Sadakat Kadri

Yulia Navalnaya’s call for protest votes and spoiled ballots in Russia’s presidential election was heeded by thousands. Outside the Russian Embassy in London yesterday, a queue stretched for almost a mile along Bayswater Road throughout the afternoon. It’s unlikely that many had given up their Sunday to contribute to Vladimir Putin’s 87 per cent share of the vote. 

Last week saw the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. Victory Day ceremonies were muted in Moscow, but Berlin commemorated defeat almost as usual. The Red Army’s arrival isn’t a straightforward cause for celebration in many places that fell under Stalin’s control after 1945, but Germany doesn’t question the sanctity of its liberation. Having learned the hard way why international harmony matters, it maintains at least five hundred Soviet war memorials.

As Suella Braverman herself may remember from growing up in London in the 1980s, it used to be quite common among racists to label or insult non-white people as ‘illegals’. There’s no indication she cares about that today – but, like Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, she’s always been determined to differentiate her foreign-born parents from undeserving immigrants. The lawfulness of her father’s arrival from Nairobi in 1968 has therefore become central to her political back story.

The Kremlin is urging Russian cinemagoers to remember 1945. A state-funded romantic thriller, depicting love, skulduggery and justice at the world’s first war crimes trial, recently opened nationwide. Nuremberg, written and directed by Nikolai Lebedev, promises to counter ‘the falsification of history’, according to the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who thinks parallels with the present are obvious.

The urban woodlands of northern Helsinki looked almost fiery under the low September sun. According to Juha Aalto of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, however, deforestation is accelerating, biodiversity is declining and the land sector in 2021 for the first time emitted more carbon dioxide than it absorbed.