Saturday 14 February 2026 The idea that Josip Broz Tito might somehow have been responsible for the death of Joseph Stalin has circulated for decades in the hinterland between Cold War folklore and serious historical speculation. It is a theory sustained not by documentary proof but by a convergence of motive, opportunity, precedent and an unusual personal enmity that set Tito apart from every other Communist leader of his era. Examining this claim requires restraint—an insis

Saturday 14 February 2026 Switzerland’s posture towards Ukraine since Russia’s full scale invasion in February 2022 has been characterised by tension between law, history and geopolitics. She has condemned the invasion clearly and repeatedly, aligned herself with most European sanctions against Moscow, and offered substantial humanitarian and economic assistance to Kyiv. Yet she has also refused to supply weapons directly to Ukraine or to permit the re export of Swiss manufac

Saturday 14 January 2026 The Munich Security Conference is often described as a barometer. That is true, but it understates what happened over Friday 13 February 2026 and Saturday 14 February 2026. Munich did not merely measure the atmospheric pressure of transatlantic relations — it exposed two competing ideas of what the West is for, what it is afraid of, and what it should build next. In the corridors and on the stage, the question was not simply whether Europe will spend

Saturday 14 February 2026 Ukraine’s emerging defence technology export sector is not being built in peacetime boardrooms. She is building it under air-raid sirens, inside workshops that move when the front line moves and inside laboratories that are, in truth, trenches with soldering irons. That origin story matters, because it explains both the sector’s strengths and its tensions: speed over perfection, iteration over grand design, and an instinct for survivability that is h

Saturday 14 February 2026 To ask what sort of personality makes an effective soldier is to ask an unfashionable but necessary question. Modern public discussion of warfare often concentrates on technology, doctrine and geopolitics, while the human material of war is reduced to abstractions: manpower, morale, losses. Yet war remains, at its core, an intensely human enterprise. Weapons may extend reach and lethality, but they do not decide whether a person advances under fire,

Saturday 14 February 2026 When Norway’s Chief of Defence, General Eirik Kristoffersen, recently warned that Russia might invade Norway not to conquer her but to shield the nuclear forces on the Kola Peninsula, he was not describing a likely peacetime adventure. He was describing a wartime reflex—one rooted in how Russia has long organised her most survivable nuclear assets, and how she expects NATO to try to destroy them.  Kola is not merely “the High North”. She is the hinge