World

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Zelensky’s choice: can Ukraine force Russia to negotiate?

When Russian forces first rolled into Ukraine, most thought that President Zelensky would have to flee. Boris Johnson said Britain could host a Ukrainian government in exile. The Americans offered to get Zelensky out of Kyiv to protect him from the hit squads that Moscow had sent to kill or capture him. Zelensky, with the courage and flair that has defined his war leadership, replied: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ Well, the Ukrainians now have the ammunition – and three months in, the war looks very different to how on 24 February anyone imagined it would. Yes, the Russians have taken Mariupol, opening the way for a land corridor

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What we learnt from Eurovision

Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during the performance of a hirsute, gurning, cod-operatic bellend from that patently European country Azerbaijan. ‘Putin’, my wife and I both reckoned, seeing as Russian hacker groups favourably disposed towards their country’s leader had promised that they would do what they could to disrupt the broadcast and indeed the voting. If this really is the third world war, then I suppose it is a suitably banal and modernist take on universal annihilation – this yearly celebration of joyous gayness and very bad music suddenly part of the same war as the

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The madness of France’s burkini bust-up

To burkini, or not to burkini? This is the question that divides France in the run-up to the first round of voting on 12 June for the next National Assembly. The pre-election political conversation here had been pretty stale and entirely predictable. Enter the burkini. The political and media class is presently talking of nothing else. Not since Brigitte Bardot took her top off in God Created Woman has the nation obsessed so compulsively with appropriate female swimwear. Designed originally for Australian lifeguards uncomfortable with traditional swimwear, the burkini has not gone down well since arriving in France five years ago. Something about the garment seems to drive the French

Owen Matthews

Cold Turkey: why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?

Driving a hard bargain is the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief survival skill – one that has kept him in power for nearly as long as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. And the basic principles of bargaining are twofold: never give something away for nothing, and make your threats to walk away convincing. No surprise, then, that Erdogan’s buzz-killing announcement last week that Turkey would oppose Swedish and Finnish membership of Nato was made in characteristically blunt terms. Speaking of a planned visit of Nordic diplomats to Ankara, Erdogan asked: ‘Are they coming to convince us? Excuse me, but they should not tire themselves.’ He directly contradicted his own

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How not to level up parliament

Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might happen next. The day before the news broke, I was talking on WhatsApp to Daniel Detcom, a Ukrainian territorial reservist (in normal life, a disc jockey), currently on active service in Mykolaiv. He told me that the Azovstal issue was producing disagreement among Ukrainians. Those fighting in the steel plant were mostly more nationalist than President Zelensky. Some people suspected him of not striving hard enough to help them, because they might be better for him as ‘dead heroes’ than as active participants in a future Ukraine. It may be

Douglas Murray

The dishonesty of how we respond to tragedies

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had no problems with claiming that guilt for that attack could be liberally spread around. Some said that everybody on the political right bore responsibility. Others claimed that anyone who was leading Britain’s ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum shared the blame. It was different in October last year, when Sir David Amess MP was murdered

Nicholas Farrell

Italy’s hostility to Nato is building

Ravenna, Italy The war in Ukraine has caused an unholy convergence of the left and right in Italy. While there is nothing formal so far about this alliance of enemies, it nevertheless threatens to destroy the unity of Nato. The most high-profile participant is -Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega – the party with the second-highest number of MPs in Italy’s parliament – which is invariably defined as ‘far right’. Salvini, who has been one of Vladimir Putin’s strongest supporters outside Russia, condemned the invasion of Ukraine and has now come out as a pacifist. He opposes Finland and Sweden joining Nato, or sending more arms to Ukraine, on the

Christina Lamb

Lviv diary: ballet, bomb shelters – and everyone loves Boris

It is a glorious spring evening in Lviv and what could be better than a ballet gala at one of Europe’s grandest opera houses? The performance starts with an unusual announcement. In the event of an air raid siren, all spectators must go to the bomb shelter. The red-velvet seats are less than a third full – not for fear of going to a ballet in a war in which Russians have bombed a theatre, but because they can sell only 300 tickets since that is the bunker’s capacity. There is an emotional rendering of the national anthem for which the audience stand, hand on heart, and it is hard

Wednesday

The Spectator

Sanction Gerhard Schröder

From the start of the war in Ukraine, the democratic world has shown striking unity in the economic boycott of Russia. But sanctions are always a blunt instrument: aimed at the regime, they end up harming the whole population. Ordinary Russians, too, are victims of Vladimir Putin’s corruption and misrule. Far better to target the Kremlin and those close to it. The system of targeted sanctions on named individuals is one way of doing this. Action has now been taken against 1,086 people, with assets suspended and travel bans imposed. To go after the rich and powerful is always a test for democracies, especially if such people are generous in

George Lai

Hong Kong and the surprising truth about the British Empire

What would the world be like if the British Empire had never existed? Critics of British colonialism say that the countries that fell under its rule would have been better off without it; the Empire’s supporters say it brought progress and prosperity in its wake.  So who’s right? The truth is hard to find. After all, one of the difficulties in assessing the legacy of British colonialism in many ex-colonies is the lack of a counterfactual. Put simply, we don’t know what a place would be like if it hadn’t been colonised. But Hong Kong is a special case. Since the bulk of China, except tiny bits like Hong Kong, were never colonised

Sara Wheeler

The unbearable brutality of the Bolsheviks

For far too long,’ Sir Antony Beevor writes, ‘we have made the mistake of talking about wars as a single entity.’ In Russia: Revolution and Civil War he sets the record straight for the bitter years between 1917 and 1921, revealing the myriad ways in which individual actions constellated and 12 million people perished. This is not a story about winners and losers. As the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once wrote about every conflict everywhere: ‘There is neither victory nor defeat; there is only catastrophe.’ It seems wrong to categorise this book as military history. It is like reading a film. Typhus-bearing lice in hospitals at the front are so

Tuesday

Annabel Denham

The protocol is hurting Northern Ireland

With every sausage war or fish fight over the past 18 months, the chances of survival for the Northern Ireland protocol have narrowed. But the fallout from the NI Assembly elections, which saw Sinn Féin become the largest single party, has made it increasingly likely that the UK will take unilateral action to override parts of the Brexit deal. The protocol has few supporters. Arguably its only redeeming feature was that it allowed Boris Johnson to break the deadlock and conclude the withdrawal agreement. Because a porous land border between the UK and the Republic would have threatened the single market – and a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will France’s PM offend Britain like her predecessor?

Élisabeth Borne was unveiled as the new prime minister of France last night and in her acceptance speech she paid tribute to her only female predecessor. She kept her compliment short, which was fitting, as Edith Cresson didn’t last long as PM. Appointed by Socialist president François Mitterrand in May 1991, Cresson was gone by the following April, but not before she had outraged much of the world. All of this has been conveniently forgotten by the French press, and indeed the global media, in saluting the achievement of Cresson the trailblazer. The Guardian quoted Cresson telling a French broadcaster that ‘it’s more than time’ that there was another woman leading

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is hopelessly muddled on Ukraine

A couple of weeks ago Ursula von der Leyen portentously announced a further package of EU sanctions against Russia – the sixth, in case you had lost count. No doubt an underling immediately told Vladimir Putin. Most likely, that adviser will have been waved away; Vladimir has more important matters to think about. Much of the announcement was small beer. Putin won’t be shaking in his shoes at the thought that a few more of his top brass are being sanctioned, the odd bank removed from Swift, three broadcasters silenced in the EU, and a bar on the EU supply of corporate services like accountancy to Russian companies. True, there were

Monday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

France’s new prime minister will never overshadow Macron

Meet Élisabeth Borne, the new prime minister of France. Borne has hardly worked a day in the private sector. She is a technocrat to her bone marrow. She has never been elected to anything. And she will never, ever threaten president Emmanuel Macron. ‘She’s like Jean Castex (the outgoing prime minister) in drag, without the comical side,’ sighs one Paris insider. The job of prime minister in France is generally hellish, essentially that of a whipping boy, and Borne faces numerous vexing dossiers. At the top of the pile is the cost of living crisis, over which her power seems minimal. She’ll also get pension reform, so she will be

Edward Howell

North Korea is in the midst of a Covid catastrophe

As Covid spread throughout the world in 2020, North Korea slammed shut its borders. It was an approach that has paid off, until now. No longer Covid-free, the country’s state media has admitted that cases – and deaths – are exploding. Since April, over 1.2 million cases of a ‘fever’ – a euphemism for coronavirus – have been detected. North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un has said the arrival of the pandemic is a ‘great turmoil’. Hundreds of thousands of cases – and 19 deaths – were reported yesterday alone in North Korea. In a country that prizes secrecy above all else, the true toll is likely to be even higher. But if North

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Russia and the death of the Golden Arches theory

Ah, well, it was a lovely idea, born of the age of liberal-democratic triumphalism that was the 1990s: the ‘Golden Arches theory’, which held that no two countries that had McDonald’s franchises had ever been – or would ever go – to war. Remarkably, it wasn’t the product of McDonald’s PR department but the work of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He argued that the arrival of McDonald’s signified a society that had become so consumerist that enough people had enough invested in economic stability to ever risk a war. Armed conflict ain’t good for the hamburger trade The final nail in the coffin of the Golden Arches theory has come

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How powerful is the People’s Liberation Army?

43 min listen

It’s clear now that Vladimir Putin didn’t expect his army to perform quite so badly when invading Ukraine. As much as that is celebrated in much of the world, it will be a cause for concern – or at least a moment for learning – amongst Beijing’s military leaders. Because Russia has always been a heavy influence and source of strategy and equipment for China’s People’s Liberation Army, ever since the days of the Soviet Union. So could the PLA – which hasn’t been in active combat since Vietnam in 1979 – similarly flounder? That’s the burning question my guests and I discuss in the latest episode of Chinese Whispers.

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Olaf Scholz is tanking

North-Rhine Westphalia is Germany’s largest state, almost as large as the Netherlands. It was a traditional SPD fiefdom during the time of Helmut Kohl, but in 2005 it became a CDU state. Surely, if the SPD was on the march, ready to turn Germany’s regional politics red as it did the chancellery in last year’s election, a state like North-Rhine Westphalia would return to the party? But the big news from yesterday’s federal state elections is that the SPD, the party of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, scored its worst-ever result in Westphalia: less than 27 per cent of the vote. The CDU won with 35.5 per cent and will probably

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland gamble

Boris Johnson will head to Northern Ireland today as the government lays the groundwork to unilaterally overwrite parts of the protocol. Tomorrow, the Foreign Secretary is expected to unveil plans for a new law to change the protocol if the EU refuses to grant concessions. Given Johnson’s frayed relationship with the DUP – the party hasn’t forgiven him for agreeing the current Brexit deal – his call for party leaders in Northern Ireland to get ‘back to work’ and form an executive is likely to have only a limited effect. However, a 2,000-word article by Johnson in the Belfast Telegraph lifts the lid on the UK strategy when it comes to changing how