World

Thursday

Dalibor Rohac and Ivana Stradner

Putin’s winning streak in European politics

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said triumphantly that ‘if Putin was seeking to divide the EU, to weaken Nato, and to break the international community, he has achieved the exact opposite.’ A month later, Vladimir Putin may be struggling on Ukraine’s battlefields but he has been on a winning streak in European politics. In both Serbia and Hungary, Kremlin-favoured incumbents were re-elected last weekend. If the tight polls are any indication, Putin may get lucky in the upcoming presidential election in France as well, providing an ample pay-off to Russia’s long-term investment in Europe’s far right and proving von

Sergiy Osachuk

The view from Ukraine: world war three has already started

I saw the first Russian bombs land from my balcony in Chernivtsi. They hit a military depot 50 miles away but the vibrations were so strong it felt like it happened right by us. I’d attended an intelligence briefing from Volodymyr Zelensky’s office hours before to be updated on the situation: I’m the governor of Chernivtsi, the capital of the Oblast region. The President’s office was keeping us abreast of plans for an invasion that many Ukrainians thought would never happen. Even now, it’s hard to take in. The horrific images from Bucha have finally alerted the world to Putin’s true tactics. We are living through daily air raids, rocket

Douglas Murray

How to lose elections XXXX

I have remarked here before about our era’s tendency to accept election results if your side wins but to reject them if they lose. Happily in the UK there is no significant body of opinion which believes that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2019 election. True, there are a few Momentum loons who still think that Corbyn would have won had the Tories not somehow got more votes. But even among the most diehard Momentum-ites few actually come up with stories of ballot rigging, high-level corruption and more. Still, our country is not immune to the ‘I only accept the results if my side wins’ tendency. After all, we had Carole

Paul Wood

Europe’s last dictator: Lukashenko’s fate depends on Ukraine

A young man wearing combat fatigues and an extravagant moustache, and carrying a heavy machine-gun over his shoulder, nods towards some burned-out armoured vehicles. ‘We smashed the orcs today,’ he says, using the Ukrainian soldiers’ term for the invading Russians, a reference to the sub-human legion in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He goes on: ‘Putin, you are a dickhead – your Greater Russia will die together with you.’ The soldier – his uniform has a badge saying ‘Ivanov’ in Cyrillic – is not, in fact, Ukrainian. He is one of a small number of volunteers from Belarus, next door, a country that is certainly part of the Greater

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Progressives vs populists: Macron, Orban and Europe’s faultline

As soon as Emmanuel Macron was sure that Joe Biden had won the American election, he tweeted: ‘We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges. Let’s work together!’ There was no effusive tweet this week from the Élysée when 54 per cent of Hungarian voters re-elected Viktor Orban as Prime Minister for a fourth term. The silence from Macron was deafening. Not so his principal rival in France’s impending election. On Sunday evening Marine Le Pen tweeted an old photo of the happy couple shaking hands with the declaration: ‘When the people vote, the people win!’ Le Pen will hope that Orban’s victory is a good omen ahead

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Putin’s terror: the politics of war crimes

In early February, when Vladimir Putin’s troops were on the Ukrainian border and much of the world thought he was bluffing, the Russian military’s guidance on mass graves was changed. Bodies should be covered with chemicals, diagrams showed, and then rolled over by a bulldozer to flatten the ground. The advice seemed so grotesque as to be a decoy: surely a brutal invasion would not be so clearly signalled? The story of the mass grave found in Bucha shocked the world because it represents how fast things have deteriorated and that we are now seeing the kind of barbarism Europe thought it had left behind. The pictures of dead children

Francis Pike

Can Imran Khan cling on to power in Pakistan?

In the brief interlude of Chechen independence between the Russia-Chechen Wars of the 1990s, I travelled with Imran Khan from Grozny to Baku, where we were due to meet Azerbaijan’s finance minister. We had different reasons for our visit. I was interested in the business potential of the countries of the Caucasus, while Khan, a former cricketer turned fledging politician who had recently formed the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI), was keen to support the then independent Sufi Islamic state of Chechnya. To get to Baku we had to catch a plane from the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan. Our Chechen hosts told us that we did not need

Radek Sikorski

Putin’s war is a disaster for Russia

Strasbourg Europhobes will never have a better argument against European integration than the seat of the European parliament in Strasbourg. It’s not just the €200 million per year it costs to move MEPs to and from Brussels once a month at great inconvenience to everyone; the building itself is a disgrace. It feels like a prison: identical glass corridors look out over a useless inner courtyard, so you can go on walks without the danger of escape. The former president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso once suggested turning the building into the headquarters of the European Institute of Technology, which was an excellent offer both for the country

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has taken this election for granted

Things are going from bad to worse for Emmanuel Macron, and for the first time political commentators in France are considering the possibility that he might not win a second term. The latest poll, carried out for Le Figaro, has him one point ahead of Marine Le Pen in the voting intentions of the people canvassed. Brexit and Trump have taught us not to put all our trust in polls but there’s no denying that Macron’s election campaign is in trouble. As I wrote yesterday, this time last month he was 18 points clear of Le Pen and a racing certainty for a second term. Where has it gone so

Wednesday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Does Rwanda offer the answer to Britain’s Channel migrant crisis?

Away from the well-merited focus on Ukraine, normal politics carries on in Britain. One has to poke around a bit to find it, but there are several issues, rendered all but invisible, that will weigh heavily on the minds of voters at the next general election. Rather than Russian barbarism in Ukraine, it is these things that will determine Boris Johnson’s fate. Britain’s broken immigration and asylum system is close to the top of the list. Among Leave voters, it is the second most important political topic, above healthcare and defence and security. Eclipsed only by economic pressures, Boris cannot afford to ignore what is happening in the Channel. Yet still his government is burying

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

China’s zero Covid crack-up

‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu Weiping, a senior official at Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), have gone viral in China. Her phone call with a frustrated local was recorded, and her despair resonated with people in the city and the rest of the country who are at their wit’s end with the zero-Covid policy. Shanghai is buckling: the Covid chaos there is the worst China has seen since Wuhan in 2020. In the last two years, China’s zero-Covid policy has demonstrated the determination and effectiveness of the one-party state. Millions of people can be tested

Julius Strauss

Bucha and the dark echoes of Srebrenica

High on a hillside not far from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica the remains of dozens of young Muslim men had been left to rot. By the time I found them most of the flesh had been eaten away by forest scavengers – bears, wolves, foxes and even stray dogs – but the skeletons and skulls remained, some with rags of clothing and scraps of hair still attached. Personal possessions lay among the remains: tobacco tins – one inscribed with the name Suljo, a pair of broken glasses, family photographs. Most of these photos were taken with Polaroid cameras – a status symbol in the old Yugoslavia. The black backings had

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Could Marine Le Pen actually win?

Emmanuel Macron is worried. This wasn’t how he had envisaged the election. A month ago the president of France held a staggering 18 point lead in the polls and, as he looked over his shoulder in the home straight, he could barely make out Marine Le Pen in the distance. Now the gap is four points and she is breathing down his neck as the finish line approaches. Le Pen is one of Europe’s more interesting politicians. The daughter of Jean-Marie, the founder of her National Front party – which she rebranded National Rally in 2018 – and the aunt of Marion Maréchal, she has always been considered something of

Nigel Jones

Putin, Bucha and a tale of two Russias

The scenes of butchery and barbarism in the liberated Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin and nearby villages – civilians tied up, tortured, mutilated and shot; women raped, burned to death in their cars, and buried in a mass grave – have been compared to the worst slaughters of World War Two. The West struggles to comprehend how such savagery can occur in 21st century Europe. We should certainly be shocked but not surprised. The red thread running through Russia’s unique history, from Tsarist times until today, is a recurring motif of mass murder and massacres that have no parallel in other modern European states, with the exception of the dozen

Tuesday

Alexander Faludy

Viktor Orbán is no friend of the West

Viktor Orbán‘s victory speech in Budapest on Sunday night took a curious turn. Speaking after a fourth landslide win, he opined: This victory is one to remember because we had the biggest [opponents] to overpower. The left at home, the international left, the bureaucrats in Brussels… the Soros empire… and even the Ukrainian President. Orbán skipped over the challenge to regional stability caused by the Russian invasion of neighbouring Ukraine. Having refused military aid to Kyiv, and having exchanged barbs with President Volodymyr Zelensky, he reassured ethnic Hungarians in West Ukraine: ‘Don’t be afraid, the motherland is with you’. Orbán’s party is raising the prospect of secession of Ukrainian lands,

Samuel Ramani

Putin doesn’t need to seize Kyiv to destroy Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine took one step forward and two steps back in the search for an elusive peace settlement during talks last week. Negotiators met in Istanbul to discuss Ukraine’s potential accession to the EU and Nato, the status of Crimea and Donbas, and security guarantees for Ukraine. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky dismissed hopes of a breakthrough and dashed hopes for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia’s bad faith approach to negotiations with Ukraine is unsurprising and fully aligns with its conduct during previous military interventions. During the August 2008 Georgian War and throughout its post-2015 military intervention in Syria,

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Was another tragic Jewish death covered up in France?

Not for the first time in France the death of a Jew is dominating the news, and not for the first time there are whispers of an attempted cover-up. Several candidates in Sunday’s election have paused from their campaigning to air their views on the death of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old who was struck by a tram in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The candidates portrayed by the commentariat as ‘extreme right’ were the most direct. ‘Did he die because he was a Jew?’ tweeted Eric Zemmour, himself a Jew. ‘Why is this case hushed up?’ Marine Le Pen also wondered on social media if ‘what was presented as an accident

Antoine Colonna

Could the Corsica revolts spread all over France?

The Colonnas in Corsica are a bit like the Smiths in Britain. We are numerous. But in smart Parisian circles, the mention of this name sends a chill through the room. Yvan Colonna, a member of my extended clan (though not a known relative), was the most notorious Corsican nationalist of his time. He was convicted of the 1998 killing of a Préfét of Corsica, the highest republican official on the island. Last month, Yvan was himself murdered in a mainland French prison.  He was attacked by a fellow prisoner, an Islamist who had been arrested and brought over from Afghanistan. It was an especially gruesome affair. Colonna was beaten and then strangled

Sam Cranny-Evans

Can the Switchblade drone win the war for Ukraine?

The United States is sending a new weapon to Ukraine in the fight against Russia: the Switchblade drone. At least 100 of the loitering munitions (LMs) are being shipped from the US as part of an $800 million (£600 million) package of military aid. Switchblade, which is launched from a tube and is about the size of a baguette, is fitted with an explosive warhead. An operator flies the drone into an area of interest before detecting, identifying and attacking a target with lethal effect. Can it help win the war for Ukraine? Designed and manufactured by California-based AeroVironment, there are multiple variants of the Switchblade drone. Initially, it seems most likely the Switchblade 300, a

Isabel Sawkins and Grace Rollison

Putin’s army is using rape as a weapon of war

In Ukraine, no one is safe from the onslaught of the Russian army. Men, women and children are all targets. And there is mounting evidence that Russian troops have been raping civilians since the onset of war last month, with sexual violence serving as part of the Russian army’s attempts to subjugate the Ukrainian population. It is a deliberate strategy. Nothing is off-limits for the Russian army. Gruesome images were recently shared online by Mariana Betsa, ambassador of Ukraine to Estonia, to document what is happening in Ukraine. She shared an image of the body of a three-year-old girl. Betsa said the girl had been raped. Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko has also accused