World Archives

Thursday

24 Feb 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: what we know so far

Vladimir Putin finally made his move overnight. In a spontaneous address to the Russian people in the early hours of the morning, Putin declared the beginning of a special military operation to demilitarise Ukraine. The missiles started flying almost immediately. Based on the opening hours, it’s safe to say that the Russian military operation is far larger, more coordinated and geographically dispersed than many assumed previously. Cruise missiles and artillery fire landed on targets in at least seven Ukrainian cities simultaneously, from Kharkiv and Odessa to the capital, Kiev. Matthew Chance, a CNN international correspondent, had to change into his flak jacket and helmet during the middle of his broadcast, with

James Forsyth

Putin launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine

Russia last night launched a full on assault on Ukraine, with cruise missile strikes reported on the airport east of Kiev amongst targets in at least a dozen other cities. At the moment, it is unclear whether it is Kiev’s military or civilian airport which has been hit; air raid sirens sounded at 7am. The city of Mariupol on the Azov sea has come under heavy shelling. Ukraine’s border guard agency said two cities – Chernihiv and Zhytomyr, in northwest Ukraine – are coming under attack. A senior Ukrainian official has been quoted saying large numbers of of Ukrainian soldiers have already been killed. Russia has denied Ukrainian reports that five of its aircraft and one helicopter

Wednesday

23 Feb 2022

Anshel Pfeffer

Israel’s Arab-Sunni alliance is piling pressure on Iran

The world’s eyes are, naturally, all on Ukraine. But elsewhere in Europe, diplomats are locked in a series of talks to prevent an altogether different war in another region. In a hotel in Vienna, negotiators from Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China have been meeting their Iranian counterparts. In an adjacent hotel, negotiators from the United States are waiting to see Iran’s latest proposals. This is the eighth — and perhaps the last — round of talks which have gone on intermittently for the past ten months over the potential return of the US to the Iranian nuclear agreement, which Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from in 2018. The expectation last

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Boris Johnson faces pressure to be tougher on Russia

Boris Johnson came under sustained pressure at PMQs today to introduce tougher sanctions against Russia. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Ian Blackford pressed the Prime Minister on the matter, with the Labour leader opening his questions by arguing that given a sovereign country had been invaded, ‘if not now, when’ would the government unleash a full package of sanctions. Starmer repeatedly said the Labour party was supportive of what had been announced so far but that it wanted much more from the government. This included cracking down on the Russian state-backed broadcaster RT, which he said should be prevented from spreading Vladimir Putin’s propaganda around the world. Johnson argued that

James Forsyth

Why we shouldn’t ban Russia Today

Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, has written to Ofcom urging it to keep the situation with Russia Today ‘very carefully under review’ given events in Ukraine. At PMQs, Keir Starmer called for the government to ask Ofcom to review RT’s license. But if RT lost its broadcast license in the UK, then Putin would use this as an excuse to kick out the BBC and other British broadcasters. Just look at how Russia closed the Moscow office of Deutsche Welle, the German public service broadcaster, and ended the accreditation of its journalists after a German-language version of RT was taken off air in Germany. The least-worst option would be for

Mark Galeotti

Has Putin outplayed Macron in Africa?

While the world is focused on Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn all French forces from Mali. Last weekend, thousands of soldiers were flown out of the former French colony after nine years of fighting Islamist insurgents in the Sahel. Malian protesters bid the French soldiers farewell by shouting ‘Shit to France’ at the departing planes. Following a military coup in May, Mali’s ‘interim President’ Colonel Assimi Goïta began to tire of the French and their calls for free elections. There were also lingering doubts over France’s motivation, stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign. So Goïta began looking for allies who could provide him with muscle to fight the Islamist insurgency

Theo Hobson

The trouble with Putin’s Christian Orthodoxy

If you are worried about the uncertain fate of democracy in today’s world, what should you do? Become a human rights advocate, maybe, or a campaigning journalist. Or maybe you should consider becoming a Protestant missionary. In today’s Times, Danny Finkelstein draws our attention to the democracy index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It tells us that democracy has been in decline since 2006, and in recent years it has downgraded some of the most seemingly solid democracies, including the US, from ‘full democracies’ to ‘flawed democracies’. It is rather unfashionable to speak of the Protestant roots of liberty I had a look at the top ten ‘full democracies’.

Jake Wallis Simons

What would prime minister Corbyn have done about Putin?

Jeremy Corbyn’s question in the House of Commons this week filled me with the relief of catastrophe averted. Addressing Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, the former Labour leader and Morning Star columnist said: ‘Would he be prepared to countenance, if the Russians pulled back, any reduction in the Nato presence on the border as well in order to bring about a longer-term secure peace in the region?’ In reply, with admirable restraint, Wallace condescended to state the obvious. ‘We didn’t put 165,000 combat troops on the edge of a sovereign country and hold a gun to the head of a democratically elected government,’ he pointed out. Once and for all, it

Freddy Gray

Would Trump have prevented the crisis in Ukraine?

‘I know Vladimir Putin very well,’ said Donald Trump yesterday, speaking of the Ukraine crisis, ‘he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now.’ As with a lot of Trump utterances, that statement is at once arrogant, preposterous — and probably true. Maybe it is a coincidence — or Trump’s often-cited luck — that the last major crisis over Ukraine was back in 2014, after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and Putin annexed Crimea. Or perhaps not. Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised Back then Barack Obama led the free world and, busy as he was, he offloaded

Gavin Mortimer

Is the New York Times right to say Muslims are fleeing France?

Has the New York Times found a new bête noire? It was for a number of years Britain, damned for having had the temerity to leave the European Union. As Steerpike noted, the Sceptered Isle became a ‘plague-riddled, rain-drenched fascistic hell-hole’. But now it is the turn of France to receive a finger-wagging from the Gray Lady. Last week the NYT ran a lengthy article entitled ‘The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France’, in which it claimed that a growing number of French Muslims are emigrating because of the hostility they have experienced since the wave of Islamist terror attacks in 2015 and 2016 that left more than 200 French

Katja Hoyer

Cracks are already showing in the EU’s Russia response

‘The EU is united and acting fast,’ said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, as she condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A new package of sanctions, swiftly agreed upon by EU member states, appeared to show von der Leyen was right. Yet in reality, the measures were disappointing: a number of Russian officials had their assets frozen, but even Putin himself avoided punishment. Given the different attitudes and interests of EU members, from here on unity will be even more difficult to obtain. While the EU has vowed to ‘hurt Russia’, it seems unlikely it will agree upon how. Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Russian-backed Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk

Rodric Braithwaite

Has Putin lost control?

As the Soviet Union fell to pieces around our ears, we in the Moscow embassy used to discuss the Weimar precedent. A great nation, humiliated by a lost war and economic misery, tries but fails to set up a democracy. It then falls victim to a dictator who promises to restore his country’s greatness and bring justice to the millions of fellow countrymen who have been trapped in foreign countries which only exist as a result of maps drawn by the victors. British, French, and American diplomats may have been incompetent and pusillanimous before 1939. But one man, and one man only, was responsible for the outbreak of war: Adolf

Nigel Jones

How Putin is following Hitler’s playbook

Like many rulers of Russia before him, especially Stalin, Vladimir Putin is a keen student of History. Judging by his current actions, it seems as though he has been particularly brushing up on the story of 1938, when another dictator, one Adolf Hitler, deliberately provoked the destruction of an independent European state – Czechoslovakia – by inflating the grievances of an ethnic minority within its borders to undermine and eventually obliterate it. So has Putin been following Hitler’s playbook in his confrontation with Ukraine? It looks very much like it. Consider: on 28 May 1938 Hitler told a meeting of his top generals: ‘I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia should

Julius Strauss

Putin’s next move

Budapest Russian troops, many apparently without insignia, began advancing into the disputed Donbas region yesterday. The question now is how much further they will go. The Donbas rebels claim an area three times the size of the territory they currently hold, which is roughly equivalent to the area of Devon. If Moscow were to try to take control of the larger territory, it would mean overrunning the Ukrainian frontlines. It is unlikely that Kiev’s military can mount a serious defence if the Kremlin orders a full-scale attack. The call to advance came in the form of a belligerent speech by Putin to the Russian people. In it, he strongly suggested

Freddy Gray

Why the silence over Biden’s links with Ukraine?

‘He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.’ So once said Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, of the now president Joe Biden. We don’t yet know if Biden is wrong about the current Ukraine crisis. We may be about to find out. His speech on Tuesday was at least competent, if not entirely coherent. ‘Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belongs to his neighbours?’ asked the president, in one of his now all-too-familiarly infirm attempts to sound firm. Yet Biden said his administration,

Tuesday

22 Feb 2022

Stephen Daisley

Putin must look at the West and laugh

Whatever the West’s response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty, the crisis demonstrates the limitations of western politics and policy across the board. If Vladimir Putin understands any demographic better than the Russian people, it is the governing class of the West: that Harvard-Oxbridge-Sciences Po axis of toweringly smug and practically interchangeable global-liberals who weep for international norms they weren’t prepared to defend. Their ideas and their sanctions are tired because they are civilisationally tired. Putin knows this, but none of the rival ideologies aiming to replace liberalism have anything better to offer. The failure of the global-liberals comes on many fronts but two of the most significant have been

Ian Williams

Unmasking ‘panda diplomacy’

The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It was deployed to cover the harsher political edges of the games, and was romping around on the ice at the closing gala. Bing Dwen Dwen is only the latest example of China’s use of ‘panda diplomacy’, so successful over recent decades. The Chinese Communist party has long used them as envoys to potential partners. A bill now wending its way through the US Congress strikes at the heart of panda diplomacy. If it passes, it will keep American-born giant panda cubs in the US, which would break China’s monopoly on

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s diplomatic failure in Russia was still a political success

President Emmanuel Macron may or may not have imagined that his mission to Moscow would head off armed conflict in Ukraine. He will nevertheless have calculated that while his mission was an abject diplomatic failure, it was a modest political success. The French pro-Macron media (most of it) bigged up the visit as a triumph of French diplomacy and an affirmation of Macron’s global stature. Plus, all the jetting back and forth gave the President an excuse to further delay announcing his candidacy for the presidential election, the first round of which is in just 47 days. He might have failed to stop Putin’s aggression, but at least he was

Seb Kennedy

Are the lights about to go out across Europe?

Impact-Site-Verification: de2f122d-4b66-49e8-911d-d4d5628b0063 Today’s snap decision by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to halt Nord Stream 2 — the new pipeline intended to export vast amounts of Russian gas into the EU — will make precisely no difference to European energy security, at least in the short to medium term. It could force a rethink of Berlin’s longer-term energy strategy, but the bigger question facing energy markets is whether Russia will curtail existing gas flows into Europe. Scholz on Tuesday instructed Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action not to allow the Baltic Sea pipeline to start pumping gas ‘for now’. Halting the certification process puts the project on hold

Ross Clark

It’s too late to break Europe’s gas reliance on Russia

So, Nord Stream 2 will not be plugged into Germany’s gas grid. A little surprisingly, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been first out of the blocks this morning in the western economic response to Putin’s recognition of breakaway states in eastern Ukraine. The block is not total: what Scholz says is that the certification process for the pipeline will be halted — leaving open the possibility that it might, after all, be connected if Putin starts to behave himself, or Germany becomes especially desperate for gas. Nevertheless, it is a significant move which will have an economic impact on Russia. But it is astonishing that the project was ever allowed to come