Five years is not such a long time for the armies that eyeball each other along the demilitarised zone cutting the Korean peninsula in half. Their guns have been on a hair trigger for more than five decades. In fact, the frozen battlelines are such a feature of the landscape that part of them is now a Cold War theme park.

Since Russia enshrined freedom of speech as a constitutional right in 1993, a total of 152 journalists have been murdered there. A database set up in June by two media monitoring organisations, the Glasnost Defence Foundation and the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, sets out the details of each case. Yelena Tregubova is trying hard not to be the 153rd.

There is a fault line running through Ukraine that is a product of its history and people. To talk about the history of Ukraine as simply one of Russian occupation is to disenfranchise the voice and identity of a large chunk of its population. If you are not a Uniate Catholic from western Ukraine, you are likely to be Russian Orthodox from the east or south. Hence real democracy can only be achieved if it is accepted as a multi-ethnic state.

THE streets of Paris, famously constructed for armies, faced two of them on May Day. One – that of the well- disciplined troops of the far-right leader Jean-Marie le Pen – they could cope with. The other they couldn’t.