Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum review, the devil you know - John Simpson (The Guardian)

 Book of the Day:

Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum review – the devil you know

A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism

John Simpson

The Guardian, Wed 17 Jul 2024 07.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/17/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum-review-the-devil-you-know?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks#img-1

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed. China, you might have thought, would see peace as essential for its brand of capitalist-Marxism-Leninism to thrive. Yet you only have to read Bill Clinton, speaking in 2000, to realise how very unrealistic that idea has become: “Growing interdependence will have a liberating effect in China … Computers and the internet, fax machines and photocopiers, modems and satellites all increase the exposure to people, ideas and the world beyond China’s borders.” It would be as hard for governments to control the internet, he famously added, as it would be to nail Jell-O to a wall.

But instead of the technology mastering the autocrats, the autocrats have learned to master the technology. In this new age of autocracy, men like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orbán run entire countries according to their own personal political interest, recharged from time to time by carefully manipulated elections; though last month the voters of India unexpectedly refused to give Modi the majority he needed. Meanwhile the US, whose opinion used to matter just about everywhere on Earth, suddenly seems as intimidating as a scarecrow in a beet field.

Applebaum offers a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality

Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the early 1990s, when she was writing about the danger that Russia’s post-communist implosion would one day present for the west, after Boris Yeltsin left office. She talked even then about the need for Nato to build up its defences against the time when Russia would be resurgent; while I, having spent so much time in the economic devastation of Moscow and St Petersburg, thought the best way for the west to protect itself was by being far more generous and welcoming towards Russia. Events have shown which of us was right, and it wasn’t me.

Autocracy, Inc. is deeply disturbing; it couldn’t be anything else. But Applebaum’s research is as always thoroughgoing, which makes it a lively pleasure to read. When she writes about Zimbabwe, for instance, she uncovers a weird and shocking cast of characters to explain the degree to which a potentially wealthy country has been devastated by unthinkably bad government; including the presidential envoy and ambassador-at-large Uebert Angel. Angel, a British-Zimbabwean and evangelical pastor, teaches “the fundamental aspects of becoming a millionaire”; his personal assistant, another Brit called Pastor Rikki, can allegedly get you a face-to-face meeting with President Mnangagwa for a couple of hundred thou. Rikki was shown on camera promising this to an undercover reporter for Al Jazeera, though he states that the resulting documentary was “brutally edited to portray a false narrative”. Skilfully, Applebaum shows how important a financial entrepôt like Dubai is in promoting the interests of governments such as Zimbabwe, and how it facilitates China’s growing financial control over countries which, left alone by the west, are available for sale or hire.

This is more in the nature of an extended essay about the way the world is going than a major study, but it is a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality. Applebaum is particularly good on information-laundering outfits, “typosquatters” which have the appearance of real, dependable outfits (Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, Spiegel.pr not Spiegel.de). These pump out savagely pro-Russian material, which people read on social media and pass on: for instance the fake press release last year which announced that Nato was going to use Ukrainian troops in France to deal with pension protesters. Obviously false, but it still led to smashed windows and broken bones. The Jell-O is firmly stuck to the wall.

It’s a disturbing world we live in, but understanding its ways, keeping our own counsel, and knowing who to trust have never been so important. Anne Applebaum, who 30 years ago foresaw the way we were going, is one of those we can trust.

Mao’s Legacy Is a Dangerous Topic in China - Tania Branigan (Foreign Policy, 2023)

Mao’s Legacy Is a Dangerous Topic in China

Discussing the Cultural Revolution has become increasingly risky.

By Tania Branigan, a Guardian leader writer and author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution.

Foreign Policy, May 6, 2023

This article is adapted from Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan (W.W. Norton, 304 pp., $29.95, May 2023).®

“For Chinese people, history is our religion,” the intellectual Hu Ping has argued. “We don’t have a supernatural standard of right and wrong, good and bad, so we view History as the ultimate judge.” The Chinese Communist Party has finessed this tradition. It sees history not as a record, still less a debate, but a tool. It can be adjusted as necessary yet appears solid and immutable: Today’s imperatives seem graven in stone, today’s facts the outcome of a logical, inexorable process. The contingencies and contradictions of the actual past are irrelevant. The truth is what the Party says, and what the Party chooses to remember.

Its current narrative is enshrined in the National Museum of China. It stands in Tiananmen Square, directly opposite the Great Hall of the People, where grand political ceremonies are held; across the way hangs the portrait of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong, stretching 4.5 by 6 meters and reputedly 1.5 tons in weight. The picture morphed through a few incarnations before Mao approved its final template at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Now it is replaced with an identical version each year, just before October’s National Day celebrations. At least one spare is kept at the ready in case it is damaged, as in 1989, when dissidents pelted it with eggs (and paid with years in prison). Come what may, Mao continues to surveil his successors and his country. Most assume that the picture will hang there as long as the Party hangs on to power, so symbolic that the leadership would never dare remove it.

For centuries, this part of the city has been the political heart of the nation. The square lies in front of the Forbidden City, home of the emperors, on Beijing’s north-south central axis. Under Mao its size was quadrupled to 400,000 square meters, making it the world’s largest city square. The Great Hall of the People and what were then the twin Museums of the Chinese Revolution and Chinese History were completed in the same year, 1959, as part of a monumental building program marking the Party’s tenth year in power. It had established already that its rule depended not only on the promise of a better future, but also on a shared understanding of that pledge’s contrast with former misery. So the grand museums were erected, and workers and peasants were encouraged to dwell on long-gone injustices in rituals of “recalling past bitterness and cherishing present happiness.” The people were still developing their political consciousness. Sometimes they included the terrible famine just past in their list of miseries, but officials would quickly set them straight, reminding them that Past Bitterness meant the years before the Party came to power.

For Chinese people, Tiananmen Square is their history. It saw the nationalist student protests of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Mao’s proclamation of the founding of the People’s Republic thirty years later, the mass rallies by Red Guards. Foreigners mainly associate it with the bloody crackdown on the protests which erupted here in 1989, attacking corruption and demanding reform and even democracy. When Chinese troops launched the final assault to clear the square, hundreds of soldiers poured in from behind the museum building.

Turning its guns against its citizens finally demolished the Party’s mandate: its claim to serve the people, already fatally undermined by the Cultural Revolution. Its rule now rests upon its promise of economic well-being and its restoration of national pride. The more conflicted and uncertain the former, with China’s years of double-digit growth rates well behind it and the effects of rapacious capitalism glaring, the more essential the latter. Since 1989 the Party has redoubled its commitment to patriotic education, portraying the Communist triumph over foreign aggression. It has rewritten textbooks and opened a swathe of red history sites. Officials and schoolchildren are bussed to places such as Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, and the former revolutionary base at Yan’an.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, born of the revolution, has embraced his party’s heritage. His first public act on assuming power was to escort the Politburo Standing Committee to the National Museum’s landmark exhibition: the Road to Rejuvenation, conceived a few years earlier but now promoted from its more modest home in the Museum of Military Affairs. A photograph blazoned across state media showed the seven men posed with such exquisite awkwardness that they could have been on show themselves. At the heart of the narrative was China’s Hundred Years of Humiliation at the hands of foreign bullies and its liberation by the Party. It was the story of the country’s suffering through the Opium Wars and subsequent imperialist aggressions; of how China had been brought to its knees; and how, through the sacrifices of heroic Party members, it had thrown off its shackles and returned to glory. It set the theme of Xi’s leadership: the Chinese dream of wealth and power. The last room portrayed both the glories and the comforts of modern China, from a space capsule for its taikonauts to a glass case of mobile phones. 

“History has proven that without the Communist Party of China, the People’s Republic of China would never have come into being, nor would socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the exhibition concluded. The last six decades had been blurred into one broad advance, the sharp and deadly political clashes reshaped into a gentler, happier tale of historical inevitability under the Party’s benign leadership. It was not the historical inevitability of Karl Marx, with the triumph of the proletariat; rather, the notion that authoritarian power had brought greatness to the Chinese nation again. It was no coincidence that the Museums of the Chinese Revolution and of Chinese History had been fused into a single National Museum.

When it was rebuilt, in the late 2000s, the architects were instructed to ensure the result was larger than any other in the world. Nothing about the museum is human-sized. The ceilings are so high, the spaces so expansive, that weekend crowds look like model railway passengers clustering at a real station. The exhibition spanned four giant halls, but there was one small—very small—section titled “Setbacks and Progress in the Exploration of Socialist Construction.” It daintily posed the question of how the Chinese people, under CCP leadership, “overcame hardships,” without, of course, elucidating those hardships, still less exploring the causes. It did not educate; it confirmed, discreetly, and to a very limited degree. Only if you already knew your history could you see what it deigned to acknowledge.

A glass case held three documents dated 1961, including one captioned: “Liu Shaoqi’s notes from a meeting held during his investigations in Changsha and Ningxiang, Hunan.” This was part of Liu’s research into the Great Famine, and it helped to end the disaster, but it paved the way to his own death in the Cultural Revolution, thanks to a vengeful Mao.

There was little more on this second great disaster of the era. An exhibition which made space for two dozen different mobile phones could find only a dingy corner for the Cultural Revolution; and it dared not show the catastrophe itself, only its aftermath. High on the wall was a photo of Mao’s heir, Hua Guofeng, and other leaders, following the Gang of Four’s fall, and another of joyful youths massing in the square to celebrate the purge.

No country faces its past honestly, and some in China have asked why the West was transfixed by the Maoist trauma recorded in books like Wild Swans when it appeared uninterested in slave narratives. America’s self-image as a beacon of democracy is undimmed by its cozying up to dictators, plots to oust or kill elected leaders, and backing of murderous anti-communist purges. More Britons believe the empire was a source of pride than shame; a benevolent institution, not created at gunpoint to enrich ourselves but rolled out to bring railways, cricket, and Shakespeare to the globe’s four corners. The West didn’t consciously conceal as China did; in its arrogance, it rarely noticed there was something to forget. We had often preferred to export our greatest sadism, and to allow others to enrich us by means we never questioned or recognized.

In Britain, convenience, implicit bias, and power differentials were enough to produce the distortions and erasures. In China, explicit orders and self-censorship did the work. The Cultural Revolution was not a totally forbidden subject, as discussion of the 1989 crackdown was. People found spaces in which they could operate by picking their times, shunning the spotlight, bending the rules, and having the right connections. The haziness of the line between forbidden and permitted was partly a by-product of China’s size and the multiple levels of bureaucracy. But it was also deliberate. While some were adept at exploiting grey areas, many shrank back further. It was simply easier and more efficient to make people censor themselves.

Blur the boundaries and you could also move them without acknowledging the shift. In some ways the Cultural Revolution had become less risky territory. Online discussion proliferated. One professor, though barred from launching a course called “The Cultural Revolution,” won approval by simply retitling it “Chinese Culture, 1966-1976.” But in most ways it had become harder to talk about. The amnesia about the Cultural Revolution is more recent than it seems. In its immediate aftermath, a flood of memoirs and novels had laid bare trauma and oppression, handily confirming the wisdom of the Party’s turn from Mao to market under Deng Xiaoping.

Then, in the early eighties, a campaign against bourgeois liberalism began to target such “scar literature.” In 1988 a regulation warned that, “from now on and for quite some time, publishing firms should not plan the publication of dictionaries or other handbooks about the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’.” In 1996 researchers held a symposium on the anniversary; ten years later they were warned off. In 2000 Song Yongyi, a repentant Red Guard turned historian, was held for more than five months due to his work, despite his American citizenship. And in 2013 Xi would issue a warning against “historical nihilism.”

The official Party verdict on the Cultural Revolution called it a catastrophe, which isn’t surprising. By the time it was formulated, Deng was in charge. He had been purged not once but twice, and his son has used a wheelchair since “falling” from a third-floor window while imprisoned by Red Guards. But Deng didn’t want to brood on what had happened: “The aim of summarizing the past is to lead people to unite and look ahead,” he instructed those drafting the judgement. It acknowledged that the events had caused “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” It was “initiated by a leader laboring under a misapprehension and capitalized on by counter-revolutionary cliques.” Laboring under a misapprehension. It was worse than a crime, then; it was a mistake. Mao’s errors were acknowledged but could not be dwelled upon.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Party had no other way to square this circle: Mao was both Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. Chinese communism’s triumphs and disasters cannot be separated; he stands for both and still commands love and respect from many. To cut him off would saw away the roots which anchor the Party’s power, as well as raising dangerous questions about other leaders’ failure to stop him. Cloaking the Party in Mao’s aura also veiled its rejection of its past and its adoption of the things it once sought to destroy. Instead of acknowledging its turn to the market, the Party proceeded as though nothing had happened: Deng said his reforms were upholding Mao Zedong Thought. Mao’s preservation, psychically and even physically, made sense in terms of the Party’s own past: the Lenin/Stalin dilemma. But it addressed a larger problem too. Allowing people to judge their history acknowledges their right to judge things in general. Permit them to repudiate Mao, and they may repudiate you.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

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Tania Branigan is a Guardian leader writer and author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution.

Read More On China | History

Top 10 books about the iron curtain - Timothy Phillips (The Guardian)

Livros da Guerra Fria

Top 10 books about the iron curtain

The dividing line between capitalism and communism which descended across Europe after the second world war inspired spy writers and historians, polemicists and memoirists

Timothy Phillips

The Guardian, Wed 28 Dec 2022 12.00 GMT

The iron curtain bisected Europe from north to south between 1945 and 1989. It defined the continent, and in many ways the entire world, because of the ideological battles that raged across it. The realm of capitalism and representational democracy dominated to the west; the realm of communism and one-party rule to the east.

Crossing the curtain in either direction was always an undertaking, and for millions was both illegal and impossible. The nuclear might and conventional armed forces of all major powers were focused on that dividing line, the most likely place for a third world war to start.

I was just 11 when the iron curtain collapsed. I remember watching news of the Berlin Wall falling. Ever since, the divide has been a ghost in my mind. I started learning Russian the following year and my textbooks came from the Soviet era. I visited eastern Europe from 1995 onwards and found countries reeling from the end of its version of socialism.

I also discovered early how the iron curtain had inspired writers. From tense cold war thrillers to passionately argued treatises blaming one side or the other for the stalemate, from historians trying to make sense of how Europe became so riven to memoirists committing their own, often tragic tales to print: the iron curtain has been the source of some amazing books.

Just before the pandemic, I travelled the length of the iron curtain, from the Arctic where Norway and Russia meet to the frontier of Turkey and Azerbaijan, the most southerly place where Nato touched the Warsaw Pact countries. The result was the trip of a lifetime and a book, The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border. It is my attempt to capture what survives of the old divide both on the ground and in people’s heads. I read widely during the journey. It is one of the pleasures of solo travel. Here I share 10 books that reveal the essence of the most menacing border the world has yet seen.

1. Eight Days at Yalta:by Diana Preston

Even once the second world war was under way, it was by no means inevitable it would end in a divided Europe. Preston’s 2020 book is a vivacious account of how the Big Three allied leaders gathered on the Crimea to thrash out an uneasy agreement about the continent’s future and their countries’ respective spheres of influence. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 was a supremely important political event. But Preston also focuses on the personal preferences and foibles of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and how they navigated one another’s red lines.

2. The Third Man by Graham Greene

When people think of the iron curtain, they tend to think of two European cities particularly – Berlin, itself divided, and Moscow, from where the USSR government effectively ran its satellites. However, until 1955, Vienna was divided much like Berlin into American, British, French and Soviet sectors. Greene’s The Third Man (1950) and the earlier film of that name conjure the period better than anything. The investigation of Harry Lime’s death shows the City of Dreams in a seedy postwar light. Greene also foregrounds one of the greatest cold war oddities, Vienna’s Inter-Allied Military Patrol, which required one soldier from each occupying power to share a jeep and travel to crime scenes together.

3. Alex von Tunzelmann’s Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis That Shook the World

This rare gem focuses on two of the biggest events of the period, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. Both reached their culmination at the same time in 1956. More often treated separately, in Von Tunzelmann’s hands the twin crises regain their full geopolitical force. She has an eye for illuminating detail; the action often unfolds hour by hour. It reads like a thriller.

4. Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth byFrederick Kempe

The year 1961 was when the cold war had one of its “hot” moments. Kempe takes the reader on a journey into the conflict, as Soviet and East German authorities attempt to solve the problem of West Berlin. An island of western capitalism marooned inside the GDR, West Berlin was also a major escape route for unhappy East Germans. More than 2.5 million had fled by 1961. Khrushchev and the East German regime were determined to end this embarrassment. For a time, it looked as if they might seize West Berlin, but in the end the Wall was their chosen sticking plaster, a monstrous imposition on Germany’s capital, but one that largely worked to trap East Germans inside for the next 28 years.

5. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

No iron curtain book list would be complete without Le Carré, and this is the book of his that sticks closest to the iron curtain. It is dark, cynical and, even after six decades, gripping. Ultimately, the hero, British agent Alec Leamas, is compelled to confront the reality of the Berlin Wall at close quarters.

6. Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo

Leo explores what it was like to grow up in the GDR in one of my favourite memoirs. He writes beautifully and his words are deftly rendered in English by the much-missed translator Anthea Bell. The good, the bad and the ugly of East German life are before us. For me, the most affecting passage describes Leo’s first visit to a huge East German road checkpoint. “How barricaded our country is,” he thinks. “What became of a dream of socialism?”

7. Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

The USSR had iron curtain land borders with three countries – Norway, Finland and Turkey – but also a maritime border with the west on the Baltic Sea. Latvia was one Soviet republic with a long Baltic coastline. This ended up punctured with missile bases and barbed wire. Latvian writer Ikstena’s 2015 novel takes a harshly ironic look at life there, through the eyes of a doctor who is banished to a remote village only to find herself contemplating the absurdities and injustices of so-called ”mature socialism”. There is a wonderful passage where characters watch the televised state funeral of Leonid Brezhnev and see the men lowering him into the grave lose grasp of his coffin; it falls with a loud crash – I can reveal this is not fiction.

8. Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey by Anthony Bailey

Bailey’s book was one inspiration for my own iron curtain journey. He travelled the line while the divide was still in place, going from the top of the inner German border to Trieste. He is restricted in his ability to enter the east. Nonetheless, the book contains much fascinating reportage. The author really manages to get under the skin of what the frontier meant to ordinary people.

9. Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania by Blendi Fevziu

Nowhere in Europe was more mysterious during the cold war than Albania. The country was isolated even from other communist states and the dictator Enver Hoxha effectively immured his nation on all sides. Fevziu’s biography is shocking reading. As a young man, Hoxha “slept till noon, stayed up late at night and had no particular interests”. But once he hit his stride, he imposed bizarre laws on Albanians and outlasted six ministers of the interior, the first five of whom he executed.

10. Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szabłowski

What has the iron curtain left behind? There are physical remnants, some large and celebrated, others small and neglected. There is also a legacy in millions of minds. Many pine for their lost lives in the Eastern Bloc. My own journey found people missing not just the good parts but also sometimes the bad, including the impassable borders and the state intrusion into daily life. Szabłowski, a Polish journalist, travelled across central Europe to write this tender and opinionated book. It is a delight from beginning to end.

• Timothy Phillips is a travel writer and historian. He is the author of The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border, published by Granta Books. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 168 of the invasion - Jordyn Beazley (The Guardian)

Russia-Ukraine war at a glance

Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 168 of the invasion

Zelenskiy vows to ‘liberate’ Crimea as Kyiv denies responsibility for deadly attack on Russian airbase in the annexed peninsula 

Jordyn Beazley

The Guardian, Wed 10 Aug 2022 01.39 BST

• A Russian airbase deep behind the frontline in Crimea has been damaged by several large explosions, killing at least one person. It was not immediately clear whether it had been targeted by a long-range Ukrainian missile strike. In his nightly address, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, did not discuss who was behind the attacks but vowed to “liberate” Crimea, saying: “This Russian war against Ukraine and against the entire free Europe began with Crimea and must end with Crimea – with its liberation.” An adviser to the president, Mikhail Podolyak, said Ukraine was not taking responsibility for the explosions, suggesting partisans might have been involved.

• The head of Ukraine’s state nuclear power firm warned of the “very high” risks from shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Russian-occupied south and said it was vital Kyiv regains control over the facility in time for winter. Energoatom’s chief, Petro Kotin, told Reuters in an interview that last week’s Russian shelling had damaged three lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Ukrainian grid and that Russiawanted to connect the facility to its grid.

• Russian forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant are reorienting the plant’s electricity production to connect to Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, according to Ukrainian operator Energoatom. “To do this, you must first damage the power lines of the plant connected to the Ukrainian energy system. From August 7 to 9, the Russians have already damaged three power lines. At the moment, the plant is operating with only one production line, which is an extremely dangerous way of working,” Energoatom president Petro Kotin told Ukrainian television. The plant, located not far from the Crimean peninsula, has six of Ukraine’s 15 reactors, and is capable of supplying power for four million homes.

• The leaders of Estonia and Finland want fellow European countries to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens, saying they should not be able to take holidays in Europe while the Russian government carries out a war in Ukraine. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, wrote on Tuesday on Twitter that “visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right” and that it was “time to end tourism from Russia now”, the Associated Press reported.

• US president Joe Biden on Tuesday signed documents endorsing Finland and Sweden’s accession to Nato, the most significant expansion of the military alliance since the 1990s as it responds to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports.

• The US state department has approved $89m worth of assistance to help Ukraine equip and train 100 teams to clear landmines and unexploded ordnance for a year, Reuters reported.

• The total number of grain-carrying ships to leave Ukrainian ports under a UN brokered deal to ease the global food crisis has now reached 12, with the two latest ships which left on Tuesday headed for Istanbul and Turkey.

• Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has been struggling with quotas imposed by the EU for sanctioned goods that it can import across Lithuania from mainland Russia or Belarus, the region’s governor admitted.Lithuania infuriated Moscow in June by banning the land transit of goods such as concrete and steel to Kaliningrad after EU sanctions on them came into force, Reuters reported.

• Russia has launched an Iranian satellite from Kazakhstan amid concerns it could be used for battlefield surveillance in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran has denied that the Khayyam satellite, which was delivered into orbit onboard a Soyuz rocket launched from Baikonur cosmodrome, would ever be under Russian control. But the Washington Post previously reported that Moscow told Tehran it “plans to use the satellite for several months, or longer, to enhance its surveillance of military targets” in Ukraine, according to two US officials.

I write from Ukraine, where I've spent much of the past six months, reporting on the build-up to the conflict and the grim reality of war. It has been the most intense time of my 30-year career. In December I visited the trenches outside Donetsk with the Ukrainian army; in January I went to Mariupol and drove along the coast to Crimea; on 24 February I was with other colleagues in the Ukrainian capital as the first Russian bombs fell.

This is the biggest war in Europe since 1945. It is, for Ukrainians, an existential struggle against a new but familiar Russian imperialism. Our team of reporters and editors intend to cover this war for as long as it lasts, however expensive that may prove to be. We are committed to telling the human stories of those caught up in war, as well as the international dimension. But we can't do this without the support of Guardian readers. It is your passion, engagement and financial contributions which underpin our independent journalism and make it possible for us to report from places like Ukraine.

If you are able to help with a monthly or single contribution it will boost our resources and enhance our ability to report the truth about what is happening in this terrible conflict.

Thank you.

Luke Harding

Foreign correspondent