New Moscow Rules

After six months of Donald Trump, Ukraine seems to finally have a shot at surviving Russia’s territorial war of aggression again. The US president’s frustration with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s evident lack of interest in ending the war has resulted in not only renewed American arms supplies to Kyiv—at least the Patriot missiles needed desperately to fend off Moscow’s drone and missile barrages—routed through NATO but also the beginnings of an unprecedented warmth between Trump and the Western alliance, prompted also by Europe’s plans to spend more on defence. Things can and will turn again. Trump hasn’t completely given up on Putin and it remains to be seen how serious he is about the secondary sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, given that the threat carries a risk to the global economy. Moreover, the Kremlin might see the 50-day deadline for a peace deal as too generous a window whereby it can maximise its territorial gains. Putin’s nightly rain of fire and death on Ukraine after each “lovely talk” with Trump has no overt military objective apart from raising the civilian death toll to break Kyiv’s will to fight on. The Russian economy is hurting but can NATO throw Kyiv a new lifeline on time?

An Irish Horror Story

They were thought to be victims of the Irish famine of the 1940s. But buried in a disused sewage tank on the site of the former St Mary’s children’s home in Tuam, County Galway, are the remains of 796 babies born to unmarried mothers. What former Taoiseach Enda Kenny called a “chamber of horrors” hadn’t revealed its secret until 2014 when an amateur historian, Catherine Corless, blew the lid off the scandal. Run by the Bon Secours Sisters, an order of Catholic nuns, the mother and baby home had no burial records or headstones but Corless’ scrutiny of city records found hundreds of children who hadn’t been given a proper burial. The first child died at St Mary’s in 1925, the year it opened, and the last in 1960, a year before its closure. The first bones were found by two boys playing on the patch in the 1970s, a square lawn with a side grotto and a statue of Mary, but the full horror—bundles stacked upon bundles in the subterranean space rotted and blackened with age—had to wait. The formal excavation began this week under Daniel MacSweeney, an expert at finding missing bodies in conflict zones.

French Provocation

France’s national debt of €3.3 trillion has been accumulating at €5,000 per second. To cut it, Prime Minister François Bayrou has proposed cutting two public holidays—Easter Monday and May 8, the latter celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany. The French, very possessive of their jours fériés, aren’t happy, with the left and far-right howling in protest. But it was Charles de Gaulle who had scrapped the May 8 holiday only for François Mitterrand to restore it. Bayrou, powerless in parliament, ironically is free to manoeuvre. The French, however, don’t really take more holidays than the rest, their 11 a year being just the European average.

Donald TrumpFrançois BayrougeopoliticsVladimir PutinVolodymyr Zelensky