On 24 February 2022 – exactly a year since the date of this week’s Guardian Weekly magazine – Vladimir Putin unleashed his brutal offensive on Ukraine. As our senior international affairs correspondent, Emma Graham-Harrison, wrote in the following day’s Guardian newspaper: “The continent awoke to the shock of scenes it once believed it had left in the 20th century: helicopters strafing homes outside the capital, long lines of tanks ploughing ever deeper towards Ukraine’s heartland, roads choked with refugees, and civilians huddled in underground stations to escape bombardment.”
Much has been written since then about the state of the war and how it might end, but this week we focus on a key plank of the west’s response: the wide-ranging economic sanctions against Moscow that it was hoped would throttle Putin’s war effort.
Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and gas has been a fundamental weakness in the plan to cut off Moscow’s cash flow, providing an apt metaphor for this week’s cover art. “Oil symbolises the leaky nature of the west’s measures against Russia, and I could think of no one better than Lisa Sheehan to bring it to life,” says art director Christophe Gowans.
As diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour writes for our big story, Russia’s economy has not exactly folded as hoped – but with Europe having proved more resilient than expected to energy blackmail and signs that his revenues are now severely restricted, is Putin running out of room for manoeuvre?
Scottish politics was rocked by the news that the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is to stand down. For so long the face of the independence movement, she leaves a huge void in nationalist politics – and may have opened a door for the UK Labour party to re-establish itself there after many years. Michael Savage and Libby Brooks report.
The Guardian’s special investigation into the fast-growing global industry around disinformation – and those who seek to exploit it for electoral gain – is both essential and chilling reading. We bring you up to speed in this week’s edition, and there’s much more from the Disinfo black ops series on the website.
There’s plenty of brilliant writing elsewhere in the magazine. Don’t miss Tim Adams’s interview with Bernie Sanders, who wants us all to stay angry. On the Opinion pages, Booker prizewinning author Arundhati Roy writes witheringly on modern India, where big business is in lockstep with violent Hindu nationalism. And in Culture, we find out how the melancholic world of goth culture became hip.
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