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General Richard Dannat, the head of the British army, once remarked that the British Armed Forces are less understood and less honoured for their commitment and sacrifice by ordinary Britons than in comparable societies, like United States, and probably even less than in earlier periods.
But this is not unique to Britain. And it is part [...]

President Putin built up his authority by promoting mates of his from KGB to senior posts in the government and economy. Now president Medvedev is doing the same, but instead of promoting spooks, he’s promoting people from a legal and business background, like him.
In his first cabinet reshuffle, announced today, Medvedev began to promote [...]

Exactly how bad has the first half of this month been for the UN? Where does one start? You could choose Burma, where the international organization’s ability to deliver aid in a hostile climate has been hurled into doubt. Or Sudan, where Darfuri rebels sallied forth to attack Khartoum, demonstrating exactly what [...]

Yesterday I was at a roundtable on Europe and climate change, hosted by Jim Murphy, the UK’s minister for Europe, with his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, as the main speaker.
France is about to take over the EU presidency and will play a critical role on the road to Copenhagen. Two questions stand out:

Can the [...]

It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans.  With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists.  But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make [...]

I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis - it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, [...]

This just in from the BBC:
The head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Joachim Ruecker, has said he expects it to stay, throwing into doubt a planned June handover to EU officials. Mr Ruecker told the BBC that the extent of co-operation with the EU mission “had yet to be decided”.
“One thing is for sure,” [...]

The UN Mission in Kosovo is starting to look like that tedious guest at the end of your dinner party that just won’t leave. Except, in this case, the guest also happens to be your landlord. With the Security Council deadlocked, Kosovo is still subject to its Resolution 1244 of 1999 - and according to [...]

For three weeks, Europe’s “big men” have been polishing off their CVs in the hope of getting one of the new top EU jobs to be created if the Lisbon Treaty comes into force. They all want to be at the other end of the phone when the U.S wants speak to Europe, as Henry [...]

Later in the week half of the European Commission will go to Beijing. Playing Kissinger to EU President Barroso’s Nixon, Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson has prepared the way for his boss with a thoughtful speech to the China-Britain Business Council.
Instead of boycotting the Olympics, Mandelson argues that China should be treated with respect - but [...]

Below the jump, Alex and my talk at last weekend’s Progressive Governance summit - it’s a four minute summary of our paper on multilateralism and global risks.

I recently interviewed Sergei Markov, who is a key spin-doctor to the Kremlin. He told me that the West had completely underestimated the extent to which things will change under Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev.
He said: “Most western observers expect no change because Medvedev is the new president. On the contrary, Putin chose Medvedev precisely [...]

Just when things had gone quiet in Kosovo, the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague has found a way to spice matters up.  It has acquitted former Kosovo Albanian premier Ramush Haradinaj of war crimes, which puts him back in the political game down in Pristina.  Not that he ever really left that game after [...]

While the EU is still recovering from its series of set-backs in Chad over the last two months, it’s been hit by bad news from an earlier mission.  In 2003, the French led the EU’s first African venture, Operation Artemis, into the DR Congo to bail out beleaguered UN troops.  This has usually been hailed [...]

I’d dropped my plan to do weekly scorecards on events in Kosovo, not least because bigger and better-informed Balkan-watchers like ICG are on the case. But the recent violence in Mitrovica brings me back to an argument I made in the first days after sort-of-independence was declared: that the best plan for the Kosovo [...]

I was astounded to read today of the FSB’s arrest of Ilya Zaslavsky, who’s a manager at TNK-BP in Moscow, and also the organizer of the Russian branch of the Oxford Alumni, on charges of industrial espionage.
The Russian-Oxford alumni association held monthly drinks in Moscow, which I went along to a few times. Can’t say [...]

The foreign banks active in Russia tend to have a far more informed and less cliched view of Russian politics than foreign policy analysts in Washington or London. They also tend to have better contacts with Kremlin sources than foreign diplomats, particularly the woeful British embassy in Moscow.
Banking analysts and strategists have been quick to [...]

…as the eurozone overtakes the United States of America. 
FRANKFURT (AFP) — The dollar’s plunge has made the eurozone the world’s biggest economy by one measure and has underscored shifts that are reorienting the 15-nation bloc towards Asia, Russia and oil-rich Gulf states, analysts say.
“With the euro now trading around 1.56 against the dollar, the size [...]

Lord Bell, PR guru and Tory peer, has plied his dark arts for some fairly controversial characters in the past - Augusto Pinochet, Boris Berezovsky, Michael Chernoi, even Margaret Thatcher - but even he might have his hands full with his latest project: spinning Aleksander Lukashenko, the iron man of Belarus and the ‘last dictator [...]

As regular readers will be aware, my fellow Global Dashboard columnist Richard Gowan is never happier than when Europe is burnishing its peacebuilding credentials, whether on Iraq, Chad or elsewhere.  So we can all share in Richard’s joy when he learns that the Council of Europe has appointed former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to [...]

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