World

Tuesday

Harold James

Is this Putin’s ‘Suez moment’?

Suez is long remembered as a critical moment in Britain’s imperial decline. Might future historians say something similar about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? There are a number of striking parallels between Britain’s relationship with the United States in the 1950s and Russia’s ties with China today. Britain’s rash move to reclaim the Suez Canal from Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, was – as with president Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – conducted without any substantial prior consultation with its key ally. In Russia’s case, it was China that had no warning. But during the Suez crisis, it was the United States which had its nose put out of joint.  The limits of

Oleksiy Pluzhnyk

Ukraine’s language is a vital weapon in our fight against Russia

Vladimir Putin believes that Ukraine is essentially a Potemkin country. We are, he claims, a nation ‘entirely created by Russia’. This came as news to Ukrainians like myself. Russian soldiers and mercenaries sent to our country are also finding out the hard way that, despite our many similarities, there are key differences between Ukraine and Russia. These have made life difficult for Russians who have attempted to go undercover in our country. While Putin might not like to admit it, we have our own culture and our own vision of the future. We also have our own language; idioms and turns of phrases – and way of pronouncing words –

Monday

Julian Jessop

What happens if Russia defaults?

Well down the list of things to worry about as the ghastly Ukrainian tragedy unfolds is the high probability that the Russian government will stop paying its international debts. But this risk should certainly be somewhere on that list – as the fallout from past defaults has shown. We have been here several times before. Moscow also defaulted on its debt in 1998, exacerbating a sell-off across all emerging markets. It led to the collapse of a huge US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, which had to be bailed out to prevent a worldwide meltdown. This came too late to save many other investors from large losses. Ten years later, apparently

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Should we prepare for an oil price crash?

I almost felt a sense of perverse celebration as the meter clocked round to £100 – the first time I have ever spent so large a sum filling my car with diesel. Not so long ago it was costing me closer to £60. After gas and electricity prices, it is suddenly oil prices which are making the news. Some garages have been shown selling the fuel for over £2 a litre. If you live in a rural area and rely on oil to heat your home, you may have experienced an even bigger shock in the past fortnight: the price of domestic heating oil has doubled to around 120 pence

James Jeffrey

Spare a thought for the Russian squaddie

Britain’s greatest war poet Siegfried Sassoon was well aware of the idiocy of those who cheered the deaths of soldiers. ‘O German mother dreaming by the fire/ While you are knitting socks to send your son/ His face is trodden deeper in the mud,’ he wrote in his World War I poem Glory of Women. His verse dealt with the hypocrisy and callousness of civilians who failed to recognise the cruel reality of war. We appear to have barely learnt a thing in relation to the war in Ukraine, as we celebrate all too readily the deaths of those on the ‘wrong side’. On Twitter now – and throughout the media – there

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Will China come to Putin’s rescue?

Joe Biden appears to be trying to force China’s hand over Ukraine. This follows days during which Beijing has tied itself in knots, offering to play a ‘positive role’ for peace, but refusing to criticise Russia – avoiding even calling the invasion an invasion, and echoing Moscow’s justifications. US Officials at the weekend briefed American news outlets that Russia has asked China to provide military equipment, and requested additional economic assistance to help cushion the impact of Western sanctions. The officials, keen to protect their intelligence sources, declined to say precisely what Russia was seeking, nor what China’s response had been. But they said they were watching closely and warned

Robert Ginzburg

Russian cities are returning to their Cold War state

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 rouble note as though it would vanish in front of me – until it told me I’d reached my limit for the day. Being cut off completely from money

Sunday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The West needs to prepare for guerrilla war in Ukraine

Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned this week that convoys of weapons being sent to Ukraine would be considered legitimate military targets by Russia. It was a deliberately ambiguous and political statement more than anything else, but it is also a useful reminder of the need to think about the potential next phase in the war. It is still unclear whether the Russians will be able to recover from their unimpressive initial onslaught, but one way or another it seems likely that at least part of Ukraine will end up under Moscow’s control. It also seems pretty certain that Ukrainians behind the lines will not quietly submit, but instead

Robert Service

The fatal miscalculation that led to war in Ukraine

The war against Ukraine – or the ‘special military operation’ as it is compulsorily known in Moscow – has lasted over a fortnight. For weeks Putin maintained a bristling encampment of forces in western Russia, southern Belarus and Crimea. He hoped this would provoke the collapse of the ‘neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian government and its comedian-president. When this failed to occur, he invaded. Photographs show Putin sitting at the end of a long table keeping his distance from his leading associates, such as the booming-voiced foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and khaki-clad defence minister Sergei Shoigu. Gone are the days of Kremlin camaraderie: Putin now expects and gets the maximum display of deference

Nigel Jones

Putin’s taste for terror is nothing new

There is tragically nothing new about the scenes of indiscriminate terror unfolding in Ukraine: bombing and shelling unleashed by Putin’s forces in the streets of Kharkiv and Mariupol against civilians today is a familiar tale – almost a reflex action – of what Russia does whenever it is faced with opposition or the defiance of a smaller nation. We have been here before. In fact anyone born in 1952, the year of Vladimir Putin’s birth, has been here many times: East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, Kabul in 1979, Grozny in 1999 and Aleppo in 2016.  Lashing out in insensate rage and violence and sending in the

Saturday

Jeff Stein

Russia has been preparing for war with the US for decades

The lights were blinking off. As raucous pro- and anti-Trump crowds flooded into Washington for the presidential inauguration in January 2017, the DC police department’s citywide surveillance cameras stopped recording. Within seconds, 123 of its 178 surveillance cameras, including those monitoring the streets around the White House and the headquarters of multiple federal agencies, had been ‘accessed and compromised.’ The intelligence gap lasted for three days, from January 12 to 15. Coming on the heels of Russia’s covert intrusions into the 2016 campaign, officials at first feared Vladimir Putin—or other bad actors, from China, Iran or North Korea—had dramatically upped their game to create more chaos in American society and

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield and Nicola Shulman

29 min listen

On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Douglas Murray starts by explaining why C. S. Lewis was right about war. (00:56) Mary Wakefield is up next, looking at the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over. (10:18) Nicola Shulman finishes the podcast, reading her piece about Philip Larkin’s big problem. (16:53)

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Is Russia becoming a dictatorship?

Is Russia heading for dictatorship? Some would think it is already there, but even today there are still some remnants of a civil society and constitutionalism. It is harder to believe they will last for long though. For a long time, Vladimir Putin’s regime was something of a post-modern authoritarianism that in the main relied not so much on fear and force as control of the narrative and occasional, measured applications of prophylactic repression. Back in the 2000s and even 2010s the elections were rigged, but the real trick was to allow opposition parties and candidates who were, in the main, so personally unsavoury and politically unattractive that while the

Colin Freeman

The reality of being ‘under siege’ in Kyiv

Kyiv, Ukraine I’ve never commuted into a warzone by train before, but I can now recommend it. The express train to Kyiv from Lviv near Ukraine’s Polish border has several advantages over coming in by car. Firstly, it avoids a 14-hour motorway drive, where fuel is short and traffic jams are long. Plus, the online booking app still works far better than any in Britain. Despite the risk of Russians-on-the-line, the train has been kept running to help Ukrainians flee Kyiv for the Polish border. But it returns to Kyiv largely empty, save for a few Ukrainians on mercy dashes to pick up relatives. We trundle through the night, the

Justin Bronk

Putin’s dream of annexing Ukraine is over

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its third week, it is becoming abundantly clear that the Kremlin’s maximalist geopolitical aims of regime change and a ‘greater Russia’ which includes Ukraine and Belarus are no longer achievable. The question now is how much damage will Russian forces inflict on Ukrainian cities and their brave defenders before Putin and his advisors lower their ceasefire conditions to terms that Ukraine’s leaders and population can accept. Ukraine is in a strategically stronger position than many in the West appreciate, but the war on the ground is still stacked in Moscow’s favour in the short term. The plan to decapitate the Ukrainian state at

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can Boris get the Saudis to pump more oil?

The oil price is up by more than 40 per cent since the start of the year. It is being driven up by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the lack of investment in oil and turning the world economy on and off again: US production is still not back to pre-pandemic levels. In the immediate term, as I say in the Times today, pretty much the only way to bring the price down is to get Saudi Arabia – which has 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity – to pump more. The West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has always been morally problematic. The justification for it, despite Riyadh’s appalling

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why are British soldiers deserting to fight in Ukraine?

When my brother was an infantry officer in the early 1990s the soldiers under his command were hard men. Most hailed from the north-east of England; in an earlier era they might have mined coal for a living. They smoked and drank and swore, and they were superb soldiers, as they proved in South Armagh and in Bosnia. It’s safe to assume these men would have struggled as infantrymen in today’s British army.  Even the word ‘infantrymen’ would cause problems today. Last year, the Ministry of Defence recruited for a director of diversity and inclusion (salary £110,000 per annum, compared to the £20,000 an infantryman is paid). Meanwhile, in November, it

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris Johnson rejects Europe’s open approach to Ukrainian refugees

One of the most extraordinary (and moving) videos to have emerged since the invasion of Ukraine shows scenes at Berlin Central Station where refugees are paired upon arrival with locals offering accommodation. An unprecedented crisis has been met with an unprecedented public response – some 350,000 beds have been offered in Germany now. Over a million in Poland. People’s generosity has risen to the challenge – without government getting in the way to slow things down. Could it happen here? We risk ending up doing more than any European country to arm the Ukrainians but less than any other to help refugees Michael Gove is set to launch a British

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Don’t make war in Ukraine about Putin’s mental health

There was a time when supposedly serious commentators on world affairs used to at least feign historical knowledge. They might quote Bismarck or Castlereagh. Now, international relations punditry, like almost everything else, has succumbed to the language of pop psychology. Vladimir Putin is ‘gaslighting’ the Russian people, we are told, motivated by his ‘hypermasculinity’. His invasion of Ukraine is, according to one commentator on Radio 4 this morning, ‘unforgivable abuse’. I thought abuse meant kicking a dog or being cruel to a partner. Now it means starting a war. It’s almost as though we’re unable to think of Putin as anything other than a nasty contestant on reality TV. Take

Andrew Tettenborn

Why is the EU attacking Poland and Hungary in a crisis?

With Russian bombs harassing Kiev and Kharkiv, the two unsung heroes of Europe have been Poland and Hungary. With very little notice, they have between them welcomed, fed and accommodated well over a million refugees from Ukraine. This they have done gladly and without complaint. Yesterday the European parliament passed a ponderous 2,500-word resolution devoted to Poland and Hungary. An appreciation, perhaps, or even a vote of thanks? Not exactly. It was actually a call for the EU to take steps as soon as possible to block payment of EU budget and Covid recovery funds to both countries, and criticising Brussels for not having started the process earlier. Why? The