Tony Wood

The world’s fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter, Russia has greater combined oil and gas reserves than Saudi Arabia and will continue to profit from rising oil prices for several more years. But as the world shifts to alternative energy sources – Thane Gustafson in Klimat projects a peak in global demand for fossil fuels around 2030, followed by a swift decline – its hydrocarbon revenues will dwindle. What’s more, Russia is more vulnerable than most to the environmental impacts of climate change. As Gustafson puts it, ‘Russia is already one of the chief causes of climate change; but as time goes on, it will also be one of its chief victims.’

It is too early to tell exactly how bad the consequences of Russia’s senseless and unnecessary war against Ukraine will be. The least pessimistic scenario – a short war followed by a ceasefire – still entails widespread destruction and suffering in Ukraine. And the situation could get even worse, as further players become involved in a proxy war that has every...

Mexico City​, in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is ‘above all, too many people’. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the ‘multitudes surrounding multitudes’: the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions...

On​ 16 April Raúl Castro stepped down as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party. Much of the coverage focused on the fact that, for the first time in more than sixty years, none of the island’s top political posts is occupied by a Castro. This was a generational transition: the current president and first secretary of the party, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to whom Raúl...