Less than a week into this war, says Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, Vladimir Putin is already “heading towards a historic defeat”. He sent his troops in knowing that Russia dwarfs Ukraine militarily, and that Nato wouldn’t deploy any of its own forces in the country. But his plan – to hit Ukraine “hard and fast” and establish a puppet regime in Kyiv – still depended on the Ukrainian people rolling over and accepting their Russian occupiers. Putin gambled that they would, perhaps in part because Crimea offered little resistance in 2014. It is becoming increasingly clear that this gamble is failing.

Roman Abramovich might have ceded his stewardship of Chelsea Football Club, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, but why was he allowed to get his hands on it in the first place? It’s a textbook example of “Putin’s mafia” using London as a “laundromat” for cash plundered from the Russian people. Despite his “sportswashed” reputation, Abramovich is just as bad as the rest of them. Back in the 1990s, when Russia’s then president, Boris Yeltsin, was trailing in the polls, he struck a deal with Abramovich and his fellow oligarchs. He offered them the mineral wealth of Russia “at a fraction of its true price”, in exchange for a $100m loan and access to private TV channels. The stitch-up worked: “a tiny coterie of men emerged with the riches of Croesus” and Yeltsin won the 1996 election. The economist Paul Gregory called it “the single largest heist in corporate history”.