The Bulletin World Weekly is a newsletter by Peter Bale exclusively for Spinoff members, covering and analysing the most important stories from around the globe. In this special edition, a look back at a tumultuous year.
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Russia changed the world in February
In a sense 2022 started not on January 1 but on February 24, when columns of Russian armaments moved into Ukraine, marking the beginning of what the Kremlin clearly expected to be a rapid invasion of its neighbour and the decapitation of its leadership.
The invasion was predicted by a remarkable flow of US and NATO intelligence – much of it made public by the US – and it’s now clear that Kyiv had been preparing for the military attack for some time, rejigging its entire military strategy away from old Soviet methods towards agility and dynamism.
It is hard to overstate the impact of the invasion of a sovereign European nation in the 21st century. Among the flow-on effects this year were that energy prices spiked globally; NATO swung into action to support Ukraine with equipment and training (even New Zealand sent highly skilled intelligence and logistics and infantry officers to Europe); China tried out what might happen if it invaded Taiwan – and appeared to think better of it; Sweden and Finland decided to join NATO; and the US and its allies are sending tens of billions of dollars of arms, training and aid.
With Russia now clearly using winter as a weapon and Ukraine seemingly trying ever more bold strikes using innovative – sometimes even homemade – weaponry, it seems the conflict will stay at a high intensity with missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure, daring morale-building spectaculars by Ukraine, and World War One-style trench standoff on the frontlines.
Expect fatigue in European capitals as energy prices spike over winter, and increased talk about some sort of ceasefire or peace talks based on the borders that prevailed before the invasion – a prospect that Kyiv will find hard to swallow. President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged a Christmas ceasefire as a first step, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied: “No, no such offers have been received from anybody. This topic is not on the agenda.”
To stay on top of the story until the World Bulletin comes back in January, I recommend:
Ukrainecast – the BBC’s daily podcast on Ukraine features a remarkable line up of guests, including frontline reporters and everyday Ukrainians, and skilled analysis.
Battleground: Ukraine – a well-reported weekly podcast from veteran war correspondent Patrick Bishop and military historian Saul David.
Thinking about… Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s newsletter/blog includes his latest thoughts on Ukraine and much else. I also cannot recommend highly enough one of his many books, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
China faces Covid challenge and an uncertain 2023
Having evidently buckled on its zero Covid strategy after the success of the remarkable blank paper protests, Beijing faces a surging crisis as the year turns. This comes even after a year in which Xi Jinping cemented his control of the Chinese Communist Party – or thought he had.
It is hard to get a clear handle on the situation given the controls on media in China but it appears the Covid testing process has broken down and that infections are sweeping the country. Eventually, that will combine with the low level of vaccinations and the relative ineffectiveness of the locally developed vaccine China insisted on using to create a national health crisis. The knock on effects on the economy, society, and Xi himself can only be guessed at so far.
“The government has left the public to fend for itself,” was how The Economist (paywall) put it.
As Reuters reported: “On Nov. 21, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, in charge of China’s war on Covid-19, said infections had to be brought down to zero as they emerged. Nine days later, she said the Omicron strain of the virus had “weakened” even though new cases in the Chinese capital hit a high. Last week, in one fell swoop, China cut away most of the tenets governing its stifling zero-Covid policies, effectively ending its war on the pandemic. It has since turned to re-educating people on the harmlessness of Omicron and pushing the idea of self-care, a dramatic U-turn from quarantine camps and crushing lockdowns that sparked recent, rare public protests.”
Recommended listening:
Drum Tower – a new weekly podcast from the Economist about China, co-hosted by its Beijing bureau chief and its chief China correspondent
The world in pictures in 2022
From the crowds returning to Times Square in New York after the peak of the Covid pandemic to the war in Ukraine, the Winter Olympics, and that ridiculous long table Vladimir Putin used to keep his distance from Emmanuel Macron, CNN offered an elegantly curated and presented collection of images of 2022.
Likewise, Reuters has created a series of spectacular 2022 images in categories from fashion, entertainment, space, protest and many more.
Novelist Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize 2012 for her book ‘Bring Up The Bodies’. (Photo: Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)
Some we lost in 2022
It’s sobering to look back and consider people we’ve lost in 2022. Most readers’ thoughts will likely go first to Queen Elizabeth II but I thought I’d call out a handful more whose lives were described so beautifully in The Economist by the unbylined obituaries editor Anne Wroe. I will also link where I can to an equivalent from The Guardian which, unlike The Economist, does not have a paywall.
Abe Shinzo, 67, former Japanese prime minister: shot dead on July 8 with a handmade gun allegedly by a man who objected to Shinzo’s connections to Korea’s Unification Church.
“His main concern…was that Japan should assert itself in the world. For too long it had trod nervously, cringing in atonement for its crimes in the second world war, clinging to a constitution written by the American occupiers that required it to be pacifist and to rely for its defences on the United States,” The Economist wrote in its obituary, closing with this: “His simplest wish was that Japan should no longer be haunted. He did not believe in ghosts.”
“Few other Japanese leaders in living memory have left as deep an imprint on their country as Shinzo Abe,” The Guardian wrote, using the anglicized structure of Japanese names.
Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, died on September 22 of a stroke, aged 70.
“It was a late flowering but a glorious one, her triangular form shimmering through literary festivals, then stage and screen, in blue and silver and immense black capes lined with silk…,” The Economist wrote of her physical and psychic presence in an obituary titled: “Hilary Mantel saw things that others couldn’t”. “Fame was gleeful, because she had laboured so hard, against such odds, to earn it.”
“The impulse to write grew out of her sense that something was seriously wrong with her,” The Guardian wote. It turned out she had a long history of undiagnosed endometriosis.
James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory of environmental interconnectedness, died on July 26, aged 103.
“A hypothesis so all-embracing threw up question after question, which he tackled with delight,” The Economist wrote in its obituary headlined: “James Lovelock changed the way human beings look at the Earth”.
“Lovelock reckoned that, according to standard physics, the planet’s surface should have boiled with the increasing heat, rather than remain cool. The only explanation, he decided, was that the Earth was a self-regulating system that had found a way to preserve its equilibrium: and that the organisms on Earth had kept their environment stable,” The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Lovelock.
Carmen Callil, publisher and feminist, died on October 17, aged 84.
“She championed hundreds, if not thousands, of women writers,” The Economist wrote of the founder of Virago Press. “But if she could take just one book with her…it would be ‘Maurice Guest’ by Henry Handel Richardson, whose real name was Ethel. Richardson was Australian, as was she. The novel is set in 1890s Leipzig, and is suffused with many of the things she adored: music, art, sex and a certain émigré cosmopolitanism that came from being the child of a Maronite Christian and an Irish Catholic whose forebears had made a new life on the other side of the world.”
“Virago aimed to provide a mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women – at a time when they were permitted neither mortgages nor bank loans,” The Guardian wrote.
For more on those we lost this year, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper The Observer has a 2022 obituaries section. Reuters also has a beautiful set of pictures of notable people who died during the year.
… and a few resurrections
As well as those we lost in 2022 there was the odd resurrection of sorts. None was more spectacular than the return of long-time Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who won re-election having been counted out under corruption allegations and bitter opposition.
With the help of extreme right-wing Jewish parties, Netanyahu rose again, prompting this rather harsh headline in the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Lust for Power Revealed in All Its Sickening Glory.
In the New York Times, former Palestinian negotiator Diana Buttu predicted that the Palestinians would bear the consequences of Netanyahu’s return, writing: “As the prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, finalizes the formation of Israel’s most extreme right-wing government to date, I, along with other Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories, am filled with dread about what the next few years will bring.”
In Brazil, the former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who served prison time on corruption charges that were later quashed – staged his own remarkable political resurrection to defeat right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro.
It seems another expert in resurrection was part of Lula’s motivation to go into politics. According to The Guardian, “had it not been for a chiding from Fidel Castro nearly four decades ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva might well have abandoned what would prove one of the most storied political careers the region has ever known.
“’He gave him a bollocking,’ Lula’s biographer and friend, Fernando Morais, said of the moment the Cuban revolutionary took the Brazilian unionist to task for considering throwing in the towel after failing in his bid to become São Paulo’s governor in 1982.”