KYIV WHEN YOUR BIGGEST backer calls you a dictator and a thief, then you in trouble. Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who until a few weeks ago was the Churchill of eastern Europe, has suddenly found himself being labelled a criminal, by the President of the very country that has urged him to fight Russia for the…

WASHINGTON, DC “FOR ALL THOSE still looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, this is what military defeat looks like.” The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman was not smiling when he spoke, he was, he insisted, merely stating the obvious. His country and the United States of America were discussing peace in Ukraine over the heads…

DUBLIN THE PRESENCE OF so many brutal criminals among its immigrant population has people and commentators speculating on whether Ireland perhaps has a special visa program for drug gangs and the like. “We seem to be attracting the violent rejects from around the rest of the world,” insists Stanislaus Hoch, a former police officer who…

MOSCOW RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER Sergei Lavrov appears to have rumbled a NATO plan to get thousands of its troops on the ground in Ukraine, by disguising them as peace keepers. The Putin loyalist has deemed it unacceptable. His Ministry says not only can Ukraine not be in NATO, but NATO cannot be in Ukraine. In…

PARIS NEWS THAT A brigade of the Ukrainian Army, trained in France, has seen scores of its soldiers break and run away after being sent to the front, has caused some to wonder whether there might be something about French culture that doesn’t lend itself to war. “Well, it’s well known that four years occupying…

BELGRADE, THURSDAY NOW THAT PRESIDENTS Putin and Trump are talking over his head, Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky is said to be being advised that he might wish to consider his own personal position if the war with Russia does not end with the recapture of the Donbas and Crimea. “Normally, when a war is –…

WIRE SERVICES AT SEVENTY SEVEN, Rolling Stone wild boy Ronny Wood has been deemed too young to tour with geriatric rock legends The Rolling Stones. “His youth and inexperience are factors even our AI computers cannot predict for,” says Simon Hugo-Witherington-Faust a quantum insurer based in London. “Mick and Keith are what we call Zimmer-Frame…

CITY OF LONDON STAFF THE BRITISH ECONOMY is in such peril that the country may have to consider a return to those enterprises that made it great centuries ago, says a leading economist. Dr John Silver, of the Larceny Fund, a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands, says that Britain became a world empire…

WASHINGTON DC THE NAME’S BIDEN, Joe Biden. News that President Donald Trump has revoked his predecessor’s security clearance, has been met with whispers that it is not because of Biden’s age but because he may be next in line for the role of James Bond. “You can never be too sure in this world, but…

FROM OUR AUSTRALIAN CONSTRUCTION CORRESPONDENT WALLY “BLOODY” SLOW AN OFFER FROM Australia to take on the job of rebuilding the Gaza Strip has been rejected by the US President who says he would like his grandchildren to be alive to see the completed resort he has in mind. “Have you seen the timescales on Aussie…