Cover Story

How we chose this week’s images

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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

We had an important cover lined up for this week, on the hard choices posed by green growth. But when some mercenaries from the Wagner Group mutinied, our thoughts turned to Russia.

On June 24th, as a convoy of armed militia charged at high speed towards Moscow, it seemed as if almost anything could happen. However, by that evening the drama was over. Churchill once likened Russian leaders to “bulldogs fighting under a carpet”. This week they suddenly emerged, snarling and biting. But not for long.

The job of our cover was to signal to readers where we thought Russia was heading and that we had something to say about a story that they had been following avidly.

The tank firing on itself suggests that we are going back to the battlefield. And indeed, this week’s issue does report on the morale and focus of Russia’s troops. After Yevgeny Prigozhin seized the logistics and command centre of Rostov-on-Don, seemingly without any resistance, Russian officers will be distractedly looking over their shoulders at how they will be affected by a power struggle back home.

The second sketch, with ZZs facing off against each other above a tense-looking Vladimir Putin, combines the idea of a mutiny with the implications for the Kremlin. Whether Mr Putin survives or not, he has been revealed as a blunderer. He is not so much a tsar as the top thug in the hollowed-out gangland that he has made of Mother Russia. And, in a world where power is everything, he looks like a weakened thug to boot.

This works better, because it focuses entirely on Mr Putin. It plays on his manly penchant for riding bare-chested across the Siberian taiga. It shows the hollowness of his propaganda and the decrepitude of the state that he has shaped. (It also has echoes of Richard III, the beleaguered English king who would have swapped his kingdom for a horse.)

Some of us liked this very much. Few weapons work better against a tyrant than mockery. The words evoke the courage of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, when the Biden administration offered him safe passage out of Kyiv at the start of the war: “I need ammo, not a ride,” he is supposed to have said. Mr Putin, by contrast, seemed rattled in his address to the nation on June 24th. After he had finished speaking, he disappeared from sight.

But others preferred the tone and clarity of this. Mr Putin is cracking up. Even if his rule is not about to crumble, it will never be the same again. If you look closely in the final cover, you can spot a chunk above his eye that is the shape of Ukraine. And that’s not all. Mr Putin also has a chip on his shoulder.

Our original plan had been to put the climate on the cover. Faced with the enormous task of exhorting the world to act, people who care about climate change often find it hard to accept that they must deal with trade-offs—even when doing so would bring clear benefits.

From the panels of Davos to the pages of newspapers, people argue that there is no trade-off between the economic development of low- and middle-income countries and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. Governments and development banks with limited budgets are loth to admit that not all their goals can be reconciled—that they must therefore choose.

Yet choose they must, because growth is the best way to lift people out of poverty and growth creates emissions. What’s more, spending to cut emissions is most effective in middle-income countries, but spending on health care and schools is most effective in the least-developed countries.

The giant balance suspended from the arms of a windmill says that when people allocate resources they are making a choice, whether they admit to it or not. The lad toting a plastic jerry can to the well is dwarfed by the windmills: electric power has come before water.

Here is that first idea worked up into a moody landscape. Many, like this newspaper, argue for mechanisms that minimise the conflict between development and climate action—a carbon price that bites would be our favourite; more generous payments from the rich-world that created the problem would be second-best. Unfortunately, politics means that neither is likely. The choice between climate and development is real, and it is excruciating. Which is worse, a poorer today or a hotter tomorrow?

We felt that this better captured that terrible dilemma. Limited resources make it essential to squeeze as much value as possible out of what is available. A reluctance to weigh costs and benefits stems from a well-meaning desire to avoid injustice. But that reluctance gets in the way and the consequences fall most heavily on those in greatest need.