World

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Putin and Xi’s anti-West alliance is strengthening

The visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to the north-eastern Chinese city of Harbin today was no doubt designed as a symbol of the tightening economic relationship between the two countries. Harbin is a gateway for their burgeoning trade; the Russian leader was there to open a China-Russia expo. In the minds of many Chinese nationalists, though, Harbin has far darker symbolism. ‘Little Moscow’, as the city is sometimes called, was established by Russian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century and was the administrative centre of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. This was an imperialist project to give Russia a shortcut to Vladivostok and the Russian Far East,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Beijing’s nickname for France’s president is ‘Macaron’

Five people have now been killed and scores wounded in the New Caledonia insurgency as Emmanuel Macron struggles to restore order on the Pacific island. There was a fourth night on disorder on Thursday, despite the state of emergency in place and the presence on troops on the streets. Military reinforcements from France are expected in the next few hours. Louis Le Franc, the French High Commissioner, told reporters he hopes their arrival will enable them to regain control of those areas in the hands of the rebels. So far the insurgents have caused more than €200 million (£172 million) worth of damage by burning and attacking the island’s infrastructure.

Robin Ashenden

Georgia’s ‘foreign agent’ law protestors won’t go down quietly

Following the introduction this Tuesday of Georgia’s notorious ‘foreign agent’ law by the ruling party Georgian Dream, there has been widespread popular protest in the capital Tbilisi. The law, proposed last year but postponed in the face of public resistance, demands that any non-governmental organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad must label itself an ‘agent of foreign influence’ or face fines and even imprisonment. While the government claims it’s simply a practical bid to create transparency in Georgian politics, critics, who call it the ‘Russian Law’, feel it’s a leap towards greater union with the Kremlin. They fear the legislation will simply be abused,

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The troubling reaction to the shooting of Robert Fico

Just imagine if, following the killing of Jo Cox, some right-wing media outlet had said: ‘Well, she was a divisive figure, and very pro-Remain, so it’s not surprising something like this happened.’ We’d be horrified, right? We would have looked upon such low commentary as excuse-making for murder, as a borderline justification for an utterly unjust act of violence against an MP, a mother and democracy itself. It is hands down the most disturbing thing I’ve heard on a news channel Well, something not dissimilar to this imagined scenario happened for real yesterday – and we need to talk about it. It was on Sky News. They were discussing the

Ukraine

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Zelensky feels the pressure as Russian offensive intensifies

Volodymyr Zelensky this morning cancelled all of his upcoming foreign trips. He was scheduled to travel to Madrid on Friday to meet King Felipe VI. The news was announced by the president’s press secretary, and comes as Ukrainian troops struggle to hold back a renewed offensive by Russia in the Kharkiv region. Recognising the urgency of the situation, Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, who has been in Kyiv this week, said the US would provide another $2 billion (£1.6 billion) in funds on top of the $60 billion aid package signed off by Joe Biden earlier this month. The fighting in the Kharkiv region has been intensifying for

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Draft dodgers are undermining Ukraine’s plea for help

Emmanuel Macron warned recently that Europe is in ‘mortal danger’. The French president said that Russia cannot be allowed to win its war with Ukraine. He reiterated the idea he first floated in February of sending soldiers to Ukraine, saying: ‘I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out.’ Macron’s comments come amid reports of an upsurge in draft dodgers in Ukraine. They are frightened because their government has launched a crackdown on men avoiding the draft. In November last year it was reported that as many as 650,000 Ukrainians of military age have left the country since the war began. ‘Some men paid

Owen Matthews

The US war aid might be too little, too late for Ukraine

At the last possible moment, after months of prevarication and with Russian troops on the brink of a major breakthrough in Ukraine, the US Congress last night voted to approve more than $61 billion (£50 billion) worth of military assistance for Kyiv. In a vote that a vocal minority of Republicans had desperately attempted to stop through procedural objections and threats to remove speaker Mike Johnson, 210 Democrats and 101 Republicans finally joined to support Ukraine. A majority of Republicans – 112 Congress members – voted against. The money comes at a critical moment in Ukraine’s war effort. With US aid stalled in Congress since last October and European allies

China

America

Europe

Dalibor Rohac

The assassination attempt on Robert Fico will change Slovakia for ever

Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot several times. While it is impossible to fully flesh out the consequences of today’s assassination attempt, it is safe to say that the event is a dramatic game changer for Slovak, and potentially for Central European, politics. During a meet and greet with the public following a cabinet meeting in the small mining town of Handlová, a man reportedly shouted at Fico, ‘Rob, come here,’ before shooting at him three or four times aiming at his chest and abdomen. The prime minister fell on the ground before being taken by his protection officers to the car and

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Normandy prisoner escape shines a light on France’s criminal underworld

‘Sometimes when we turn on the television we get the impression that nothing’s going well in France,’ Emmanuel Macron said on Monday. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ France’s president has developed a knack of being overtaken by events – and so it has proved once again. A huge manhunt is underway after two prison guards were shot dead near Rouen in Normandy. The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a prisoner, described by police sources as a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’, whose real name is Mohamed A. Two vehicles blocked the prison van on the A154 motorway and, as the prisoner was sprung, two of the guards

Jim Lawley

Catalonia has gone cold on independence

Is Catalonia’s independence movement dead in the water? Elections held in the region on Sunday reveal that support for separatist parties dropped significantly. Between them, the hard-line Junts per Catalunya, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and two small separatist parties only managed 61 seats – of which 35 went to Junts. In the regional parliament, 68 seats are required for a majority. This is an anticlimatic end to an impassioned, and at times dramatic, saga for the region. On 27 October 2017, confident that the European Union would welcome a new, freedom-loving net-contributor to its budget, Catalonia boldly declared itself ‘an independent and sovereign state’. But rather than a warm welcome,

Yesterday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin can’t hide how dependent he is on Beijing

Vladimir Putin has arrived in China for a two-day state visit, the first since the start of his fifth term as president. The trip began in Beijing, where Putin met with Chinese premier Xi Jinping for the first of several talks. There remained a distinct sense that once again Putin has come to Beijing with begging bowl in hand  The meeting began with the effusive pleasantries that have become a standard part of any interaction between the two leaders. Putin called Xi a ‘dear friend’ once again and said he had chosen to make his first post-inauguration trip abroad to China to return a favour, after Xi travelled to Russia

Nigel Jones

Slovakia is united after the assassination attempt on Fico. It won’t last

Somewhat unfairly, Slovakia is often overlooked and ignored as a quiet and peaceful backwater in the often turbulent turmoil of east European geopolitics. The assassination attempt that almost ended the life of its controversial prime minister Robert Fico yesterday has changed all that. Fico was shot five times in the abdomen and arm. After undergoing emergency surgery, he is now said by doctors to be stable, and likely to survive his life threatening injuries. That unity is unlikely to last long if Fico bounces back from his brush with death The suspected gunman, whose motives are still unknown, was arrested at the scene, and has been named as Juraj Cintula,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France is spiralling out of control

The cold-blooded execution of two prison guards at a Normandy motorway toll on Tuesday has shocked France. It is for many commentators and politicians incontrovertible evidence of the ‘Mexicanisation’ of the Republic. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has told the escaped prisoner and his accomplices that they will be hunted down and punished, but it better be done quickly. With every passing hour that they remain at liberty it reinforces the image of a state that, in the words of Senator Bruno Retailleau, ‘has lost control’. Other politicians are talking of a ‘war’. Eric Zemmour told an interviewer the country was engaged in ‘a civil war’, while Francois-Xavier Bellamy of the

Rohit Kachroo

Gangs of Tehran: how Iran takes out its enemies abroad

‘It was Friday afternoon, around 2.45. I came out of the house and was going towards the car on the driver’s side,’ Pouria Zeraati says casually. Zeraati – a presenter at the London-based TV station, Iran International – is recounting what was probably an Iranian state-sponsored attack. ‘I was approached by a man who pretended to be someone asking for £3. The second man then approached. They held me strong, very firmly, and the first person stabbed me in my leg.’ The Iranian regime is reshaping the murder-for-hire market in the US and parts of Europe Zeraati is talking on his first day back at work since he was knifed

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Ahmad Massoud: ‘I’m 100% sure I can topple the Taliban’

It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government. ‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’ ‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud,

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Veep show: who will Trump pick for his running mate?

We are in the fifth week of Donald Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial and the real scandal is that it’s all so intensely boring. Sex, porn-star witnesses, shady lawyers, a president in the dock – the headlines are a tabloid dream. The crux of the case, however, is a bunch of tedious charges to do with tax reporting and accountancy. Who wants to read about that?   Trump is ‘not looking for an heir because that would be Macbeth or King Lear, a bloodbath’ Trump adores the attention, naturally. As the greatest showman of the 21st century he understands that we, the people, need fresh drama and new characters. That’s why, while

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Natalie Elphicke defects, wages rise and Switzerland takes Eurovision

Home The parliamentary Labour party shook itself uneasily after Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, crossed the floor of the Commons and joined it, because she found the Conservatives too left wing. Monty Panesar, the former England cricketer, left George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain a week after being announced as a parliamentary candidate. Some Liberal Democrat party members complained to the Equality and Human Rights Commission about the deselection as a candidate for Sutton and Cheam of David Campanale, an Anglican. The Commons voted by 170 to 169 for MPs arrested for serious sexual or violent offences to be banned from attending parliament. The government bruited plans to stop

Tuesday

Sam Meadows

Javier Milei is torn between the West and China

Javier Milei pledged to ‘make Argentina great again’ when he took to the stage in February at the CPAC meeting of right-wing thinkers in the United States. The Argentine president is a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist who, like Donald Trump, rose to prominence promising to deliver shockwaves to his country. The first six months of Milei’s presidential term have been notable for the sudden domestic reforms he has enacted – cutting government ministries, devaluing the peso and slashing subsidies – but he has also found himself at the heart of tensions between the world’s two great powers, America and China. On this, he is acting uncharacteristically carefully. Ending economic cooperation with China

Paul Wood

Could a Trump conviction really change the presidential election?

The first time I heard the name ‘Michael Cohen’ was in 2015, from a Republican political operative who told me: ‘It’s his job to clean up Trump’s messes with women.’ He went on to explain how Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, would pay a large amount in cash to whichever actress-model-stripper-pornstar was claiming to have been screwed, dumped or knocked-up by The Donald. And, crucially, Cohen – Trump’s ‘designated thug’ as he called himself – would scare the hell out of the women concerned to make sure they signed an airtight NDA (or non-disclosure agreement). Over the years, this story has turned out to be far more durable than

Alexander Kolyandr

Is Andrei Belousov Russia’s Albert Speer?

President Vladimir Putin’s appointment of the civilian economist Andrei Belousov as Russia’s defence minister in the third year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is bad news for Kyiv and its allies. Replacing the unpopular Sergei Shoigu with Belousov marks a clear shift in Putin’s strategy: he views the war as a battle of economic attrition.  There is hardly anyone better suited for the job than Belousov. A Soviet-trained economist, he cut his teeth in academia before joining the government just months before Putin became prime minister in 1999. Since then, he has climbed through the ranks to become Putin’s economic advisor and, from 2020, the First Deputy Prime Minister, overseeing

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

China’s vendetta against Nato

46 min listen

Last week, President Xi Jinping visited Serbia. An unexpected destination, you might think, but in fact the links between Beijing and Belgrade go back decades. One event, in particular, has linked the two countries – and became a seminal moment in how the Chinese remember their history. In 1999, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by US-led Nato forces. Three Chinese nationals died. An accident, the Americans insisted, but few Chinese believed it then, and few do today. The event is still remembered in China, but now, little talked about in the West. Xi’s visit was timed to the 25th anniversary of the bombing itself. ‘The China-Serbia friendship, forged

Terry Barnes

Elon Musk has won a victory for free speech in Australia

In the unedifying clash of heads between billionaire Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk, and Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, there could only be one rightful winner. Elon Musk. On Monday, Musk’s X succeeded in having a temporary injunction thrown out by Australia’s Federal Court preventing it and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta from posting images of last month’s Sydney stabbing. An Armenian Orthodox bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was attacked in his church, allegedly by a religiously radicalised youth, in April. The incident was captured by the church’s own livestream of the event and beamed across the internet: the footage is disturbing but already there for the world to see, if anyone chose

Mark Nayler

Catalans appear to be growing tired of independence

Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE) won crucial elections in Catalonia over the weekend, beating a pro-independence bloc whose support has been declining steadily over the last few years. The Socialists were led by Salvador Illa, who served as Spain’s health minister during the pandemic. The party will now have the first shot at forming the region’s next government, despite being 26 seats short of a majority. The negotiations are likely to last for weeks, and may have an impact on the national administration led by Pedro Sanchez, which itself is heavily reliant on the support of Catalan separatists. Sunday’s election was a de facto vote on Catalan secession, which has been

Eliot Wilson

Sunak’s dire warning will fall on deaf ears

Even on the most optimistic reading, Rishi Sunak is drinking in the last-chance saloon. Today the Prime Minister is delivering a speech which is supposed to kick-start the general election campaign. Sunak wants to demonstrate that the Conservative party has the vision and policies to guide the country through a dangerous and uncertain future. But Sunak’s speech seems to be striking the wrong note: one of doom and gloom rather than optimism. Sunak’s speech has been rapidly dismissed as a bungled relaunch It’s no surprise that Sunak’s speech has been rapidly dismissed as a bungled relaunch. The PM’s thesis is that the next few years will see more change than

Charles Parton

The Harvard man who became Xi Jinping’s favourite academic

Xi Jinping is a busy man. He holds down three jobs. As General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), he rules 1.4 billion people and disciplines 100 million party members; as Chairman of the Military Commission, he commands and reforms the world’s largest army; and as president, he glad-hands a succession of Beijing-bound heads of states. In his spare time he has also authored ten books. So you can be sure that when he carves out time for a separate meeting with a hitherto unremarkable American academic, it is not without purpose. Graham Allison, in case you have not heard of him, is an historian with a chair at

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What the Shoigu reshuffle means for Putin’s war machine

There was an expectation that the appointment of Vladimir Putin’s new government would see some change in the Russian security apparatus, but few predicted that Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu would be replaced by an economist, Andrey Belousov, with Shoigu becoming secretary of the Security Council. With an economist taking over the defence ministry, and the old minister taking up a policy and advisory role, the technocrats are in the ascendant. The goal though is not peace, but a more efficient war. The technocrats are in the ascendant. The goal though is not peace, but a more efficient war Much has been made in some quarters about the fact that Belousov

Connor Allen

Working in Brussels, I saw the dark side of the EU

To this day, many Remainers see the vote to leave the EU as an entirely self-inflicted wound. But is that truly the case? Senior European politicians are starting to reflect and acknowledge Europe’s own hand in Brexit – and the damage Brussels may have caused after the referendum result. During my time working in the European Parliament in the Brexit period, for two different Remain-leaning MEPs in the ECR and Renew Europe groups, I saw this darker side of Brussels first hand. Friedrich Merz, leader of the German CDU, stated this week that he ‘remember[s] that David Cameron asked for changes to EU social policy and came back to London empty-handed. The

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Sergei Shoigu out as Russia’s defence minister

It’s reshuffle time in Moscow and it seems that Sergei Shoigu, who has served as Vladimir Putin’s defence minister for the last 12 years, is out. He’s being replaced with Andrei Belousov, an academic economist who has been advising Putin for 20 years and spent the last four as deputy prime minister. It’s a surprise appointment given Belousov’s lack of military experience. Sergei Lavrov, 74, stays as foreign minister, as does Valery Gerasimov, 68, head of the army. Rumours had been swirling about the demotion of Shoigu, 68, for some time, especially after one of his deputies and close allies, Timur Ivanov, was last month thrown in jail pending trial for

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Chinese society is rapidly militarising

The reports in China’s state media speak about ‘advancing national defence education in the new era’, teaching students to be ‘disciplined’, and ‘promoting the spirit of hard work and inspiring patriotism’. But behind the stultifying Communist party jargon is a new law that will force school children to undergo miliary training and which marks another step towards a militarisation of Chinese society on a scale not seen since the days of Mao Zedong. The revised ‘law on national defence education’, now before China’s rubber-stamp parliament, proposes mandatory military drills for middle school pupils aged 12 to 15 and says that defence should be studied even at primary school. Ritualised military-style

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why are the yakuza stealing Pokemon cards?

A high-ranking member of the yakuza (Japanese mafia) has been arrested in Tokyo for selling stolen Pokemon cards. Keita Saito was taken into custody in April after the theft of goods worth 1,600 dollars, which included a stack of the popular ‘Pocket Monster’ trading cards. What a comedown for the once fearsome lords of the underworld whose domains included extortion, prostitution, loan sharking, and illegal gambling. It’s as if Don Corleone had been reduced to running the shell game (‘watch the ball, which cup is it under?’) on some New York back street.  The low-rent nature of the crime is indicative of how desperate the Japanese yakuza now appear to be