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By Matthew Parish Monday 12 October 2026 There is something peculiarly appropriate about one of Ukraine’s oldest human rights organisations being based in Kharkiv. This is a city in which questions that elsewhere belong to law books and university seminars have acquired an uncomfortable physical reality. What is arbitrary detention? What constitutes torture? What obligations does a state owe to civilians? How does one prove a war crime? What does justice mean when the suspected perpetrator is...

By Matthew Parish Monday 12 October 2026 For most of human history, intelligence and obedience have been qualities we have expected to coexist uneasily. We want our soldiers to think, but also to obey orders. We want civil servants to exercise judgment, but to remain subordinate to elected governments. We want employees to display initiative, but not to steal from competitors in order to improve the quarterly accounts. Every sophisticated human organisation therefore confronts the same...

By Matthew Parish Monday 12 October 2026 A Mariupol mother remembers the destruction of ordinary life, three weeks without basic services, the struggle for food and water, and the extraordinary journey that carried her family out of the besieged city. There is a peculiar cruelty in remembering an ordinary life after it has disappeared. The things that once seemed too mundane to deserve notice acquire, in retrospect, an almost unbearable significance: sending children to school, going to work,...

By Matthew Parish Monday 12 October 2026 I have developed a problem. I can no longer take the news seriously. This is an awkward condition for somebody who writes a newspaper, and I am conscious that admitting it may represent a professional error of some magnitude. Nevertheless, after repeated journeys between Lviv, Kharkiv and Western Europe, I have discovered that much of what is presented to me as news now produces approximately the same emotional response as a restaurant menu advertising...

By Matthew Parish Monday 12 October 2026 There is something peculiarly characteristic of Donald Trump’s approach to international economic relations in his latest announcement that the United States is to acquire substantial quantities of diesel fuel from the Russian Federation. The American President has identified a problem, namely the exceptionally high price of diesel in the United States, and has proposed what appears to be a straightforward commercial solution. Russia possesses enormous...