regions that were under Russian control - those living in areas of the four regions still held by Ukraine did not have a voice. In spite of this, the Kremlin claimed that the referendums gave Moscow the right to annex the four regions in their entirety. At that time, Russia occupied most of Luhansk and Kherson regions, but only around 60% of Donetsk, and in Zaporizhzhia it has never even controlled the state capital. The city of Kherson (capital of the region of the same name) was occupied by the Russians at the start of the full-scale invasion but liberated in November 2022, prompting thousands of residents to take to the streets in celebration.
 
Russia claimed that 99% of voters in Donetsk region were in favour of becoming part of Russia, 98% in Luhansk, 87% in Kherson and 93% in Zaporizhzhia. The results were recognised by only two countries - Russia and North Korea, neither of them known for being a beacon of democracy.
 
“Any annexation of a state's territory by another state resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the principles of the UN Charter and international law,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time. “The so-called referendums cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”
 
Steve Witkoff, it would seem, disagrees.

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash
 
 

Today marks three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in the last two weeks the conflict has suddenly been propelled back to the top of the news agenda and into the public consciousness again.

US president Donald Trump’s love-in with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has upended all previously held expectations about the war’s future and potential peace negotiations. Just as they were three years ago, Ukrainians are staring down the barrel of a gun, feeling the full weight of the existential threat facing their country. Ukrainian sovereignty and its existence as an independent country are once again in serious doubt, as they were in February 2022. Then, a 35-mile-long column of tanks was heading towards Kyiv from the Belarusian border and the Russians were aiming to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet leader as president of Ukraine.

“How do I begin to describe what it feels like here, on the ground? It feels oddly similar to these very days three years ago,” says Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. “That anxious February of 2022, filled with a buildup to a disaster. We saw it coming closer but didn’t want to believe it would happen – it seemed so insane, impossible to imagine. A military invasion to take over a free country? Impossible. Just as impossible as it is to believe that the leader of the free world will side with the Russian dictator. And yet, it’s happening.”

For three years, Ukrainians have stood up to the Russian aggressors. The resilience and defiance of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people has shocked and impressed much of the world. Since February 2022, nearly 50,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed on the battlefield, as well as thousands of civilians. Eighty percent of Ukrainians have personal experience of loss, be it a close relative, friend or acquaintance. Ukrainians cannot allow themselves to believe that the carnage of this brutal war is all for nothing.

In the few short weeks since Trump’s inauguration, he has upended the geopolitical principles that have been in place since the end of World War II and in doing so, he appears to have pivoted the US from an ally of Ukraine to a foe.

Many Ukrainians were justifiably frustrated with former president Joe Biden. His regime furnished Ukraine only with sufficient military assistance to prolong the fighting, not enough to win the war. Had Biden been willing to supply more sophisticated weaponry earlier, before the Russians had time to build their formidable lines of defence, he could have saved lives, territory and, probably, money in the long run. But for all that, Ukrainians always knew the US was on their side.

One can only guess at the content of the infamous 90-minute phone call between Trump and Putin, but the Russian president was clearly very persuasive. From that moment on, Trump began parroting Russian propaganda and hurling well-worn Russian insults at Zelensky: calling him a dictator, falsely claiming his approval ratings are at rock bottom, and even insinuating that it was Ukraine that started the war.

It comes as little surprise that the Russian leadership and its state-run media are euphoric, the current state of play goes beyond their wildest dreams. Before negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have even begun, Trump’s team has blithely conceded two of the West’s key leverage points without demanding any concessions in return, stating that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is unrealistic and that Ukraine will never join NATO, not to mention ending Russia’s isolation.

Putin’s three years as an international pariah have come to an abrupt end. He is soon to have a seat at the table with the American president, while US negotiators agreed to reestablish full diplomatic relations and talked about potential joint energy ventures. Trump has even signalled an intention to invite Russia back into the G7.

Numerous historical comparisons with the period before and during the Second World War have already been made by myself and many others. Most obviously, Trump’s appeasement of Putin calls to mind the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the leaders of Britain, France and Italy signed away part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an attempt to avert a wider war. Any freezing of the frontlines in Ukraine is likely to set the scene for further Russian incursions down the line.

Then there’s the notion of two nationalist dictators making a deal behind the backs of other world leaders (while Putin is a dictator in every sense of the word, Trump merely acts like one), reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 – the ill-fated non-aggression treaty that enabled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up parts of Eastern Europe unopposed.
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And, of course, the meeting of Russian and American officials in Saudi Arabia to discuss the fate of Ukraine without inviting representatives from Kyiv or the rest of Europe to the table smacks of the 1945 Yalta Conference. Then, the three chief allied leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – met in the Crimean resort town to decide the fate of Germany, carving up the country into zones and deciding the future of the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. 

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Today's services of remembrance honour the six million Jews - two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population - murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, as well as millions of others - political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, gays, blacks, those with disabilities.

But no memorial service, no book or film or TV documentary, can adequately commemorate what happened during the Holocaust: the systematic and targeted persecution and killing of Europe's Jews. The humiliation, torture, starvation, and annihilation of an entire people in a world scarred by prejudice. The Holocaust didn't begin with Auschwitz, it began with hate. It began with the separation in people's minds of 'us' and 'them', of stigmatising Jews because they were considered different. Jewish property and businesses were vandalised, Jews suffered public humiliation in the streets and town squares, their children were forced out of their schools, and parents forced out of their homes. Eventually Jews became dehumanised to such a degree that they could be killed like vermin, gassed using a pesticide, Zyklon B.

Eighty years on, we see the same process of stigmatisation. It has become acceptable political discourse to dehumanise migrants. Our politicians exhort, "Stop the Boats!" and "Send them Back!" Minorities are increasingly coming under attack - be they Jews, Muslims, migrants or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Political parties and other organisations espousing far-right views are on the rise across Europe and the Americas. It feels like the lessons we thought we had learned from the Holocaust are being forgotten, and soon there will be no survivors left to remind us.

The words of a plaque on the site of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau are more poignant than ever: "For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity". 

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2018. The tour, conducted by a guide whose great-grandfather had survived the camps, was haunting. Appalling, gruesome, sickening….there are no words that can do justice to the horrors perpetrated there. The visit is something everyone should experience. It records events that should never be allowed to happen again. And yet humanity periodically forgets. Since then, ethnic cleansing has been perpetrated in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Myanmar. Right now, there are accusations of genocide in Gaza and Ukraine. 

Even more shocking to me than the Nazi concentration camp was the sense of absence in the Polish cities I visited. In Krakow and Warsaw, the pre-war Jewish communities made up around a quarter and a third of the population, respectively – around 60,000 Jews lived in Krakow and 400,000 in Warsaw. In Krakow, the loss is palpable. Several vestiges of the old Jewish quarter remain – synagogues turned into museums; a cemetery where one wall has been built using fragments of gravestones shattered by the Nazi occupiers; shop fronts adorned with the names of their Jewish former owners. Indeed there is something of a revival of Jewish culture and heritage, with concerts of klezmer music, a Jewish festival and the Israeli ‘Hummus and Happiness Bar’, as well as a museum of photographs documenting the area’s Jewish life and loss.

In Warsaw it is the dearth of remnants of the Jewish community that is so chilling. The Germans razed the city to the ground as they fled the approaching Soviet troops. This makes the tiny fragments that remain all the more shocking: a single street that survived the demolition of the ghetto, pockmarked with bullet holes; a narrow fragment of ghetto wall; a synagogue that miraculously survived – one of over 400 that used to exist in the city; metal strips traversing the pavement at intervals, marking where the wall stood from 1940 until the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, when its inhabitants were herded onto cattle trucks and sent to the death camp at Treblinka.
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And, in the sparkling new Jewish museum, exhibits marking hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland come to an end not during the war, but afterwards, when the remaining few Jewish survivors returned to their villages to be welcomed not with sympathy and understanding, but with rampant anti-Semitism and fresh pogroms. The foundation of the state of Israel provided the escape that the remaining Jews needed, and they fled, en masse, in 1948.

The momentous events in Syria that culminated in the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad earlier this month may come to be seen as a turning point in Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

It seems all too fitting that Assad should flee to Moscow, to be welcomed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and granted asylum. The two men have much in common. They came to power within weeks of one another, both anointed by their predecessors. Assad assumed the presidency in July 2000 on the death of his father, the brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, while Putin was nominated by the increasingly drunken and shambolic former president Boris Yeltsin as his successor at the turn of the millennium. He went on to win a snap election in March 2000, formally taking office in May that year.

A quarter of a century ago, both men represented a great new hope for their respective countries. Assad was young, Western-educated and charming. Many expected him to make a decisive break from the violent and repressive autocracy of his father. Putin’s accession to the presidency also marked a dramatic shift from the chaotic Yeltsin years. Then US president George W Bush famously said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

But the Western politicians and diplomats couldn’t have got it more wrong. Assad and Putin have presided over two of the harshest totalitarian states of our era, marked by strict repression, human rights abuses, and imprisonment or murder of opponents.

The two dictators cemented their alliance during Syria’s civil war. Putin came to Assad’s aid when the latter’s grip on power was hanging by a thread, launching thousands of Russian air strikes in 2015-2016 that wreaked havoc on opposition strongholds, in particular Aleppo, which was bombed to smithereens. Mile after mile of Syria’s second biggest city was razed to the ground, leaving nothing but rubble, twisted metal and shattered remnants of people’s lives – a strategy Putin would later repeat in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. Russia’s intervention in Syria was instrumental in turning the tide back in Assad’s favour.

The fall of Assad’s regime casts doubt on the future of Russia’s naval base at Tartus, a key strategic deepwater port on the eastern Mediterranean, and its nearby airbase at Hmeimim. Russian naval vessels have already moved away from their base. What’s more, Russia’s failure to prevent the fall from power one of its key allies serves to dampen Moscow’s prestige in parts of the world, most notably the Sahel region of Africa, where Putin has sought to gain influence and control of natural resources.

But most worrying of all for Putin, the swiftness of the rebel advance in Syria proves that longstanding autocratic leaders can be toppled, including when they least expect it. Even though it failed, the march on Moscow by Putin’s former friend Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023 – often referred to as an attempted coup – indicates that Russia is not immune to such sudden reversals. It’s well known that Putin is prone to paranoia and he must now be seeing shadows lurking in every corner of the Kremlin.

There are other signs too, that Putin isn’t getting things all his own way. Meddling in the elections of other countries is one of Russia’s tried and tested methods of gaining influence and fomenting opposition to the West, including using Russian bots to flood social media platforms with anti-Western commentary and disinformation. But neighbouring democracies have got wise to Moscow’s tactics and started fighting back.

Last month a referendum in Moldova on including a desire for EU membership in the country’s constitution passed by a far narrower margin than expected, allegedly because of a surge in Russian-sponsored interference. Moldova issued a formal protest to its Russian ambassador, accusing Moscow of organising ineligible voting, bribery, and security threats in a bid to influence the vote.

In Georgia, opposition groups accuse the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party of rigging the vote and stealing October’s parliamentary elections, plunging the country into turmoil. Mass protests reminiscent of Ukraine’s Euromaidan movement of 2013-14 have continued since late November following a decision to delay EU accession talks, further reignited by the appointment of a vehemently anti-Western president.

And most recently, and most dramatically of all, Romania has annulled the result of its 24 November first round presidential election vote, which was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Putin sympathiser. Romania’s constitutional court took the unprecedented step of cancelling the election after intelligence concluded that Georgescu had benefitted from a mass influence operation conducted on TikTok, allegedly orchestrated from Russia.

As well as declining influence in its near abroad, signs are beginning to emerge of discontent at home as the Russian economy sags under the pressure of nearly three years of war. Galloping military spending and labour shortages have sent inflation soaring, creating a cost-of-living crisis far eclipsing anything we have experienced in the West. Butter prices have risen by 30% this year and supermarkets now keep it in locked cabinets to prevent people from stealing it to resell on the black market.

Spiralling interest rates and sharp falls in the rouble’s value are further eroding spending power for consumers, and the effects of US and European sanctions are finally beginning to bite. Having defied the West with its resilience for the last three years, Russia’s economic growth is dropping sharply and leading even the hardy and complacent Russian populace to question its government’s priorities.

These reversals in Moscow's fortunes are not yet enough to affect the situation on the battlefield, where Russia remains on the ascendancy. Its army continues its slow, grinding offensives into Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and around Kharkiv, as well as taking back inch by inch (with the help of North Korean troops) the Russian territory in Kursk region that it lost to Ukraine in the summer.

But Russian progress is painfully slow-moving and comes at an ever-greater price. November’s military losses were the highest since the start of the war, with more than 45,000 Russians killed or seriously wounded over the course of the month. Even by Russian meat-grinder standards, the figures are truly staggering. On 28 November alone, Russian casualties numbered 2,030. Compare this with the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s when approximately 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in nearly a decade of fighting.

It is no coincidence that Russia’s war losses have soared since Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in the US. Trump famously boasted on the campaign trail that he would “end the war in 24 hours”, prompting Putin to redouble his efforts and throw the kitchen sink at his war effort, desperate to put Russia in as strong a position as possible ahead of expected peace negotiations when Trump comes to power.
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In contrast, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has initiated a charm offensive with Trump, signalling a willingness to compromise and discussing possible scenarios for ending hostilities. And the initial signs indicate that his tactics may be working. Following a meeting with Zelensky in Paris, the mood music in the Trump camp may be shifting slightly in Ukraine’s favour.

​Everyone knows that Trump loves to make a deal and that he can’t stand losers. If he can be persuaded that backing Putin – who he has previously referred to as a friend – would be the equivalent of a great big L on the forehead, Trump may just throw himself decisively behind Zelensky and enable the Ukrainians to reverse some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield and negotiate a peace deal on favourable terms. Maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

We all know that US President-elect Donald Trump is big on words, but that his actions don’t always mirror his rhetoric. He has said on numerous occasions that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, but what is that likely to mean in practice?

The most widely used adjective to describe Trump (or the most widely used adjective that I can repeat in print) is “unpredictable”. His actions are impossible to second guess, but what we do know is that Russian president Vladimir Putin will be dancing a jig (inwardly at least) at the prospect of a second Trump term.

Russia has played an active role in helping to influence in Trump’s favour the outcome of all three presidential elections he has contested. A US investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian troll farms had disseminated propaganda aimed at damaging the Democratic Party and attacking its 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as hacking the Democratic Party campaign and promoting Trump. During this year’s campaign, the US government in September sanctioned high-profile Russian figures, including Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, for allegedly interfering in the election and seized internet domains linked to Russian propaganda.

Trump has repeatedly touted his close relationship with Putin, and the two are reputed to have participated in frequent phone calls. His past remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine make troubling reading. He has described the Kremlin’s actions as “savvy” and “genius”, and declared that he would not help protect NATO allies that fail to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to defence: “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills,” he said in February. He has also described Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as “one of the greatest salesmen in history,” for his success in obtaining billions of dollars of US support for Ukraine.

But Putin is a wily old fox. His expectations for the outcome of his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have been wildly misguided (a “special military operation” intended to last two weeks has rumbled on for close to 1,000 days) but he can still outsmart Trump any day of the week. Recent comments by Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hint that Putin isn’t going to make it easy for the incoming US president.

“We know him from his previous quest for power and we believe that some of his promises, in which he spoke of a quick resolution of the situation in Ukraine, are nothing more than rhetoric,” Ryabkov told Russian news agency Interfax. Moscow currently only conceives of ending the war on its own terms, he continued. "There is no opportunism here and our interests do not depend on who occupies the Oval Office.”

President Zelensky may have been quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, but his election win has met with deep fear and despondency in Ukraine. All his campaign rhetoric indicates that Trump will withdraw financial support for Ukraine and try to broker a peace deal. This manifesto represents a lose-lose for Kyiv. Without US weaponry and ammunition, Ukraine would quickly cede territory on the battlefield; and any deal is likely to favour Russia, with the added fear that Putin would fail to honour the terms of the treaty and advance again in the future.

Putin in June laid out his demands in a peace proposal and there’s no reason to suggest his goals have changed since then. He said Russia should keep all the land it occupies as well as the provinces that it claims but does not fully control – meaning the whole of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, even though Ukraine still holds parts of the latter two, including their regional capitals. Russia would also insist on Ukraine giving up all hope of NATO membership. For Ukraine, these demands are nothing short of an ultimatum for surrender.

Whatever the terms of any new peace treaty, the signals from Washington and Moscow already hint that progress may be far from straightforward. Trump and Putin are both notorious for their casual relationship with the truth. We’ve already had Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (an expert in the art of denying statements that later turn out to be true) dismissing reports of a phone call between the two after the Washington Post reported that Trump had warned Putin of “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe”.

We learned during Trump’s first term that campaign rhetoric is not necessarily an indicator of his policies once in office, and his opinions can pivot wildly depending on who he listens to. He appears to be surrounding himself with a small group of wealthy allies and loyalists, and has ruled out his pro-Ukrainian former secretary of state Mike Pompeo as a possible defence secretary. But frequent personnel changes were a feature of Trump’s first term, and Pompeo says he still believes Trump will adopt a more hardline approach to Russia once he re-enters the White House.

“It’s absolutely critically important that the perception is the West stood up to this thug and this horrible guy [Putin] and didn’t allow evil to triumph and that’s imperative,” Pompeo told the Fortune Global Forum. “I’m very hopeful President Trump will see that imperative.”

Pompeo told the BBC Ukrainecast podcast back in May that the way to deter Putin’s aggression is with “an administration in the US and a strong, capable NATO that deliver a message to President Putin that the cost of continuing his aggression will exceed the benefits”.

Only time will tell whether Trump listens to Pompeo’s view, or to those Republicans who say the billions of dollars allocated to supporting Ukraine would be better spent at home. The future of Ukraine is more uncertain than ever.


Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

On Monday, Israel marked the anniversary of the Hamas attacks that left around 1,200 dead – most of them civilians – with another 250 taken hostage. In Israel and around the world, people awoke on 7 October 2023 to the shocking news and tried to make sense of events as they unfolded. There was an outpouring of sympathy for Israel. Candles were lit, vigils held and buildings were illuminated in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.
 
How things have changed a year on, with so much of Gaza now laid to waste and tens of thousands killed during the Israeli offensive that ensued. On top of that, Israel is now at war with Lebanon too, violence has escalated in the West Bank, Iran has fired barrages of missiles at Israel, and the prospect of all-out war in the Middle East is inching ever closer.
 
Closer to home, North America and Europe have witnessed a surge in antisemitism as a reaction to Israel’s unrelenting offensives. And all our lives will be affected in myriad ways if Israel takes revenge on Iran by targeting its oil facilities. The resulting spike in energy prices as winter approaches would exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis that many of us have experienced, pushing up inflation yet again and edging us closer to another global economic crisis.
 
Israelis saw the savage cross-border raids by Hamas a year ago as a threat to their country’s very existence. The same is true for Ukrainians of the full-scale invasion of their country by Russian forces in February 2022. This is just one of several parallels between the two conflicts,although there are marked differences too.
 
In Ukraine, the war began when one sovereign nation invaded another, making it a more conventional conflict. The war in Gaza, in contrast, was instigated by a non-state militant group (albeit one that is a quasi-governmental agency) with an audacious terrorist attack on the territory of another nation state. In the ensuing war, by way of defending its sovereignty, that nation state has unleashed the most devastating revenge on neighbouring territories.
 
The death toll in both conflicts is truly shocking, with Russia, Israel and Hamas all showing scant regard for human life. In Ukraine, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has recorded nearly 12,000 civilian deaths since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The actual total is expected to be far higher. Nearly six million Ukrainians are refugees, both within the country and abroad. Ukrainians repeatedly accuse Russia of genocide.
 
The number of soldiers killed in combat in the two-and-a-half years of the full-scale war is difficult to ascertain, but the Wall Street Journal last month estimated Ukrainian losses at 80,000 killed and 400,000 wounded, with Russia suffering 200,000 military deaths and 400,000 wounded, putting overall military casualties at over a million.
 
The staggering number of Russian army dead reflects its military leadership’s utter disregard for the lives of its own soldiers. It sacrifices them by the hundred in ‘meat grinder’ or ‘human wave’ attacks aimed at wearing down Ukrainian forces and exposing their positions to Russian artillery, for the sake of capturing a few metres of territory. New recruits are given insufficient training or weapons before being sent to the front line, where they may survive for just a matter of weeks.
 
Just like the Russian army in Ukraine, both sides in the Gaza war are alleged to have committed terrible war crimes. The scenes of flattened buildings in Gaza City and Khan Younis are reminiscent of Mariupol and Bakhmut; in Israel, the decomposing bodies scattered across the grass verges of Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri are reminiscent of Bucha and Irpin. Every image of a dead child, whatever its nationality, is unique and devastating.
 
As in Ukraine, the G-word is often repeated in Gaza too, with Palestinians frequently accusing Israel of genocide. The shocking death toll – to date around 42,000 mostly civilians have been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities – reflects the tragedy of their situation. Hamas instigated the October 7 attacks knowing full well that Israel’s retaliation would be swift and deadly, knowing that civilians would pay with their lives for Hamas’ use of residential areas and civilian infrastructure for military purposes. Not only does Hamas use human shields, but it also fails to open its tunnels to shelter civilians. The people of Gaza are victims of their own leadership as much as victims of Israel.
 
What is more, unlike Ukrainians, the inhabitants of this densely populated territory have been unable to flee to safety. Gaza’s three border crossings have remained blockaded by Israel and Egypt, which wants to avoid being drawn into the conflict and having to absorb a flood of refugees. Egypt also fears accusations of facilitating ethnic cleansing if it establishes refugee camps for the people of Gaza, potentially allowing Israel an opportunity to occupy their land – as some in the Israeli government have advocated. For the same reason, many Gazans would be reluctant to cross into Egypt even if it were possible, fearing that Israeli citizens would resettle their homes and communities, leaving them as permanent refugees without a homeland.
 
In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined his goals to eliminate Hamas and to bring the hostages home. A year on, neither of these objectives have been met. A terrorist organisation and an ideology are harder to destroy with missiles and guns than a regular army. There is no end in sight.
 
Both Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin stand accused of putting their own political survival ahead of the lives of their citizens. Both are long-standing leaders whose legacies will be defined by their current wars. Putin is already subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, and warrants have been requested for Netanyahu and Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
 
For Israelis, and Jews everywhere, the events of 7 October were a painful reminder of the past. For centuries, Jews had faced persecution and pogroms in Europe – nowhere more so, ironically, than in Ukraine – culminating in the six million murdered in the Holocaust. With the formation of the state of Israel, Jews thought they could finally put all the horrors of the past behind them. They came to the new Jewish state vowing ‘Never Again’. Never again would they be discriminated against or murdered just for being Jewish. They built themselves a new promised land, conscripted their youth and created a fortress, protected by some of the world’s most sophisticated military and intelligence operations to prevent the antisemitic atrocities of the past. The Hamas attacks a year ago finally shattered the dream and Jews’ sense of security around the world. 
 
Photo by MohammedIbrahim on Unsplash

​Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, interest in Ukrainian culture has flourished in the West, helping Ukrainian literature, music and art to meet with a new, receptive audience for the first time. Taking advantage of this blossoming demand for all things Ukrainian, the latest exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Art, In the eye of the Storm, showcases the country’s modernist era from 1900 to the 1930s.

Just as during the current conflict, this period of violent upheaval went hand in hand with a thriving creative scene across literature, theatre and art. The modernist movement unfolded against a backdrop of collapsing empires, the First World War, the fight for independence, the establishment of Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor and Stalin’s purges.  

Most of the works on show are on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, others come from the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine, having been removed from the country for safekeeping in the autumn of 2022 and trucked across the border into Poland.

Ironically, curator Konstantin Akinsha had been trying for several years to convince Western museums to host the show, only to be met with lukewarm interest or deterred by political tensions. Once the war came to Kyiv, all this changed. “Ironically, at the end of the day, the best promoter of my exhibition was Vladimir Putin. He ultimately made it possible by invading Ukraine,” Akinsha told New York-based ARTnews. As well as bringing an under-recognised school of modernism to a new audience, the exhibition – which launched in Madrid in 2022 – serves to save these precious artworks from the threat of Russian attack.

“The museum collections of Mariupol, Melitopol, and Kherson were lost, removed by Russians or partly destroyed,” Akinsha says. “When the war started, I decided that, if they don’t want to evacuate the collections, I had no choice but to start my own war. I was adamant that we had to move the paintings that eventually comprised In the Eye of the Storm abroad because the prospect of the show would be more acceptable than an evacuation. We made an appeal to the presidential administration. To my surprise, our undertaking was supported by President Zelensky.”

The exhibition demonstrates the falsehood of Putin’s claim that Ukrainian culture independent of Russia does not exist. It is rich in vivid colour and compositions of Ukrainian folk and decorative art – part of the wider modernist movement with its emphasis on revolutionary and technological innovation, but with a distinct flavour of its own.

It features artists from Russian, Polish and Jewish, as well as Ukrainian, communities, all of whom lived or worked in Ukraine for a period. Some are already well known to an international audience, including Kazymyr Malevych, Sonia Delaunay and El Lissitzky. Less celebrated, but equally significant, was Alexandra Exter, who founded an influential art studio in Kyiv introducing painters to the latest European art movements while associating them directly with Ukrainian folk art. Many other of the artists represented here, I, for one, had never heard of, including Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boichuk and Issachar Ber Ryback. Between them, they helped define Ukraine’s cultural identity in the early 20th century before it was snuffed out by Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders.

For many of the featured works, this was not the first time they had been rescued from danger. Some had been confiscated during the Stalin era or hidden from the Soviet censors. From the 1930s onwards, dozens of modernist works were confiscated from museums and other institutions and held in secret storerooms awaiting destruction. Ironically it was another war – World War II – that prevented the demolition of many of these precious paintings as the leadership turned its attention to a mightier foe than the art world. Numerous works were later saved by the director of Ukraine’s National Museum in Kyiv, who took them into storage and cunningly marked their value as zero on the accompanying paperwork, enabling them to remain under the radar.

The same goes for the artists themselves – some fled the country and flourished abroad; some stayed and perished in the purges. Boichuk, for example, was shot by the Soviet secret police in 1937. The monumental frescoes he was most famous for were plastered over. Ryback fled after his father was murdered in a pogrom in Elisavetgrad that left 350 dead, heading first to Kyiv, then Moscow, and finally to Berlin.

Along with El Lissitzky, Manuil Shekhtman, Sarah Shor and Marko Epshtein, Rybak was part of the Jewish Kultur Lige an organisation founded in Kyiv in 1918 that promoted the development of contemporary Jewish-Yiddish culture. A section of the exhibition features work by this group of artists, much of it depicting subject matter particular to the Jewish community of the period – the shtetl and the violent pogroms of the 1917-21 civil war.

The exhibition highlights the range of artistic styles and cultural identities prevalent in Ukraine’s artistic circles at that time. The influence of other modernist movements of the period is evident, and hardly surprising. There was no art academy in Ukraine at the start of the 20th century, so Ukrainian artists moved westwards to study, and brought back to Ukraine new ideas based on the creative movements prevalent in Europe at the time: cubism from France; futurism from Italy; expressionism from Germany.

This freedom of artistic experimentation that runs through the exhibition came to an abrupt end by the mid-1930s, with Stalin increasingly fearful of Ukraine’s national movement and of any kind of experimentation in art, music, literature or theatre, which was labelled bourgeois, decadent and “formalist”.

“Mr Putin repeats every other day that Ukraine’s identity and culture doesn’t exist, but In the Eye of the Storm proves that it does,” Akinsha says. In its review of the show, The Guardian urges its readers to: “go to this show, if you can, not just because the art is so moving, but because it feels like the smallest act of solidarity with Ukraine and its culture.” I, for one, will be looking for an opportunity to get to London this summer to see it.
 
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930s runs at the Royal Academy of Art, Burlington Gardens until 13 October 2024.

Image taken from the RA website: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/eye-of-the-storm
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For the full interview with Konstantin Akinsha, see https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/in-the-eye-of-the-storm-curator-konstantin-akinsha-ukrainian-modernism-1234711930/

Last week the UK elected a new government and a new prime minister. Whatever we thought of the last bunch (and the results show most of us really didn’t think much of them at all), the majority of Conservative MPs who were unseated or lost their government posts were surprisingly magnanimous in defeat. Of particular note were the words of the outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, who retained his seat only by the narrowest of margins.

For those less familiar with British politics, Hunt was catapulted into the role of finance minister to steady the ship during the disastrous and short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, after she was forced to sacrifice her chosen chancellor and partner-in-crime, Kwasi Kwarteng. Hunt had previously been health minister from 2012-2018 and became so unpopular that many gave him a nickname that replaced the first letter of his surname with a C. However, he won over some of his detractors with these words, spoken at around 5am on Friday morning.

“A message to my children – who I sincerely hope are asleep now – this may seem like a tough day for our family as we move out of Downing Street, but it isn’t. We are incredibly lucky to live in a country where decisions like this are made not by bombs or bullets, but by thousands of ordinary citizens peacefully placing crosses in boxes on bits of paper. Brave Ukrainians are dying every day to defend their right to do what we did yesterday and we must never take that for granted. Don’t be sad, this is the magic of democracy”.

Indeed, Ukraine had been scheduled to hold its own presidential elections in March or April this year. But Kyiv enacted martial law on 24 February 2022 in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion and the country’s legal framework does not permit elections to be held when martial law is in effect. Even if the law had allowed elections to go ahead, this would have been impossible in practical terms, with millions of Ukrainians living abroad in fear for their safety and the threat of Russian missiles and bombs targeting busy polling stations.

In contrast, Russia did hold a presidential election back in March, which Vladimir Putin won by a landslide far eclipsing that of the British Labour Party. The difference, of course, is that one election was free and fair and the other wasn’t.

Reports of ballot-stuffing and coercion were widespread in Russia, while any genuine opposition candidates were barred. Just one, a former member of Russia’s state duma running on an anti-war platform, made it through the vetting process. Boris Nadezhdin was careful to play by the Kremlin’s rules, avoiding direct criticism of Putin. Russia-watchers had considered he might be allowed to remain on the ballot to create a semblance of competition, and to provide a narrative for Putin to rally against. But Nadezhdin proved too popular, with a hundred thousand Russians flocking to sign supporter lists for him, and was barred from standing on technical grounds just weeks before polling day.

Voting in Russia’s presidential election also took place in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, where there were reports of residents being forced to vote at gunpoint or amid threats of withholding medical care or other social benefits. Vadym Boychenko, the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, described how a woman “accompanied by two Chechen military men with machine guns” turned up at his neighbour’s apartment with a ballot box and made it clear that voting was not optional. At least 27 Ukrainians who refused to vote were arrested, according to human rights activists. A high turnout was important to Putin to help silence dissent and present himself as a legitimate and popular leader.

In Russia itself, thousands of citizens headed to the polling stations at midday as a form of protest inspired by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in February in an Arctic prison, in an action called “noon against Putin”. Some visited Navalny’s grave in Moscow to symbolically cast their vote for him. In a country that punishes any form of anti-war criticism with a jail sentence – often accompanied by torture – even these mildest of protests were very risky and dozens were arrested.

Not only does the magic of democracy in the UK contrast sharply with the presidential election in Russia, but the gracious and orderly transfer of power is diametrically opposed to the last US presidential election, when Donald Trump refused to concede and attempted to overturn the result by inciting an insurgency in Washington DC. Five people died in the riot at the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, as the country and the rest of the world looked on in horror. We can only hope that the upcoming US elections will run as smoothly as those in the UK.

​Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Earlier this month a blue plaque was unveiled outside a little grocer’s shop in the small town of Harlech in North Wales. I’ve been a regular visitor to Harlech all my life, as it’s just down the road from the remote farmhouse where my grandparents spent most of their retirement, and which my brother and I recently inherited.
 
Harlech is best known for its medieval castle - a Unesco world heritage site, its long, sandy beach and, recently, a tussle with Dunedin in New Zealand to be home to the world’s steepest street. I for one knew nothing of Harlech’s link with an elite secret commando unit of Jewish refugees, sometimes referred to as the real life Inglourious Basterds of the Quentin Tarantino film.
 
Number 3 (Jewish) Troop, No 10 Commando – otherwise known as X Troop – was established in July 1942, on the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten, when Britain seemed on the brink of defeat. It was to be a highly trained commando unit made up almost entirely of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who had escaped on the Kindertransports that brought young Jews to Britain. They were a disparate group made up largely of intellectuals, artists and athletes, many of whom had been interned as enemy aliens, having lost their homes and families to the Nazis. All were hellbent on revenge.
 
Because of the men’s origins, and the dangers they would face if captured, the very existence of the troop was shrouded in secrecy. Members of the unit had to adopt fake British names and personas and destroy all traces of their former selves. Winston Churchill himself gave the troop its name. “Because they will be unknown warriors…they must be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X Troops,” he said.
 
X Troop operated as a commando unit, using advanced combat skills to fight behind enemy lines. Described as a suicide squad, many did not come back alive. Members of the troop were attached to other units rather than fighting together as a group, but were referred to as the most effective commando unit in World War II. Their daring undercover missions included in an operation to steal a German Enigma code machine.
 
X Troop fighters were also trained in counterintelligence and played an important role in interrogating German soldiers as soon as they were captured, making use of their native language skills.
 
After the war, members of X Troop went on to become Nazi hunters, routing out hidden party members and gathering intelligence and documentation used at the Nuremburg trials. One member of the troop made an arduous journey across Germany to rescue his own parents from the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
 
The troop first assembled in a traditional stone building on Harlech’s main street, now the blue-plaqued grocer’s shop, and used it as a social club. Its commanding officer, Major Bryan Hilton-Jones, a Cambridge modern languages graduate, was born in Harlech and grew up in Caernarfon, another North Wales town famous for its castle.
 
The group spent nine months training in the rough terrain of Snowdonia, including running nearly 40 miles from Harlech to the top of Snowdon – the highest mountain in England and Wales – and back, and scaling the walls of Harlech Castle.
 
The BBC quotes Bryan Hilton-Jones’ daughter, Nerys Pipkin, saying, "Dad was a quiet man, but legendary for his physical fitness and sense of humour…he was as tough as nails and the sort of man who inspired people – just the right type of person to lead this unit." Major Hilton-Jones was a father figure to the troop and won their utmost loyalty and respect. He died near Barcelona in 1969 aged just 51, in a car crash that also killed two of his daughters and seriously injured his wife Edwina.
 
Bryan Hilton-Jones’ friend Kevin Fitzgerald wrote of him in an obituary, “No one could tire him. Many so-called hard men were glad to fall back a little after the first five or six hours. They could outclimb him (some of them) but never outwalk him. He had a map of Wales in his head and never failed to select the hardest, longest distance between any two Welsh points. It was always worth it; he was the perfect companion.”
 
In 1999, a large memorial stone was erected in Aberdyfi, 20-odd miles south of Harlech, where the soldiers were billeted and did much of their training.
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The story the clandestine commando unit is told in Leah Garret’s 2021 book X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II.

Every day this month, Holocaust survivors from around the world are posting videos of themselves reading from Holocaust denial articles found on social media as part of a campaign titled #CancelHate organised by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The Claims Conference, as it is better known, launched the project to illustrate how Holocaust denial and distortion can not only rewrite history, but perpetuate antisemitic tropes and spread hate. It comes at a time of rising antisemitism around the world, triggered by Israel’s horrific military campaign in Gaza in response to the deadly Hamas attack of 7 October.

“The world is a volatile place right now. Social media offers individuals a place to hide while they spread words of hate. This campaign shows that these are not victimless posts – these mean and vile words deny the first-hand testimony of each and every Holocaust survivor, their suffering and the suffering and often loss of their families,” says Gideon Taylor, President of the Claims Conference.

Recent studies conducted by the Claims Conference show a growing gap in basic knowledge of the Holocaust, leaving younger generations increasingly vulnerable to denial and distortion. An astonishing 49% of young American adults have come across information online denying or distorting the truth about the Holocaust. Elsewhere, in the UK, 29% of adults reported seeing denial or distortion on social media. In Canada, 22% of Millennial and Gen Z adults were not even sure if they had heard of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s government repeatedly manipulates the history of the Holocaust for its own political purposes, falsely portraying Ukrainians as Nazis and even accusing Jews of being Nazis. 

“I could never have imagined a day when Holocaust survivors would be confronting such a tremendous wave of Holocaust denial and distortion, but sadly, that day is here. We all saw what unchecked hatred led to – words of hate and antisemitism led to deportations, gas chambers and crematoria. Holocaust survivors from around the world are participating in this campaign to show that hate will not win,” says Greg Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference.

With the last generation of Holocaust survivors now in their eighties and nineties, the number of survivors able to tell their stories dwindles year by year and it will soon be too late to hear their testimonies direct. Listening to these old men and women recounting brief snippets about events that happened to them as young children, the power of their words is still strong, their emotion palpable.

Each video shows a Holocaust survivor introducing themselves, reading social media posts about Holocaust denial, then briefly recounting some of their own experiences of the Holocaust. Every video ends with the tagline, “Words matter. Cancel hate”.

Here’s an example, presented by a Jewish American therapist, social worker, author and academic, who was born in Poland:

“My name is Tova Friedman, I am a holocaust survivor. Let me read to you words of a denier: ‘Dachau was full of Catholic religious and priests, not Jews. Auschwitz Jews had swimming pools, orchestras, and brothels.’ These are the words of a denier. Well, let me tell you, at the age of 5½, I and my mother and father got off the cattle trucks in Auschwitz. I was taken away from my mother and I spent six months of my life with inhuman conditions – starvation, illnesses. I saw the death chambers, I saw the smoke. We were tattooed. There were so many incidents – beatings, starvation, typhus. Out of my town, out of hundreds of children, five were left. Words matter. Cancel Hate.”

Abraham Foxman, an American lawyer and former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says, “I survived the Holocaust, but 13 members of my immediate family were murdered because they were Jewish. Holocaust denial on social media isn’t just another post. These things we say matter. Posts that deny the Holocaust are hateful and deny the suffering of millions of people. We must take our words seriously. Our words matter.”

Hedi Argent MBE, a 94-year-old British author, fled her home in Austria with her family in 1939, just weeks before the border closed. “My family was turned out of our home…because we were Jews. My father was forced to scrub the streets and was later arrested for making anti-Nazi comments, yet we were the lucky ones. The 17 members of my family who were murdered were not lucky. The Holocaust did happen,” she recounts.

Herbert Rubinstein was five years old when he and his mother were taken from the Jewish ghetto in Chernivtsi and herded onto a cattle truck bound for the camps. They were among the few lucky ones – having managed to obtain forged Polish identity documents while living in the ghetto, they were removed from the truck and fled, seeking refuge in several countries of Eastern Europe until the end of the war. “I lived through the Holocaust. Six million were murdered. Hate and Holocaust denial have returned to our society today. I am very, very sad about this and I am fighting it with all my might and strength. Words matter. Our words are our power,” he says.

Watch the videos here https://www.claimscon.org/cancelhate/ or follow the Claims Conference on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ClaimsConference