World

Friday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Even Xi is unimpressed with Putin’s bungling autocracy

To say that Vladimir Putin is giving autocracy a bad name is rather to state the obvious. But it now appears to have dawned even on his ‘old friend’ Xi Jinping that Russian incompetence and cruelty in Ukraine is undermining their joint ambition to re-write the international order. Putin’s admission that Beijing might have ‘concerns’ about his bungled war was cryptic but striking. ‘We highly value the balanced position of our Chinese friends when it comes to the Ukraine crisis,’ Putin said in remarks ahead of their meeting in Uzbekistan. ‘We understand your questions and concerns about this. During today’s meeting, we will of course explain our position.’ Xi was

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

It’s wrong to ban China from the lying-in-state

Unlike some Americans, China’s communists have no problem getting their heads around hereditary monarchy. Last week, President Xi sent his condolences to the United Kingdom. Now, he’s sending one of his most trusted deputies to pay respects at the Queen’s funeral. China has called off its wolf warriors, its diplomatic ideologues known for berating the West. Beijing is on best behaviour. Instead, the bellicose rhetoric is coming from a few British MPs, indignant that Chinese officials have been invited to the funeral. Vice-president Wang Qishan, the man tasked with representing China, is one of Xi’s most reliable lieutenants, having led the President’s flagship anti-corruption drive. But the two men go even further back,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The inconvenient truth about France’s forest fires

Montpellier Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires. It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’. Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two. Last week the

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Wagner Group exposed recruiting Russian prisoners for Ukraine

The Wagner Group thrives in the shadows, but now its founder has been caught on camera: recruiting prisoners from a Russian penal colony for the war in Ukraine. In the video, Yevgeniy Prigozhin paces about a large group of prisoners, giving them the hard sell on joining the Russian war effort. He offers them a deal: six months of service in return for a pardon for their crimes. But, should they arrive in Ukraine and refuse to fight, they will be considered deserters and shot. ‘The war is difficult,’ he says; the pro-Kremlin group has used ‘more than two and a half times’ the amount of ammunition used by Soviet

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

On the front lines of Europe’s newest war

Sotk, Armenia A group of Armenian soldiers stand guard on the road towards the village. ‘It’s not safe to go ahead,’ one says, slinging his Kalashnikov across his shoulder and motioning for our van to pull over. ‘They were shelling the highway just 15 minutes ago.’ In the distance, there’s the unmistakable thunder of artillery and smoke rising from the side of the mountains. Beyond them is the border with Azerbaijan from where, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a massive barrage was unleashed on towns and cities across Armenia. The offensive is the most dramatic escalation since the two former Soviet republics fought a brutal and bloody war

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Not all Americans are so crass

In the face of American snark about the Queen’s death, many a British newspaper reader was disgusted. With bad tidings imminent on Thursday last week, an academic at Carnegie Mellon tweeted: ‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’ An assistant professor in Rhode Island tweeted that she would ‘dance on the graves of every member of the royal family, especially hers’. Once the bleak news was in, a co-host of the popular US television show The View imagined this the ideal time to observe: ‘If you really think about what the monarchy was built on, it was built

Robert Hardman

Elizabeth II’s devotion to the Commonwealth

It’s a question which would inevitably surface during any serious discussion of Queen Elizabeth II: who was her favourite prime minister? Unlike her grandfather, George V, who was clear that he favoured Ramsay MacDonald (and told him so), or George VI, for whom Winston Churchill was the clear winner, Elizabeth II always kept us guessing. Was she, too, a Churchill devotee? Some say she harboured a greater fondness for her first Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and not just because he was good company and shielded her from the republican wrath of his own MPs. He did not, unlike Churchill, outstay his welcome but timed his resignation to divert attention from

Owen Matthews

More mad than Vlad: Russia’s ultra-nationalist threat

‘Russia without Putin!’ was the cry of Muscovites who turned out to protest against Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency for a third term in December 2011. Crowds 100,000 strong chanted their opposition on Moscow’s Academician Sakharov Prospect – as symbolically named a venue as you could wish for – as riot police stood calmly by. There was anger in the crowd. But there was hope, too, not least because the massive protest was officially sanctioned. One after another, prominent opposition politicians such as Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny denounced Putin from a stage provided by the city authorities. Today the memory of those protests seems to belong

Douglas Murray

A hereditary monarchy is good for politics

I suppose it was inevitable that with the death of HM the Queen certain floodgates would open. During her reign it often felt as though there were forces that she was single-handedly holding back. As Lionel Shriver has noted elsewhere, they have come in particularly malicious form from parts of the US. But there is one part of the republican critique of monarchy that has returned which is too little addressed, and which I have found myself countering in recent days. Not, I might add, from the sort of people who are simply hostile to our country and its past, but rather from people who wish us well but are

Wednesday

Paulina Neuding

Sweden’s new powerbrokers

Sweden may soon have a centre-right prime minister – an unusual turn of events for a country in which the Social Democrats have won 19 of the last 24 elections. Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderate party, is now set to take power. ‘I am now starting the work of forming a new, effective government,’ he said ‘A government for all of Sweden and all citizens.’ But it’s a government that is not really due to his success: his party, the Moderates, actually lost ground in the election and finished third for the first time in decades. He is preparing for power thanks to the success of another party: the

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Has Kadyrov turned on Putin?

Just how much of a grip does Vladimir Putin have on the situation currently unfolding in Ukraine? Over the weekend, the Ukrainian Army made a series of rapid advances, reportedly regaining control of as much as 3,000 square kilometres of formerly Russian-controlled territory. According to one Ukrainian commander, the counter-offensive had Russian soldiers fleeing for the border ‘like Olympic sprinters’. In a sign of just how dire a situation the Russian war effort looks to be in, Chechen leader and Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov took to social media to criticise the campaign. In a rambling voice note on the messaging app Telegram, Kadyrov slammed the Russian retreat from the towns

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

The horrors of Russian occupation are being uncovered in Ukraine

Ukraine is racing to establish control over the newly-liberated Kharkiv region. The country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky paid a surprise visit to the city of Izyum, until recently a strategic point for Russia’s occupation reinforcements (photos here). ‘We are moving in only one direction – forward and towards victory’, he said after the Ukrainian flag was raised in the city centre. The restoration of civic apparatus in these liberated areas is being carried out with military speed. Some £9 million  been allocated from the state budget to rebuild critical infrastructure. The national postal providers are already resuming work, delivering aid kits with medicine, food, clothing. Pension payments will also be posted: this still

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What Xi wants from Central Asia

President Xi Jinping hasn’t stepped outside his country since the pandemic began. For almost three years, China’s elderly leaders have been swaddled inside Beijing; journalists granted an audience with Xi have told me that they had to go through days of hotel quarantine before the meeting. Today Xi returns to the global stage. His first stop is Kazakhstan, a country rarely on the minds of western politicians. It goes to show how important China’s western backyard is to the country. Washington and London are attempting to pivot to the Indo-Pacific to respond to Chinese influence in the South and East China seas; what they’ve failed to focus on is Beijing’s

Andrew Downie

Jair Bolsonaro and Brazil’s football fight

Brazil’s football strip is one of the most recognisable garments in sport, perhaps the most potent symbol of Brazil’s sizeable soft power. People who can’t name the country’s capital or president are familiar with the players who made the yellow jersey famous. Names such as Pelé, Sócrates, Ronaldo and Marta are known and loved the world over. In Brazil, however, the iconic shirt is at the centre of a political tug-of-war. With barely a month until the presidential election, and two months until the World Cup, the fight over who ‘owns’ the jersey, a symbol appropriated in recent years by supporters of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, is one of the more

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Zemmour is his own worst enemy

Eric Zemmour is back. The bogeyman of French politics spent the summer licking his wounds after his far-right Reconquest party was wiped out in June’s parliamentary elections, but on Sunday he addressed several thousand supporters at a rally in the south of France. It is, hopes Zemmour, an opportunity to relaunch his political career and judging by his recent media appearances he won’t be watering down his right-wing rhetoric. Railing against immigration, environmental extremists and the sanctions on Russia, Zemmour picked up from where he left off in the spring. When it was put to him by one interviewer that he had paid the price electorally for focusing too much

Tuesday

Jack Smith

Norway says ‘no’ to a gas price cap

One implication of the Russian gas shut-off is that Norway has now become the EU’s largest single supplier of natural gas. According to the country’s energy ministry, they are expected to export 122 billion cubic metres of gas south to the EU over the course of 2022. This compares with the 155 billion cubic metres of gas which the union imported from Russia in 2021. Getting gas from Norway is obviously preferable to Russia: Norway is a friendly country, and Nato ally, and has gone out of its way to facilitate as much exports to the EU as possible. Over the summer, the country’s government effectively put a stop to

James Snell

Has war broken out again between Armenia and Azerbaijan?

Overnight, it seems as if a new war might have broken out in Europe. Armenian authorities claim that at least 49 soldiers have been killed in fighting with Azerbaijan close to their disputed border. A new conflict would be a tragedy and a waste. But it would also signal something else: the collapse of Russia’s global empire as it is defeated in Ukraine, and the shaking of the kaleidoscope this will inevitably cause. Armenia and Azerbaijan dispute the ownership of the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In 2020, they fought a war over it. Unexpectedly, the Armenians were handily defeated. Azerbaijan was heavily supported by Turkey, and Armenia by Russia. The same Turkish drones

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Would Putin take an ‘off ramp’ out of Ukraine?

Over the past few days, the Ukrainians have upended assumptions about the war with Russia. They have shown it was wrong to predict that the conflict was inevitably going to turn into a war of attrition. They have advanced at speed, reclaiming, according to reports, 1,000 square miles of territory in a week. It’s not clear yet whether they will be able to secure these gains. But for now, Russian forces are demoralised and do not have a conventional response. The upset evident among hawks in Russia is a reminder of the dangers for the regime in losing face in Ukraine For Ukraine’s president Zelensky, the military advance is particularly well-timed. It shows his

Sasha Lensky

Putin is cornered

On the evening of Sunday 11 September, a general alert was announced in nearly all the regions of Ukraine. A mass launch of precision missiles by the Russian Black and Caspian Sea fleets had just been detected. This is not the first occasion in this war on which such an attack has happened. The difference is, the aggressor this time deliberately aimed for critical civilian infrastructure – and hit it. Within an hour, reports of explosions and fires were followed by power-failures in several regions, with two of them, Kharkiv and Donetsk, suffering complete blackouts. The water supply was disrupted, the Kharkiv metro ground to a halt (passengers had to

James Snell

North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling isn’t frightening

North Korea would like you to know that it has nuclear weapons. It has put rather a lot of effort in recent weeks into making you aware. And if you haven’t thought much about North Korea’s nuclear programme in the last few days, it means its propaganda effort has failed. Here is what North Korea’s leaders want you to know. On September 9, North Korean media announced that the country has officially declared itself a nuclear weapons state. In a speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong-Un declared that this made his country’s nuclear programme ‘irreversible’, and declared that they would never give up their weapons even in