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4 days ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Back in February, with Ukraine’s overstretched military struggling to hold the line and the Russian onslaught grinding into its fourth year, Donald Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, telling him that he didn’t “have any cards”. The clear implication was that the Ukrainian president should accept he could not win the war and push for a peace deal on any available terms.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
The most important thing to know about the minerals deal between the US and Ukraine is that it has been signed. For all the bluster emanating from Washington late on 30 April, where US treasury secretary Scott Bessent hailed the agreement as a “historic economic partnership,” it is unlikely that American companies will now be flooding into Ukraine to exploit the mineral wealth of a country that is under relentless aerial bombardment from Russia.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Conjure up an image of life under authoritarian rule and perhaps you see tanks and martial law troops in the streets. Legions of baton-wielding riot police terrorising the cowed citizenry. A strongman leader – it does, almost always, seem to be a man – presiding over a vast military parade. Political prisoners packed off to the gulag en masse. But this is not how modern authoritarianism works.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on 12 February 2025 and was updated on 24 April after prosecutors in South Korea indicted former president Moon Jae-in, who led the country from 2017 to 2022. He was indicted on charges of bribery related to his former son-in-law’s position at an airline. Officials allege the son-in-law was hired in exchange for the airline’s CEO leading a state-funded agency.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Xi Jinping does not want a protracted trade war with the United States. He understands that this will hurt the Chinese economy at a time when the country is already grappling with a property market crisis, slowing growth, and surging youth unemployment.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Efren Morillo was supposed to be dead. He was playing pool with friends in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, in August 2016, when a group of men barged into the house. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but said they were police officers, and they told Morillo and his friends not to run. They ransacked the house looking for drugs, which the men insisted they did not have, then handcuffed them and led them out the back.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
“It’s cold as shit here,” announced JD Vance as he strode into the mess hall at the Pituffik space base in northern Greenland on 28 March.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
Vladimir Putin was enjoying himself. On stage at an annual meeting of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs in Moscow on 18 March, the Russian leader had been holding forth for close to an hour when the host, Alexander Shokhin, suggested it was time to wrap things up. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had reminded him that he was due to speak to Donald Trump at that very moment, Shokhin said, looking nervously at his watch. “Never mind,” Putin said, waving away Shokin’s concern.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
One hour into Donald Trump’s phone call with Vladimir Putin on 18 March, a White House aide reported that the conversation was “going well.” The following hour, with the two leaders still talking, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, announced that, as a result of the dialogue, the world had “become a much safer place today!” Channelling the Trumpian vernacular, he pronounced the results: “Historic! Epic!” But when the call ended and the two sides released the details,...
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Katie Stallard
On 12 March, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on $21bn worth of US goods after Donald Trump implemented 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, which he threatened to increase to 50 per cent for Canada. Trump has imposed, then suspended, 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports twice since resuming the US presidency and repeatedly vowed to make Canada the “51st state”, a threat that many Canadians take seriously.
