World

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

How can the West help Russians to defeat Putinism?

Watching Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a Christmas tradition for many. But this year, people are being urged to stay away: Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko published an open letter earlier this month asking the West to boycott Tchaikovsky and wider Russian culture until the war in Ukraine is over. ‘This war,’ he said, ‘is a civilisational battle over culture and history’.  He’s right: since February, the Russian state is doing its best to annihilate Ukrainian culture in every possible way: banning and seeking to destroy the Ukrainian language, artists, authors and music. But how far should we go in response? Is a crackdown against Russian culture a wise idea, or does it play into Putin’s hands? The Kremlin

Robert Ginzburg

Most-read 2022: Russian cities are returning to their Cold War state

We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number ten: Robert Ginzburg’s piece from March on how Russia has changed since invading Ukraine. In Russia, the lights are going out one by one. Everything one expects from an up-to-date country – cashpoints that work, Apple products, Coca Cola – is vanishing. On Saturday night, at 3am, I ran down totally empty streets searching for the last cashpoint that would work with my British Mastercard. Bank machine after bank machine sent me away empty-handed, until I found one that obviously hadn’t got the memo. I stood there making withdrawal after withdrawal – snatching each 5,000

Wednesday

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

How does the EU solve a problem like Qatar?

Can the EU afford to snub Qatar? The corruption scandal engulfing the European Parliament centres around allegations that the Gulf state gave bribes in exchange for influence and favour at the European Parliament. But if the EU cleans up this problem by distancing itself from Qatar, it might have a serious, potentially even larger, dilemma on its hands. The war in Ukraine, sky-high inflation, the energy crisis and internal divisions have already shaken the very foundations of the EU. With four suspects, including Eva Kaili, a vice president of the European Parliament, now being held on charges of corruption and money laundering, what has been dubbed ‘Qatargate’ may push the

Andrew Tettenborn

Is Eric Zemmour’s court defeat something to celebrate?

Éric Zemmour is an old-style reactionary France-first politician, a little in the mould of the interwar Charles Maurras. Though unceremoniously blindsided by Marine Le Pen in the 2022 Présidentielles, he should not be written off yet. But this week Zemmour suffered a setback: the European Court of Human Rights rejected his appeal over a conviction for ‘inciting discrimination and religious hatred’ for comments targeting French Muslims. Zemmour’s opponents are celebrating – but the verdict suggests the Strasbourg court can be selective in the rights it chooses to back, and those it doesn’t. The row stems from a TV interview Zemmour gave back in September 2016, in which Zemmour was promoting

Tuesday

Gray Sergeant

Why is India covering up clashes with China in the Himalayas?

For more than 20 years the West ignored China’s militarisation of the South China Sea. Until, that is, it was too late. Now, after being artificially expanded and built out with sand, the islands of this crucial maritime space are dotted with Chinese missile systems and runways. The region’s smaller nations, who also lay claim to sections of this sea, can only protest in vain.  Will the Free World learn from the mistakes of history? Beijing is now trying to redraw the map across the Himalayas, most recently in Arunachal Pradesh, a territory in North-eastern India that China claims as ‘South Tibet’.  Last week, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How long can the Democrats keep Trump in legal limbo?

Yesterday, a political committee set up in order to condemn Donald Trump condemned Donald Trump. It would have been truly jaw-dropping if the congressional January 6th committee (which consisted of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom thought Trump was guilty as hell) had decided to say that Donald Trump had not criminally abetted the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As it was, the headlines last night are about as surprising as the news that Donald Trump has released a new set of Trump-themed NFTs. Congress is not the Justice Department. The committee’s ‘criminal referrals’ may sound dramatic, yet the four counts have no legal teeth.

Alexander Larman

Elon Musk will have the last laugh

It ended, as many things do these days, with a poll. Apparently on a whim, Elon Musk, while attending the World Cup final in Qatar on 18 December, tweeted: ‘Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.’ Seventeen-and-a-half million people voted, and nearly sixty per cent demonstrated their belief that, yes, the days of the Musk regime on Twitter should come to an ignominious end. Given that Musk’s schtick on the social media platform has been to offer democracy to its users – all the while making sure that he remains in charge – it appears to be a binding obligation,

Jacob Heilbrunn

January 6 Committee turns Trump from predator to prey

With the January 6 Committee’s recommendation to the Justice Department last night to prosecute Donald Trump on four counts of insurrection, obstruction and conspiracy, he has gone from predator to prey. Like Jay Gatsby, who believed in the ‘orgastic future that recedes before us year by year’, he has never doubted in his abilities to gull the gullible, to fool the foolish. But his green light has now turned red as the greatest show on earth, or at least America, is about to come to an abrupt terminus. Marooned on Mar-a-Lago, Trump can only rely on the loyalty of a dwindling band of faithful retainers, including a 31-year-old named Natalie

Monday

James Snell

Japan’s rearmament could be a force for good

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s murdered former prime minister, would this week be especially proud of his country. At long last, and after years of protests and strife during Abe’s time in power, Japan has announced a reversal of its uncompromising post-war pacifism. Japan, its current prime minister Fumio Kishida has said, will now begin to rearm.  What was in question was not armaments, per se, but rather the ability of Japan’s armed forces, the self-defence forces as they are called, to fight abroad. Japan’s post-war constitution declared the country formally pacifist, and renounced both the ability to wage war and the means to do so. But all of this is changing as China

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Can Jeremy Clarkson’s critics take a joke?

There is always a tipping point in Twitterstorms. A moment at which the digital hysteria over something somebody said becomes far more offensive, and far more dangerous, than what that person said. You can feel when it happens, when the shift takes place, when it is the behaviour of the howling mob that becomes the truly shameful and anti-social thing, far more than the utterance that so outraged the mob in the first place. We have reached this tipping point, already, in the fury over Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle. The clamour for Clarkson’s head is now a far graver insult to decency and liberty than the thing Clarkson

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Podcast special: the global role of British aid

45 min listen

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shocked the world. Whilst fighting is happening in Europe, repercussions have been felt around the globe. Disruption to trade and supply chains means a rapidly worsening outlook for international development, making it harder to reach those that need support the most. Meanwhile the UK’s Covid recovery and the growing fiscal blackhole have forced Britain to make tough decisions on where our money goes, throwing into question our position as a world leader when it comes to international development and, with it, the reputation of ‘global Britain’.  Britain has always been a nation with a global mindset. But in times of crisis, do we need to reprioritise

Friday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Republicans must dump Trump and opt for Ron DeSantis

When I arrived in Washington, DC in 2006 to learn about US politics, someone told me that in America, there are two main parties: the party of power and the party of stupid. The latter denoted, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Republican party. And so it continues to prove. The failure of the much-hyped red wave to materialise in the 2022 midterms shows that the GOP has not lost its knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Consider: a day before the election, Biden’s approval rating was 39 per cent. This was a reflection of his poor performance (inflation, gas prices and immigration are just a few of the issues

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin hiding away?

December is usually a busy month for Vladimir Putin, but not this year. In the run-up to Christmas, Russia’s president typically holds his annual press conference. But this time the event has been cancelled. Putin’s annual presidential address to the Russian federal assembly – that was pushed back from the summer – has also been canned. And Putin will also be absent from the traditional New Year’s Eve ice hockey game on Red Square. Putin’s yearly telethon, where ordinary Russians can phone in and have a chat with the president (indefinitely postponed from earlier in the year), too has been axed. Such events in the Kremlin calendar are annual touchstones

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s hawks are turning on each other

Feathers are flying and divisions are widening among Russia’s hawks as the degree to which the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake becomes more evident. It is a powerful reminder that the main threat to Vladimir Putin these days comes not from liberals – largely imprisoned or forced into exile – but from increasingly disgruntled nationalists. Some of these nationalists opposed the war from the beginning, but most welcomed what they saw as a necessary counter to Nato expansion and Ukraine’s ‘betrayal’ in turning away from Moscow. However, many of them became quickly appalled and angered by what they regarded, with good reason, as the amateurishness, incompetence and corruption which

Thursday

Andrew Tettenborn

Could Britain pull out of Europe’s human rights treaty?

Just as Brexit began with a few harmless-looking chips at what looked like an impregnable concrete wall, something similar may be happening with Britain’s attachment to the European Convention on Human Rights.  The latest episode was yesterday’s ten-minute rule bill from the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Jonathan Gullis. His Asylum Seekers (Removal to Safe Countries) Bill was nothing if not direct. Put bluntly, his plan would seek to avoid a repeat of the Rwanda debacle earlier this year by allowing asylum seekers to be flown to Africa, despite any orders from Strasbourg to the contrary. Like nearly all other ten-minute rule bills, everyone accepted this one was entirely quixotic.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Hooligans aren’t alone in exploiting Morocco’s World Cup run

‘Let’s all get behind Les Bleus for victory!’ tweeted Emmanuel Macron shortly before France and Morocco met last night in Qatar in the semi-final of the World Cup. ‘Without ever forgetting that sport brings us together above all in the respect and friendship between our two nations.’ A worthy sentiment from the president but not everyone listened: certainly not some of the Moroccan fans in the Al Bayt Stadium, who greeted the playing of the La Marseillaise with a cacophony of whistling.   As for the match itself, the French did to Morocco what they had done to England in the quarter-final, punishing the profligacy of their opponents with two clinical

Anna Arutunyan

Latvia’s Russian media crackdown will delight Putin

When Russia was preparing to annex Crimea in the late winter of 2014, the newly-appointed head of the Russian agency that published our newspaper, the Moscow News, laid down some new rules. The age of disinterested, objective reporting was over. Our job, this Kremlin-picked patriotic zealot told staff, was to love the Motherland. We all resigned. As a journalist, striving for disinterested objectivity was literally my job description – the values instilled in me when I trained in New York. Praising your Motherland for money can be called all sorts of things, just not love. Instead, I went on to report on the start of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine for Western

Sean Thomas

Antarctica: the best journey in the world

If there is one minor pitfall of being a travel writer, it is this. Whenever you tell a bunch of people what you do, invariably someone will ask: ‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?’ I struggled to answer until I got on a special new boat called the Greg Mortimer, operated by a Australian tour company called Aurora – and headed for Antarctica. We sailed south out of Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, and crossed the Drake Passage. After three days I saw my first Antarctic iceberg. I’d observed icebergs before, in Iceland and Greenland, so I knew already that they could be striking, poetic, impressive. But this was

Wednesday

Winston Marshall

Sohrab Ahmari: Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Twitter files

49 min listen

Winston speaks Sohrab Ahmari, author of The New Philistines, From Fire By Water and The Unbroken Thread, a co-founder of Compact magazine and former editor at the New York Post. Sohrab was an editor at the Post when they dropped the Hunter Biden laptop story and explains its significance and what the Twitter files reveal. They also discuss the future of free speech in America.

Tuesday

John Keiger John Keiger

Brexit’s critics are strangely quiet about the European parliament scandal

The corruption scandal embroiling the European parliament and the European Union’s institutions at the highest level is shaping up to be its biggest to date. Belgian police have arrested Eva Kaili, a vice-president of the parliament, and three others in an investigation into alleged bribes involving spectacular sums in cash, allegedly from Qatar, to influence EU officials and parliamentary voting. ‘The shockwave of ‘Qatargate’ is Le Monde’s take on a story it says threatens to ‘destabilise Europe’s institutions’. This isn’t an exaggeration: the probe ripples out to the whole progressive ecosystem surrounding the parliament. Among the suspects, according to the BBC, is former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, who now manages the