Rather, it is his case that since Katharine's role in the affair (in particular, her lesser-known role as Parnell's intermediary with William Gladstone) has been revised so extensively (even "re-invented" ), a reassessment of O'Shea is overdue. Dungan's aim is not to contest the ways in which O'Shea has been portrayed-whether in political memoirs by contemporaries or in twentieth- and twenty-first-century reassessments of both Parnell and Katharine O'Shea-as "a self-deluded mari complaisant" and a "place seeker par excellence" (xv, 105). In his justification for writing a biography of the MP whom Parnell cuckolded over a period of years, Myles Dungan argues that O'Shea was "far more than the mere catalyst in a national tragedy" (xvi). The sensational divorce case brought in November 1890 by Captain William O'Shea wrecked both the political future of the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell and the movement for Home Rule. Amid rumours that new “referendums” could be held to rubber-stamp an annexation, the Kremlin has only said that it is up to those regions that are under military occupation to decide their future.The Captain and the King: William O'Shea, Parnell and Late Victorian Ireland, by Myles Dungan pp. Meduza, a Russian-language outlet, reported this week that the Kremlin was planning to combine all the lands into a new federal district that could be annexed by Russia as soon as this autumn. Russia has steadily sought to integrate newly captured land in Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in southern Ukraine. Putin denied that Russia was seeking to occupy new land in its Ukraine invasion, but the Kremlin’s actions show that is not true. It was a project that cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs, conscripted as forced labourers to build Peter’s “window to Europe” in the swamps of the Baltic Sea coast.īefore Putin’s visit to the exhibition, state television aired a documentary praising Peter the Great as a tough military leader, greatly expanding Russian territory at the expense of Sweden and the Ottoman empire with the modernised army and navy he built. Peter the Great, an autocratic moderniser admired by liberal and conservative Russians alike, ruled for 43 years and gave his name to a new capital, St Petersburg – Putin’s home town – that he ordered built on land he conquered from Sweden. “We should not talk about ‘saving face’, but about its immediate de-imperialisation.”Ĭarl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, called Putin’s desire to take back lands claimed by Russia a “recipe for years of wars”.
“Putin’s confession of land seizures and comparing himself with Peter the Great prove: there was no ‘conflict’, only the country’s bloody seizure under contrived pretexts of people’s genocide,” said Mykhailo Podolyak. Photograph: Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty ImagesĬritics said Putin’s remarks proved that his complaints about historical injustice, eastward Nato expansion, and other grievances with the west were all a facade for a traditional war of conquest.Īn adviser to the Ukrainian government said the comments showed that attempts to negotiate with Putin or find an “off-ramp” from the conflict for Putin, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has sought to do, were misguided. A woman takes a selfie in front of a poster with an image of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg on Thursday, the 350th anniversary of his birth.
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