One of the key narratives of the current Ukraine war is the staggering scale of Russian losses on the battlefield, not just of their troops but their military hardware as well. Losses, moreover, for very little gain, territorially or otherwise. How and why this has occurred is an interesting question but it's not my primary focus here. Rather I want to say a word about these losses in the context of other Russian wars in the modern era. It's been calculated (in a recent repor

As the United Nations assembles in New York this week, eight decades after its founding in 1945, all the signs are that the organisation...

August 1944, 81 years ago, saw a terrible tragedy played out on the banks of the Vistula during what we know today as the Warsaw...

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Victory Over Japan (VJ) Day on 15 August, the exact manner of, and motivation for, Japan's...

As we bask in (or seek the shade from) Europe's recurrent heatwaves this summer, I am reminded of an earlier summer - to be more precise,...

Today bombing has a very different form from even the quite recent past. In the Russia-Ukraine war, and now in the very recent conflict...

Given the prominence today of China as a global power, it's a surprise to learn that the country was not admitted to the UN and the...

On May 9, in Moscow's Red Square, military parades marked VE Day for the Russians. But how come when the Germans actually surrendered on...

Today (25 April) marks Elbe Day, the date in 1945 when American and Red Army soldiers met each other for the first time on the banks of...

The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a tiny territory that is home to Russia's Baltic fleet and a nuclear-capable missile force, has long...

The mass deportations of illegal immigrants currently under way in Trump's America - a process that seems both brutal and carelessly...

Is America really as weak as the Trumpian MAGA rhetoric proclaims. History tells a very different story.

Trump's apparent appeasement of Putin in the Ukraine peace talks is less Munich 1938 than Moscow 1939.

As we approach Holocaust Day and the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few...

Traditionally, New Year marks a moment when fresh resolutions are made that anticipate a better tomorrow. During wartime, however, even...

It's clear that the Allies did eventually defeat the Axis powers in WW2, but how and why this came about is still debated - and too...

The charge was made, during WW2 and afterwards, that the Jews put up only passive resistance to their fate, going like lambs to the...

As we contemplate a world in which the status quo is now fragmenting into adversarial power blocs, it's worth reflecting on the...

By mid-October 1940 (84 years ago now), the so-called Battle of Britain had long morphed into what we have come to call the Blitz, a...

It was at the beginning of October 1943 that a drama played out in Denmark which had no parallel in any other German-occupied country in...