World

Sunday

Patrick Gibbons

The uncomfortable history of Narva

The Alaska talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin might have happened on American territory, but the symbolism of their location is a win for the Russian President. Alaska is considerably closer to Russia than it is to the rest of mainland America, and it was once a Russian territory. Putin was returning to a land previously conquered by his people. On Russia’s opposite border, to the west, it is Russia’s imperial past, and Putin’s twisted view of shared history, that worries Europeans. Narva, Estonia’s third largest city, is a strange place, and seems even stranger since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Narva river – from which the city

Liz Walsh

How Ireland became a haven for Hezbollah’s cocaine

In the end, it was a combination of the Irish weather, European maritime intelligence and engine trouble that scuppered a massive Hezbollah-cartel drugs shipment. The Irish government’s failure to patrol the coastline has made Ireland a safe harbour for the fast-evolving drug trafficking network merging terror and narco finance. It is a safe bet that this was not the first or the last shipment to use Ireland as a gateway to the lucrative European market Hezbollah’s involvement in the transnational drugs trade to fund its war against Israel is well documented, with the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam its main conduit into Europe. But evidence from an Irish court last month

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Xi’s purge is expanding

Of all those who have been purged by President Xi Jinping, disappearing into the communist party’s vast network of black jails, Liu Jianchao is one of the most intriguing. He has held a number of top roles in the party apparatus – including in overseas influence operations and in running a shadowy department that sought to track down overseas exiles and ‘persuade’ them to return home, using methods that ranged from intimidation and even abduction to threatening family members still in China. He was also tipped to be the next foreign minister. Liu will also know that corruption crackdowns are rarely solely about corruption, but a smokescreen for all manner

John Foreman

Mounting Russian deaths will not deter Putin

In June, a grim milestone passed. The Ministry of Defence said that one million Russians had been killed or wounded in Ukraine. The Guardian reported that fatalities alone are ‘five times higher than the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars’ after 1945. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, stated that Russia had already lost ‘100,000 soldiers – dead – not injured’ this year. Yet the unmentionable odour of death offends the Russian night. In Moscow, the milestone passed without official remark. The soaring butcher’s bill has not, as some naively still hope, been matched by large-scale public unrest. Although, like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Putin’s war in Ukraine

Saturday

Owen Matthews

The 12 minutes of the Trump-Putin summit that shook the world

The Trump-Putin press conference in Anchorage was 12 minutes that shook the world. Putin got precisely what he wanted, which was full personal rehabilitation as a respectable world leader. Donald Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Putin and at the presser said that he had ‘always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir.’ And though no deal was done over Ukraine, what Putin achieved was something far more valuable – a re-set of relations between Russia and the US. Putin admitted that bilateral ties had fallen to the ‘lowest point since the Cold War’ but called for both sides to move on. ‘Not far from here

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Did Putin get the upper hand in Alaska?

Donald Trump hasn’t left his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska with a deal to end the war in Ukraine. He told reporters that ‘great progress’ was made but ‘we didn’t get there’. To discuss who really got the upper hand, Freddy Gray is joined by Spectator associate editor and Russia correspondent Owen Matthews.

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

The Alaska summit doesn’t look good for Ukraine

And just like that, the highly-anticipated summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska has been and gone, seemingly without very much at all to show for it. The two presidents met in Anchorage yesterday for what Trump had touted as a ‘feel-out’ meeting to lay the groundwork for negotiations to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. But despite Trump rating the tête-à-tête a ten out of ten – ‘in the sense that we got along great’ – on substance, the American president has come away with little to prove that Putin is any closer to stopping his invasion. The signs for Ukraine don’t look promising. Trump has

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Putin was the real winner of the Alaska summit

Vladimir Putin couldn’t stop smiling at the spectacle awaiting him in Anchorage yesterday, as American soldiers knelt to adjust a red carpet rolled out from his presidential plane. Donald Trump applauded as the Russian President walked towards him under the roar of fighter jets and stepped onto American soil for the first time in a decade. The pair shook hands for the cameras, ignoring a journalist who shouted, ‘Mr Putin, will you stop killing civilians?’ before riding off together in the presidential limo to the summit site. A royal reception, not a ceasefire, was what the international pariah had come out of his bunker for. Putin emerged from international isolation

Dalibor Rohac

The good, the bad and the ugly of the Trump-Putin summit

The three-hour Friday summit in Alaska between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin ended as well as it conceivably could have ended: as a big nothingburger. But that does not mean that Ukraine and its supporters can breathe a sigh of relief. Trump may be unhappy that the prospect of his Nobel Peace Prize remains elusive as Putin has not agreed to an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. But it is far from clear that he will end up directing his anger against Russia. The US president neither understands nor cares about understanding Putin’s motives and the threat he poses to the world To be sure, it is a good thing that

James Tidmarsh

The sad decline of the French village fête

France’s village fêtes are disappearing. A survey by the association Les Plus Belles Fêtes de France found that in just four years, nearly a third are no longer held. Once the highlight of rural life, they’re now falling victim to shrinking municipal budgets, falling household income, a chronic shortage of volunteers, endless administrative obstacles and rising security fears. In some places, tension between communities has turned violent. Only two summers ago, a teenager was murdered when a group of young men arrived to disrupt a fête. Elsewhere, fights break out so regularly that prefects now warn mayors to be ‘particularly vigilant’ during celebrations. For centuries, the fête was a rare

Antony Beevor

Is the world safer than in 1945?

11 min listen

80 years ago this week Japan surrendered to the allies, ushering in the end of the Second World War. To mark the anniversary of VJ day, historians Sir Antony Beevor and Peter Frankopan join James Heale to discuss its significance. As collective memory of the war fades, are we in danger of forgetting its lessons? And, with rising state-on-state violence and geopolitical flashpoints, is the world really safer today than in 1945? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How dangerous is Washington, D.C.?

US President Donald Trump claims Washington, D.C. has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals”. There are lots of stories about crime, including one very bizarre incident involving a sandwich. Just how unsafe is D.C.? Freddy Gray is joined by US managing editor Matt McDonald and Isaac Schorr, staff writer at Mediaite, who has written a piece on his experience in Washington for Spectator World.

Owen Matthews

Trump and Putin fundamentally misunderstand each other

Let the trolling begin. Chicken Kiev was the airline meal served to the first planeload of Russian diplomats, government officials and journalists as they flew to Anchorage, Alaska. Russia’s veteran foreign minister Sergei Lavrov arrived dressed in a white sweatshirt bearing the logo ‘CCCP’ – or USSR in Cyrillic. Russian State TV viewers have been treated to video montages of the greatest moments of US-Russian cooperation, from astronauts meeting in the Mir space station to soldiers embracing on the Elbe river in 1945. The US side, by contrast, has done their bit to make the visiting Russians feel unwelcome by billeting the Kremlin press corps in a sports stadium equipped

Matthew Lynn

Mounjaro won’t be the last drug company to bow to Trump

If you need to lose a few pounds after enjoying the French or Italian food a little too much on your summer holiday, there might soon be a problem. The cost of one of the new weight loss drugs that has become so popular in recent months is about to get a lot more expensive. The American drugs giant Eli Lilly doubling the price of Mounjaro in the UK. The price of one diet pill does not make a great deal of difference. The trouble is, the decision was prompted by President Trump’s determination to make the cost of medicines a lot fairer between the United States and the rest

Alexander Kolyandr

Can Putin extract an economic victory from Trump?

The Alaska summit taking place today isn’t just about war – economics looms equally large. Vladimir Putin, with his forces pressing forward in Ukraine, faces neither military urgency nor economic desperation to halt the fighting. For him, this has never been a territorial grab but an existential struggle against Western hegemony. His challenge is to decouple the war from bilateral cooperation with America: the former proceeds too favourably to abandon, while the latter promises diplomatic triumph and relief from mounting economic pressures. Putin’s delegation tells the story. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy for international investment, signal that sanctions and economic cooperation will be discussed. Putin

Edward Howell

Kim Jong-un will be watching the Trump-Putin summit closely

When Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet in Alaska today, it will mark their first encounter since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Although the talks are likely to be dominated by questions of a ceasefire, possible division of territory, and how the three-year war will conclude, North Korea will likely be more than a small elephant in the room. Amidst amplifying ties between Moscow and Pyongyang, neither Putin nor Kim Jong-un looks likely to abandon the other in the short term, irrespective of whether any piece of paper – however preliminary – emerges from the Last Frontier. On Tuesday, Russian and North Korean state media announced that

Sami Sadat

It’s time to take back Afghanistan from the Taliban

Friday 15 August is a painful anniversary for Afghanistan – it is four years since the Taliban took Kabul, turning my country into the worst place in the world to be a woman, and once again a safe haven for terrorists. We can mobilise many thousands of young men and women who are ready to fight for change in Afghanistan For Afghans who fled to neighbouring countries in fear for their lives the situation has recently become dramatically worse. Iran had already pushed back hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees across the border. Since its 12-day war with Israel, it has significantly increased the expulsions, alleging that Afghans helped Mossad’s operations

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Uefa’s ‘Stop killing children’ banner isn’t fooling anyone

Who does Uefa think it’s kidding? It says the huge banner saying ‘Stop killing children’ unfurled at a Super Cup match last night was ‘not political’. It was ‘about humanity’, insists an insider. ‘In fact, you could just say it is common sense’, they said. They must think we were born yesterday. Everyone whose moral faculties have not been entirely fried by the Gaza war knows this banner was likely a political dig at that state it is fashionable to hate – Israel. To display such a banner ahead of a Spurs match – a team with deep links to Britain’s Jewish community – is especially egregious The banner said

James Heale James Heale

Does European solidarity over Ukraine matter?

14 min listen

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has spent today with Keir Starmer at Number 10. This is in anticipation of tomorrow’s Alaska summit between Presidents Trump and Putin – where European leaders will be notably absent. Zelensky’s visit to the UK is designed to project an image of solidarity with Starmer, and European leaders in general – but does it really matter? And is Putin really closer to accepting a ceasefire? Tim Shipman and James Heale join Lucy Dunn to discuss Plus – Tim talks about his article in the magazine this week, for which he spoke to George Finch, the 19 year old Reform councillor who is leader of Warwickshire County Council.

A.S.H. Smyth

The Bank of England could learn from the Falklands

While the Bank of England consults on who will appear on the next round of British bank notes, with reports that Winston Churchill could be dropped from the fiver, this week in the South Atlantic a new set of bank notes came into circulation. The notes will include the Falkland Islands coat of arms, the national flower, the black-browed albatross, and Hugo Burnand’s official portrait of HM the King August 14 is Falklands day, and in celebration of the first recorded sighting of the Islands (in 1592), fresh fivers, tens, and twenties will be rolled out: the first new notes since 1984. (There will be no new fifties, apparently the