Slipping and Sliding, Spit and Polish

It’s an oil rush. Fill your boots, fellers, America is releasing its strategic petroleum reserves, ostensibly to see down Iranian pressure. Good news for voters, great news for foreign countries who want to sponge of the US teat. But in its ducking and diving haste, has the Trump administration inadvertently drunk its own milkshake?

Then in the second half of a two-parter, we’re digging into the brewing Ukranian-Polish conflict. At the earliest days of the Ukraine War, around 2014, their Parliament passed a series of laws which granted official veteran status to a couple of Second World War military groups who had, shall we say, colourful pasts.

Recently, the Polish President withdrew the Polish White Eagle decoration from President Zelenskyy after Ukraine named an elite special unit after one such.

Hundreds of hatchets were buried after Communism, but now, despite the shock of the war, old animosities are bubbling to the surface. And with them, the facade of a united Europe begins to crack.