World

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The West has to bite its lip for Saudi oil

It would be ridiculous to claim that Boris Johnson’s visit to Saudi Arabia is not morally problematic. He is going to a country which held a mass execution for 81 people this weekend – a record number – and to visit a man who US intelligence blames for the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Yet, if the West wishes to reduce Vladimir Putin’s leverage – and stabilise the oil market – then it needs Saudi Arabia to pump more; no country has more spare capacity than Saudi Arabia, which could produce another 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day if it wanted to. The best solution is – obviously – for the

Justin Bronk

Why hasn’t Russia been able to stop Ukraine’s drone attacks?

Among the many weapons being used by the Ukrainian military to inflict losses on the Russian invasion forces, several have risen to prominence in the country and on social media. Alongside ‘St Javelin’ and the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ which have mythologised the eponymous anti-tank missile and the Ukrainian air force’s Mig-29 fighters, the Bayraktar TB-2 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gained a symbolic place in the Ukrainian defensive arsenal. The TB-2 is a relatively small medium-altitude long endurance class drone. It weighs around half a ton, cruises at 70 knots (80 mph), and can carry up to four small laser-guided bombs with a practical engagement range of around 8km. Despite

Julius Strauss

Ukrainians fear Chechen fighters. Russian soldiers hate them

Residents fleeing the Kiev suburb of Bucha reported Chechens machine-gunning cars, even those with the word ‘children’ written in their windscreens. The arrival of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who claims to lead a force of 10,000 of his countrymen, will have unnerved Ukrainian volunteers defending their city. When the Chechens intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014, they gained a reputation for undue cruelty. ‘There were stories of Kadyrov’s guys castrating prisoners of war,’ one woman with family still living in the Donbas told me.  Ukrainian fighters won’t be the only ones feeling nervous. Russia’s military has had an acrimonious relationship with the Chechen leader stretching back nearly two decades. I

Tuesday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Is China’s zero Covid game up?

Omicron has broken through China’s Covid wall. On Tuesday, the country saw a record-high of more than 5,000 cases, the highest number since the original Wuhan outbreak. To Brits (and most people around the world), that might sound like a laughably small number – but, as you might expect, China’s zero Covid machine has jumped into action, leading to a disproportionate, severe response. In the most afflicted areas like Shenzhen and Changchun, public transport has been suspended, non-essential businesses closed, residential compounds locked down. People can leave their homes to take part in compulsory city-wide mass testing (social media is flooded with videos of lengthy unsocially-distanced queues at test sites)

Henry Hill

Will Westminster ever fix the Northern Ireland protocol?

Last night’s spat between the Foreign Office and the Treasury was hardly reassuring for Unionists. If you missed it, a Treasury amendment proposed a change to customs regulations where ‘UK’ was replaced with ‘Great Britain’. What’s so bad about that, you might ask. The answer is that it would have codified the carving-out of Northern Ireland as a separate legal entity. This is something that the protocol establishes: Northern Ireland continues to follow EU customs rules while Great Britain is able to diverge. But this breaking off of Northern Ireland is something the government was supposed to be trying to prevent. Sure enough, the amendment was pulled and Liz Truss

Matthew Lynn

China’s zero Covid strategy is a threat to the global economy

Aside from deterring a few tourists, and people filming fantasy epics, closing down New Zealand during the Covid pandemic didn’t make much difference to the global economy. Neither, come to think of it, did Mark Drakeford’s determination to keep Wales free from Covid-19, and even Australia’s dedication to closing itself down didn’t matter that much as long as the mines stayed open. For most of the last two years ‘zero Covid’ policies have mainly affected the people unfortunate enough to live under them and those trapped from returning home. But China? That is something different. And right now Beijing’s almost certainly doomed attempt to crush the virus is as much

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Turkish drones are transforming the war in Ukraine

Istanbul, Turkey A cheer rings out in a secret command centre. On the screen, another Russian missile launcher has vanished in a cloud of shrapnel and smoke. Working miles behind the front line, a team of Ukrainian drone operators is trying to turn the tide of the war against the Kremlin’s forces. The most effective weapon in their arsenal is the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2. Soaring 160 meters above the battlefield, it delivers death at the push of a button. So fearsome is its reputation that it has inspired a love song that has gone viral in Ukraine and even a video game. Lightweight and with a small profile, the Bayraktars

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Could France’s ‘forgotten’ voters hand Le Pen victory?

A short war in Ukraine would not suit Emmanuel Macron. The longer it lasts the longer the president of France can project to his people the image of the implacable wartime leader. So far so good. If the polls are to be believed, next month’s presidential election is a foregone conclusion; the latest poll has Macron on 31 per cent, way in front of his closest rival, Marine Le Pen, on 18 per cent. Despite such a dominant lead over the rest of the field, Macron’s campaign team insist that they are on their guard against complacency. The president will unveil his programme in its entirety on Thursday, just over

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)