Comment
Zelensky with the Emir of Qatar last weekend. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service
What the Iran war means for Russia and Ukraine
It became clear this week that Donald Trump isn’t just battling the ayatollahs in Iran, says Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. He is also fighting “a proxy war against Moscow”. There were reports in intelligence circles after Operation Epic Fury began in February that the Russians were providing Tehran with satellite intelligence to target American troops, ships and aircraft. Ukraine’s President Zelensky has now claimed that Moscow was “directly involved” in helping the Iranians plan a missile-and-drone attack on a US base in Saudi Arabia last week, which destroyed a £370m radar plane and several refuelling aircraft. Vladimir Putin’s calculation is clear: if the Iranian regime survives this war, it will demonstrate that America, for all its military might, “cannot dictate the international agenda”.
On the surface, this is all bad news for Ukraine, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg. The war has pushed up oil prices – rescuing Russia from a budget crisis and straining Kyiv’s benefactors in Europe – and torn through stocks of critical US weapons that might otherwise have made their way to Ukrainian troops. But Zelensky is “unfazed”. Almost overnight, his country has become a hugely attractive security partner because of its extensive experience in drone warfare. The Ukrainian president sent around 200 experts in drone interception to help out Gulf states shortly after the war began, and last week signed 10-year drone deals worth billions of dollars with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He has even offered to help equip the Strait of Hormuz with an equivalent to the system that has kept the Russian navy at bay in the Black Sea. Couple that with good news on the battlefield back home – Russia’s spring offensive has so far been a bust – and Ukraine is having “a surprisingly good Iran war”.
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Heroes and villains
X/@KidRock
Villains
The crews of two US Army helicopters, for taking an unauthorised detour during a training mission in Tennessee to hover outside Kid Rock’s mansion, where they were enthusiastically saluted by the MAGA-favourite country star. Army chiefs launched an inquiry but Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth quickly shut it down, saying: “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, Patriots.”
Villains
Sweet-toothed thieves who stole a lorry carrying more than 400,000 KitKats in transit from Italy to Poland. “Call me a cynical old boot,” says Carol Midgley in The Times, but I was struck that the theft of all this chocolate – which obviously generated masses of publicity – happened to take place in “the biggest chocolate sales week of the year”. Just coincidence, I’m sure.
Villains
The Chinese tech giant Baidu, after a technical error caused a number of its robotaxis to freeze mid-journey, leaving some passengers marooned inside the driverless vehicles for more than an hour. Photos and videos in the city of Wuhan show the cars stopped on busy highways, some in the fast lane.
Hero
A lecturer at Cornell University in the US, who is teaching her German-language students how to use typewriters after growing frustrated with them using AI and online translation tools to churn out perfect coursework. “Everything slows down,” says Grit Matthias Phelps of her once-a-semester “analogue” assignment. “It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time.”
Zeitgeist
Generational divide: Andy Griffith and Keri Russell in Waitress (2007)
For God’s sake don’t ask me what I’m up to
There are many challenges to eating in modern restaurants, says Jay Rayner in the FT. Reading tiny menu print without sparking up your smartphone torch; working out which loos to use based on “terribly witty but wilfully obscure gender identifiers”. Now we must add another: the friendly waiter asking staggeringly intrusive questions. “What have you been up to this morning?” “Got any plans for this afternoon?” What on earth do they think they’re doing? For all these waiters know, I might have come from a funeral or just been told I’m bankrupt. These are questions you can ask a relative, or a lover, “or the suspect in a murder case if you happen to be the investigating officer”. Not someone who has just popped in for lunch.
When I posted something spittle-flecked about this on Instagram, the responses revealed a clear generational divide. Those who agreed were “roughly my vintage”, whereas younger people thought I’d over-reacted, with one Gen Z blogger accusing me of displaying an “entitlement to be quietly horrible”. The truth – for all you Gen Zs who think I’m a heartless bastard – is that the older you get, the more life’s darker events weigh upon you. More people die, more things go wrong with your body. So when someone asks what you’ve been doing, “you can’t help flicking through the mental checklist”. Of course, I recognise that working in restaurants is a young person’s game, and that their motives are “sweet and good and pure”. But they are strangers, and strangers need boundaries. So yes, feel free to ask me if I’d like a drink. Comment on the lovely weather. “But for God’s sake don’t ask me what I’ve been up to. Because I really might just tell you.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Podcasts
Hitler in the beer hall; the wreckage; and Elser. Getty
The forgotten hero who tried to kill Hitler
On 8 November 1939, says Dominic Sandbrook on The Rest is History, Adolf Hitler travelled to Munich to celebrate the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. As was tradition, the Führer was due to give a long speech to an audience of his old comrades. But as he entered the Bürgerbräukeller, surrounded by his bodyguards, a bomb was “literally ticking”. Just over a year earlier, an unremarkable carpenter called Georg Elser had concluded that Hitler would drag Germany into another world war and that poor working class Germans like him would “pay the price”. So he had decided to “eliminate the leadership”.
Elser began planning his assassination attempt at the previous year’s Beer Hall Putsch event, waiting outside for Hitler and the others to leave before sneaking in and scoping the place out. He went home, stole dynamite from a quarry and detonators from the armaments factory where he worked, and carried out explosives tests in his parents’ back garden. In August 1939 he began going to the beer hall, hiding in a storeroom until everyone had left and spending the night building a secret compartment in a pillar. It took him 30 nights – he was meticulous, even lining the inside with tin so it wouldn’t sound hollow. He then put the explosives in and set the timer for 9.20pm, thinking that would be an hour into Hitler’s speech. Not so. Preoccupied by arguments with his generals, the German leader began his speech 20 minutes early and kept it uncharacteristically short, leaving the building at 9.07pm. Thirteen minutes later, the bomb went off, collapsing the roof and killing eight people. But Hitler was long gone.
🪚🔨 Elser was caught “completely by chance” trying to cross the border into Switzerland, because he didn’t have the right permit. Officials found wire cutters, a fuse and a postcard of the beer hall, and after some serious pressure – “Himmler tortured him personally” – he confessed. Bizarrely, the Nazis didn’t kill him immediately, instead putting him in prison and giving him an extra room to do his carpentry. It wasn’t until the dying days of the war, in April 1945, that he was finally executed.
Weather
Quoted
“A ship without a destination will never find a favourable wind.”
Seneca
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