World

Wednesday

Gray Sergeant

China’s threats to Kinmen should be taken seriously

When two Chinese fisherman died last month trying to flee Taiwan’s coastguard, Beijing laid the blame at Taipei’s feet and demanded an apology. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also spied an opportunity to advance its territorial claims. China has been targeting Kinmen, an island controlled by Taiwan, more aggressively over the past few weeks. The CCP stated that ‘there is no such thing as “prohibited or restricted waters”’ – saying that the waters around the island had been used as traditional fishing grounds by both sides. On the morning of 19 February, four Chinese coast guard vessels patrolled around Kinmen’s restricted waters. Personnel boarded and inspected a Taiwanese tourist boat that had ‘veered slightly of course’. The next day, a

Monica Porter

Is Viktor Orbán really anti-Semitic?

Much of the criticism directed at Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s long-serving populist prime minister, is richly deserved. Orbán poses as the bête noire of the EU, despite Hungary being a net recipient of EU largesse. Another source of the opprobrium directed against Orbán is his opposition to aiding Ukraine in its existential war against Russia. This is downright indecent for someone who, as a handsome young political firebrand in 1989, helped to end Soviet control of Hungary. Has Orbán forgotten, now that he is grey-haired and rather porky, what it means to yearn for your country’s freedom and independence? Continued access to cheap Russian gas and oil just isn’t a good

Tuesday

Dan Storyev

The genius of the ‘Noon against Putin’ protest

On Sunday, the final day of voting in Russia’s presidential election, Russians came out in an unorthodox protest against the Kremlin. At midday, they showed up at polling stations within the country and at embassies across the globe to take part in the ‘Noon Against Putin’ movement.  The strategy, assembled piece by piece by the motley Russian opposition, was simple. Come to your local polling station at noon local time on 17 May. Vote against Putin, for any other candidate you like, or simply spoil your ballot paper.  The trajectory the Kremlin is plotting suggests that dark things lie ahead for Russia: more war, more repression Some opposition figures spent

Limor Simhony Philpott

Why Israel targeted Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital

Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, was once again turned into a battlefield yesterday. Five hours of fighting between Israel and Hamas at the hospital, viewed by Israel as a base used by terrorists, led to some 80 Palestinians being detained. Israel claimed to have killed about 20 terrorists in the precision raid, including Faiq Mabhouh, the head of Hamas’s internal security operations. The IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) also found a large cache of weapons, including rifles, grenades, rocket launchers and cash hidden inside al-Shifa. Mabhouh’s death follows that of Marwan Issa, deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing, last week. These killings will dramatically weaken Hamas, but Israel remains some way off the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What the French left could learn from Keir Starmer

Last week on Spectator TV Fraser Nelson saluted the ‘intervention’ of the Labour party in the debate about whether the magazine he edits, as well as the Telegraph Media Group, should be sold to a UAE-backed consortium. In an interview, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary said that ‘ownership by a foreign power is incompatible with press freedom, which is essential in a democracy’. We shouldn’t have been surprised at Labour’s championing of press freedom, even for publications in the Conservative stable. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, has written more than a dozen columns for the Telegraph. The most recent was last December when he accused the Tories of having betrayed voters

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Life on the margins pt II: Li Ziqi and the phenomenon of the rural influencer

23 min listen

In the last episode, I discussed Chinese rural lives with Professor Scott Rozelle. One point he made which particularly stuck with me was the dying out of farming as an occuption – he’d said that most rural people under the age of 35 have never farmed a day in their lives. So that got me thinking, what do they do instead? In this episode I’ll be looking at one, very high profile, alternative – vlogging. I’ve noticed through my hours of scrolling through Chinese social media that there is a huge genre of rural, pastoral content.  This is an interesting phenomenon both for what it says about the rural population

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The EU is divided in its bid to stop the boats

There was good and bad news for the European Union last week: the number of migrants arriving in Europe on the Central Mediterranean route in the first two months of 2024 dropped 70 per cent compared to the same period the previous year, the latest figures revealed. The bad news was that they were up 117 per cent on the eastern Mediterranean route. The really bad news was that they were up 541 per cent on the West African route as Malians, Senegalese and Mauritanians arrived in large numbers on Spanish territory. The nationalities crossing the Eastern Mediterranean in the greatest number are Afghans, Syrians and Egyptians. The figures will

Charlotte Henry

The Nova festival documentary revives the horror of 7 October

‘Yes… But…’. It is a phrase that Jews in Britain and around the world have become accustomed to hearing since the 7 October Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the subsequent war. It is a twisted attempt to contextualise atrocities, to justify the unjustifiable. When you hear, as I have, the stories of those who survived the massacre at the Nova music festival, though, or whose family members are still being held hostage, when you see the footage from that event, you realise there is no ‘but’. In the documentary Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, a number of survivors of that day’s horrors tell their story. They include Gali Amar

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin crowns himself president of Russia again

As expected, following a three day ‘vote’, Vladimir Putin has once again crowned himself president of Russia. As of 9 a.m. Moscow time, according to the central electoral commission, 99.7 per cent of ballot papers had been counted with Putin claiming 87 per cent of the vote – higher than he’s managed in any other previous election. That didn’t stop Putin calling a press conference on Sunday evening – when supposedly just 40 per cent or so of the vote had been counted – to declare himself the victor. As his gloating press conference showed, Putin considers the democratic charade of the past three days to have been a success

Sunday

Tatyana Kekic

Meet the Russians in Serbia who voted against Putin

Today, Russians in Serbia are heading to the polls to cast their vote and protest against what many see as a sham presidential election. A polling station in the capital Belgrade opened this morning at 8am, but many decided to turn up at ‘Noon against Putin’, a protest called by the late Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.  Tens of thousands of Russians have settled in Serbia since the start of the war in Ukraine. Like millions of other Russian exiles around the world, they are eligible to vote in this weekend’s polls—which are almost certain to hand Vladimir Putin another six years in power. With no credible opponent and only

Elisabeth Braw

We need to talk about war

‘Don’t mention the war!’ Remember that? Today, war seems nearly all that European leaders want to talk about. The prospect of conflict with Russia is real, and a confrontation seems increasingly likely. That’s why Europe’s political leaders are beginning to discuss, in frank and sometimes alarming tones, the ways their countries should prepare to fight. Estonia’s prime minister, Poland’s head of national security and the Danish defence minister all say Russia could have the soldiers and equipment to launch an attack in three years. Emmanuel Macron last week met his German and Polish counterparts in Berlin to discuss Europe’s military support for Ukraine, after refusing to rule out – again

Leon Mangasarian

An ex-German diplomat’s withering verdict on Berlin’s ‘flawed’ Russia policy

Arndt Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven couldn’t have had a worse start as Germany’s ambassador to Poland. Germany’s fraught historical legacy with the country – six million Poles killed in the Second World War and Prussia’s role in wiping Poland off the map from 1795 to 1918 – inspired Freytag von Loringhoven in his final posting to push hard to improve ties with Warsaw. But the Polish government saw things differently. His approval as ambassador – a role he finally took up in 2020 – was delayed by members of Poland’s then ruling PiS party, who campaigned against him using Nazi slurs. They targeted him because his father, Bernd, was a

Sasha Lensky

What the rise of Islam means for Putin’s Russia

The term ‘Russians’, which the world likes to use for the 144 million citizens of my country, is often a misleading one. Granted, in the 2020 census, 71 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves with this label, with only three ethnic groups coming in above one per cent: Tatars (3.2 per cent), Chechens (1.14 per cent and Bashkirs (1.07 per cent). This all suggests a near mono-ethnic state with only minor influences from other nationalities and cultures. But nothing could be further from the truth. Many non-Russians, provided they master the language well enough, simply prefer to identify themselves with the ‘title nation’. Sticking with the majority and even mimicking it

Robin Ashenden

The trials and tribulations of Orthodox Lent

The Russian Orthodox Church, which I converted to in 2018, has disgraced itself in the years since. Its Patriarch Kirill has oiled up to Vladimir Putin and his war effort on every possible occasion since Russia invaded Ukraine. My feelings about this strand of Christianity may be highly ambivalent now: what good is its staggering beauty if it fails to properly call out mass murder? How is Putin, as we’re constantly told, a ‘devout believer’, when it seems he’s simply ticking his way through outraging the Ten Commandments? But my fondness for some of its rituals, including Orthodox Lent, which starts this week, remains. Lent was designed to be a

Saturday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How Putin will rig the Russian election

Pity the poor political technologists, as Russia’s professionals in the dark arts of spin, propaganda, gerrymandering and outright ballot box stuffing are known. They are not only expected to produce the exact expected election result – that’s the easy bit, when you control the count – but they are meant to make it look as plausible as possible. That’s the rub. As Russia goes to the polls, there is no question whether Vladimir Putin will be re-elected by a landslide. Indeed, it has long been rumoured that the presidential administration has already decided on the result: a clear first-round victory for Putin with 70-plus per cent of the vote on

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will France’s Olympians embarrass Macron?

France host England tonight in the final match of the 2024 Six Nations. ‘Le Crunch’, as this fixture has come to be known, is never for the faint-hearted but this evening’s atmosphere is likely to be especially febrile. The match is being played in Lyon, in the south-east of France, instead of the Stade de France in the north of Paris. There’ll be 20,000 fewer fans because of Lyon’s smaller stadium but the noise they will generate will be far greater than the corporate crowd in Paris. Lyon is rugby territory. There are several famous clubs within a 100 mile radius and the chance to barrack les Rosbifs ­– the French retort

Paul Morland

Hamas blew Gaza’s golden opportunity

Whatever else the arguments concerning the Gaza War, none is more wrong-headed than the suggestion that Gazans were living in such straitened circumstances that they had no choice but to ‘break out’ on 7 October. Palestinian solidarity protestors routinely describe Gaza as a ‘prison camp’. Even the Foreign Secretary David Cameron has previously used that term to talk about Gaza. In the wake of the Hamas massacre, the UN Chief Antonio Guterres insisted that the events of 7 October ‘did not happen in a vacuum’. Although he later denied that this was a ‘justification’ of the murders, rapes and kidnappings of Israelis by Gazans, Guterres’s comments tied in with a

Friday

James Lewisohn

How Ozempic fattened up Denmark’s economy

It’s official: weight-loss wonder drug Wegovy (also marketed as Ozempic) makes US celebrities shrink but makes the Danish economy grow. This week, the most amusing Oscars clickbait featured not the typical best- and worst-dressed actors, but instead celebrities who have experienced recent miraculous weight loss. The Daily Mail helpfully split this award category between those confirmed to have taken Wegovy, and others who have merely inexplicably and rapidly shrunk. Their collective weight loss is Denmark’s economic gain: this week, Denmark’s statistics agency confirmed the Danish economy grew 1.8 per cent in 2023 – but without the contribution of Wegovy’s owner, Novo Nordisk, it would instead have shrunk 0.1 per cent. Free market

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

It’s time to declare Putin an illegitimate president

For the next three days, Russians are heading to the polls supposedly to choose the country’s next president. Except we already know, as do most Russians, who the winner will be. It is a foregone conclusion that after this weekend Vladimir Putin will win another six years in power.  But just because the Russian elections are a sham doesn’t mean they are insignificant. In fact, quite the opposite. This weekend marks a threshold in Putin’s grip on Russia: regardless of the margins by which he will claim to have won another presidential term, he will no longer legitimately hold power. Putin’s fifth term will shortly see him overtake Stalin as the second

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine has brought the war back to Russian soil

Ukraine can’t stop Vladimir Putin’s re-election as Russian President on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shatter the perfect image of his sacred day – by bringing the war once again to Russian soil. Throughout the week, Ukrainian drones have been striking oil refineries and energy facilities deep inside Russian territory, while anti-Kremlin Russian militias fighting on Ukraine’s side have crossed the border on tanks and started a fight with Russian forces. This incursion into Russian territory wasn’t unprecedented: last spring, exiled Russians fighting on Ukraine’s side infiltrated several Russian towns in the Belgorod region, fought for several days, and then withdrew. The dire state of Russia’s border defences hasn’t improved