World

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

China’s nickname for Macron is perfect

Alexei Navalny is being laid to rest in Moscow today, a fortnight after the Russian opposition leader was found dead in a gulag in the Arctic circle. His death prompted an outpouring of grief but also anger among Western leaders. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron expressed their sadness at the news and their indignation, pointing the finger of blame for Navalny’s death at Vladimir Putin. Navalny was a courageous man who paid a heavy price for his dissidence. So, too, did Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist was a fierce critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, using a monthly column in the Washington Post to denounce the de

Thursday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin wants to talk about Russia’s future, not the war

Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the legislature) is rarely an exciting event, but it does provide an opportunity to gauge his mood and assess his priorities. This year’s – the longest yet, at over two hours – was in many ways his stump speech for March’s presidential elections, without ever even acknowledging the upcoming vote. Early on, there was an array of the familiar talking points around his ‘special military operation’ – the invasion of Ukraine. That it was forced upon him by a ‘Nazi’ regime in Kyiv and a hostile ‘so-called West, with its colonial practices and penchant for inciting ethnic conflicts

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s nuclear doctrine has been revealed

Secret documents have been leaked that reveal Russian scenarios for war games involving simulated nuclear strikes. They shed light on Moscow’s military thinking and its nuclear planning in particular, but ultimately only reinforce one key factor: if nuclear weapons are ever used, it will be a wholly political move by Putin. The impressive 29 documents scooped by the Financial Times date back to the period of 2008 (when Vladimir Putin was technically just prime minister but still effectively in charge) to 2014 (after the sudden worsening in relations with the West following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and the annexation of Crimea). Although this means that they are a little dated,

Ben Domenech

Who will replace Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell?

The announcement by Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the United States Senate, that he will step down in November came in anticipation that he would be bounced from his role regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election. Either Donald Trump’s victory would be deemed by populists as a chance to remake the Republican party, or Trump’s failure would be laid at the feet of an intransigent establishment that McConnell has come to symbolise, in every way imaginable, deserved or not. McConnell is hated by many, but also respected. He is a man with a significant legacy, borne from the before Trump times, of maintaining a position just to the

Lukas Degutis

Why Latvia is expelling its Russian speakers

Riga, Latvia At the age of 74, Inessa Novikova, who is ethnically Russian, was told she had to learn Latvian or she’d be deported. ‘I felt physically ill when the policy was announced,’ she tells me when we meet in an office close to Riga’s city centre. ‘I’ve lived here peacefully for 20 years.’ There was no requirement for her to seek Latvian citizenship after the Cold War ended. Then, it was acknowledged that ethnic Russians, who make up a quarter of Latvia’s 1.8 million population, would co-exist with ethnic Latvians. But when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, this arrangement ended. If Latvia’s ‘non-citizens’ had Russian citizenship, as Inessa did, they now

Justin Marozzi

Could Iran shift to dynastic rule when Khamenei dies?

Who will rule Iran after Ali Khamenei? The question is being asked with increasing frequency and concern as the Supreme Leader approaches his 85th birthday amid rumours of ill health, and it will be raised again on 1 March, when Tehran holds elections to the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body which will determine his successor. Neither of the principal contenders is squeamish about shedding blood in the interests of regime survival Successions in dictatorships, or in Iran’s case an oppressive theocracy, are fraught with danger. Uncertainty and instability, with the prospect of great violence, are priced in. Throw in an illegal nuclear weapons programme, the growing risk

Anshel Pfeffer

Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion. The plan has not been designed to end the war in Gaza. It is about Netanyahu’s own political survival But the plan

Wednesday

Graham Watts

What drives Ukraine’s fighting spirit?

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas. The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia’s but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Nikki Haley isn’t running to win

Commentators find it tedious to keep pointing out that Donald Trump has won yet another primary by yet another huge margin. He just defeated Nikki Haley by more than 40 points in Michigan, for instance, and many journalists seem to be focusing on his struggle to win over key ‘voter blocs’. She will inevitably cave to reality after Super Tuesday next week A lot of this talk is pure wind. Yes, Haley performed well in suburbs around Detroit and Michigan among voter groups that Trump will have to do better with in order to win in a general election against Joe Biden. But Michigan, like South Carolina and New Hampshire,

Matthew Lynn

Apple is right to steer clear of the electric car market

Apple’s much-hyped electric car appears to have been killed off before it ever hit the road. For years, the tech firm’s plan to branch out into developing an electric, semi-autonomous car have been the subject of much excitement. Codenamed Project Titan, fans speculated that Apple would turn its magic to designing a car that would revolutionise driving. The template of a square box with four wheels underneath that has dominated auto design for more than a hundred years would become a thing of the past. Over the last decade, as rumours emerged about the project – which was never officially announced – Apple nerds, who admittedly have a tendency to

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Ukraine attacks the Church of England’s ‘pro-Russia propaganda’

Perhaps Justin Welby expected gratitude from Ukraine, after the Church of England’s Synod debated the war this week. He certainly didn’t expect a double rebuke from the country, a sacred and secular censure. In letters to Welby that have not been published but have been shown to me, two official Ukrainian bodies have protested at the briefing document that was prepared ahead of the debate. As I argued yesterday, the briefing document is inappropriately even-handed, as if both sides in the conflict are caught up in a tragic muddle, and as if no particular religious body is more culpable than any other. There should be an inquiry into how this deeply

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has embarrassed and embittered his military

Emmanuel Macron is the first president of the Fifth Republic to have never served in the military, and it shows. His bellicose declaration on Monday that the West might deploy ground troops to Ukraine has been roundly rejected by France’s allies. No chance, was the retort of Germany, Britain, Poland and others. Russia also warned that such a deployment would be very unwise. Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces As a result, Macron has been left looking foolish and inexperienced, accused of war-mongering in order to boost his self-esteem after a bruising few weeks domestically. A dismissive editorial in today’s Le Figaro, the newspaper of choice

Amber Duke

Why this Gaza protest vote is dangerous for Joe Biden

Earlier this month, ‘none of these candidates’ turned out to be a political spoiler for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in the Nevada Republican primary. Even though her main rival, former president Donald Trump, opted not to participate in the state GOP’s caucus and Haley was essentially running unopposed in the primary, ‘none of these candidates’ trounced her by 33 points. An unnamed third party showed up on Tuesday night for the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan too, this time against the Democratic incumbent, President Joe Biden. At the time of writing, ‘Uncommitted’ is teetering around 15 per cent of voters in the Michigan primary against Joe Biden. Progressive activists in the state,

Bob Seely MP

The West is being too slow to arm Ukraine

A dangerous truth is emerging from Ukraine. Kyiv is slowly starting to lose the war against Russia because it is running short of ammunition, in large part because promises made by the EU and the USA are not being honoured. Concurrently, Russia has moved to a wartime economic footing, with 40 per cent of government spending now on the military. The result has seen Ukraine start to lose territory. In the east of the country, where I visited last week, talk is turning to which town will fall next. Soldiers are angry that they are dying because they do not have the ammunition – and specifically artillery shells – to return fire

Tuesday

Seth J. Frantzman

There should be no ceasefire in Gaza

Joe Biden appears to be pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. ‘My hope is that by next Monday we’ll have a ceasefire,’ the US president said yesterday. Hamas has said the comments are ‘premature’ and Israeli sources have reportedly said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was surprised by Biden’s remarks. Pressure for a ceasefire would benefit Hamas, which has been demanding a stop in the fighting since mid-October after it attacked Israel and massacred 1,000 people and took 240 hostages. Hamas’ approach in this latest conflict is nothing new: it has often sought to leverage the suffering of Gazan civilians, which it hides behind to fire rockets and build tunnels, to

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Macron won’t send troops to Ukraine

French President Emmanuel Macron does enjoy a good grandstanding. Having once been keen to present himself as a possible bridge-builder with Moscow, he is now suggesting that western troops might go fight in Ukraine – secure in the knowledge that his bluff is unlikely to be called. At a press conference at the end of a summit in Paris on supporting Kyiv he said: ‘there is no consensus to officially send ground troops. That said, nothing should be ruled out.’ He wouldn’t say any more. He wanted to maintain some ‘strategic ambiguity.’ It is certainly true that manpower is a key Ukrainian constraint. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently admitted that

Niko Vorobyov

How the Netherlands became a narco-state

In a heavily-fortified Amsterdam courthouse known as The Bunker, Ridouan Taghi, the chieftain of the so-called ‘Mocro-Maffia’ (Moroccan mafia), and 16 of his henchmen learned their fate today. The gang were all found guilty of a series of murders that shocked the Netherlands. Taghi’s case is symptomatic of a wider illness within Dutch society. In 2020, police discovered a soundproofed torture chamber in a disused shipping container belonging to one of Taghi’s rivals. Inside was a dentist’s chair with restraints for arms and legs, as well as finger clamps, scalpels, hammers, pliers, gas burners, and duct tape.  While there have always been gangland hits known as ‘liquidations’ and overall crime rates are

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why is Macron acting like a ‘warlord’?

Emmanuel Macron has said that the West may have to send ground troops to Ukraine to support their war against Russia. The president of France made his comments on Monday as he hosted a conference at the Elysée palace about how best to support Ukraine. In attendance were more than 20 European heads of state and government, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as representatives from the USA and Canada. The cynic might wonder if Macron’s grandstanding isn’t a last desperate attempt to claw back some authority before June’s European elections Macron admitted that there was not a consensus on deploying ground troops to Ukraine but ‘no option should

Ben Domenech

Trump needs to win over some of Nikki Haley’s voters

The math is clear for Nikki Haley. Even though she outperformed polling expectations in her home state of South Carolina, getting 40 per cent of the vote to Trump’s 60 per cent, her path to the Republican nomination is only going to get harder now. Thanks to significant Republican rule changes that increased the number of winner-take-all states, Donald Trump should have the nomination officially locked up within a month. And while donor money can keep Haley afloat through that moment and perhaps beyond, she has lost the backing of the Koch machine, which is shifting its resources to lower level contests. So what lessons, if any, should we take from Haley’s performance,

Aliona Hlivco

Ukraine’s heroes are losing hope

Ukraine can still win its war against Russia – and it can win it in 2024. All it needs is a speedy supply of artillery rounds, more air defences, long-range missiles, and fourth-generation fighter jets. This list goes on, but the longer the West waits, the higher the cost of this war. The tragedy is that, for Ukraine’s partners, the cost grows in money; for Ukraine, it does so in human lives. The horrors of Russian torture chambers will stay with him for life It’s now been two years since Russia’s tanks invaded; for Ukrainians like me, who live abroad, we live in constant fear of terrible news from back