World

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theatre of war: Putin’s deadly dramatics over Ukraine

Vladimir Putin now knows that the West won’t fight for Ukraine. The past few weeks have shown that. All options are open to Moscow. Russian troops could march on Kiev or stay on the border destabilising Ukraine’s economy until its government gives way. If Putin wanted a fight, he would win — at least initially. No western military force will stop Russia from crossing the border. The main question is what punishment the West would be able to inflict on Russia after an incursion. Would Nato members be able to agree on what approach to take? Tensions within the alliance have been exposed. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser,

Taki

The perils of a sex party

Gstaad I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the best exercise in the world. Both upper and lower body get the maximum workout as one churns along a beautiful course in Lauenen, a tiny nearby village that looks like Gstaad did 60 years ago. I used to bring my children to the lake here during the summer, warning them time and again about a horrible monster that lived underwater and specialised in grabbing little kids. They screamed and screamed in terror until they got a bit older, told me to stop talking nonsense and swam to their heart’s content.

Wednesday

William Nattrass William Nattrass

The EU is pushing Hungary and Poland to the brink

Storm clouds looming over the EU’s ‘rule of law’ dispute turned a shade darker on Wednesday. The European Court of Justice rejected challenges from Hungary and Poland against a controversial budget mechanism linking adherence to democracy and EU funding.  In an indication of the significance of the ruling for the bloc’s future, the verdict was the first ever to be broadcast live from the court. The European Commission will now come under intense pressure to apply the rule of law mechanism and withhold long-term budget funds for Hungary and Poland, along with the pandemic recovery funds it has already refused to hand over to those states. But the escalation of the conflict

Owen Matthews

How western journalists became Putin propagandists

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin has created a Schrödinger’s war in Ukraine

In his famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat was both dead and alive in potential, until its box was opened to find out. Likewise, it seems the much-heralded war in Ukraine is at once imminent and unthinkable, and we don’t know which. The date and indeed time of a massive invasion of Ukraine asserted with such confidence in certain newspapers seems, mercifully, to have come and gone. Vladimir Putin is saying that he wants talks to continue, and the Russian military is claiming it is moving some of its forces away from the border area. But where does that leave us? In many ways, exactly where we were before. The troop

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What would Thatcher have said about Putin?

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom that he was British ambassador to Moscow. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for thinking the sub-editors have got it back to front and he was actually the Russian ambassador to London. Sir Tony’s message in every letter is ‘It’s all Britain’s fault’. In his latest, his particular target was the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, after her visit to Moscow. He said she ‘might usefully recall Margaret Thatcher’s wise message to Mikhail Gorbachev sent in 1985 as perestroika began to take off: “We know that you have as much right to

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Is Germany finally standing up to Russia and China?

When German chancellor Olaf Scholz met Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday, the visuals said it all. As he had done with Emmanuel Macron, Putin kept his visitor at arm’s length, or rather at five metres’ length. Sitting at opposite ends of the Kremlin’s infamous long table, the two men were as physically far away from each other as they were on content. But Scholz did not seem intimidated by this. On the contrary. At the press conference that followed, he was assertive, even feisty. Are we seeing the beginnings of a post-Merkel foreign policy shift in Berlin? When ex-chancellor Angela Merkel last sat at the same table in Moscow in

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why the French right prefer Putin to progressives

Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Moscow last week was reminiscent of a trip made by Charles de Gaulle to the Russian capital in November 1944. Neither man left much of an impression on their host. Macron, after six hours of talks with Vladimir Putin, failed to persuade the Russian president to de-escalate the situation on the Ukrainian border whatever he might have claimed to the contrary. De Gaulle, the leader of the recently-liberated France in 1944, made little headway with Stalin, who subsequently told the American ambassador Averell Harriman that he found the Frenchman ‘an awkward and stubborn man’. That description must have struck a chord with Winston Churchill and Franklin

Matthew Lynn

Why ‘Ukraine carnage’ in the markets won’t last

Oil will shoot up to $130 a barrel. The prices of natural gas will double in a few hours, tipping a few more energy companies into bankruptcy. The tech stocks will crash, currency traders will panic, and the bond markets will crater. If Russian tanks do start to roll across the Ukrainian border this week then we can expect carnage in the financial markets. Indeed, they have already fallen sharply in anticipation of a possible war. And yet, the important point is surely this: it won’t last. True, the most serious armed conflict on European soil since the end of world war two is a serious matter. But geopolitical events

Tuesday

Jane Stannus

Trudeau’s totalitarian turn

It was the hot tub that did it. Photos of Canadian convoy supporters relaxing in a hot tub on a downtown Ottawa street last weekend were splashed all over the news. Now Justin Trudeau is mad and he’s gone and invoked war measures, known as the Emergencies Act. He wants that hot tub off the streets, pronto, and he needs wartime powers to get it done. Civil liberties remain ‘temporarily’ suspended… just for two weeks, while we flatten the protesters! On announcing the ‘state of emergency’, (state of emergency piled upon pre-existing state of emergency), Trudeau’s government immediately declared that banks are allowed to freeze personal and business accounts on

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Is President Macron’s re-election as safe as it looks?

In February 1995, Jacques Chirac was at 12 per cent in the polls. Two months later he was president. Two months is precisely the time remaining before the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election. At the moment, President Macron’s advantage looks unassailable: the Economist’s tracker puts his chances of being re-elected at over 80 per cent. But just how unpredictable might this election be? After a few weeks of relative inertia, there are signs that the traditionally volatile French electorate are beginning to rumble. Last weekend, the campaigns shifted into a higher gear, and not necessarily to the advantage of the incumbent. In a phenomenon I think

Josie Appleton

France’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ isn’t going away

On Sunday night, France’s ‘liberty convoy’ filled a supermarket carpark outside Lille, after leaving Paris. A video on the group’s Telegram account showed hundreds of assembled vehicles, a sea of lights and French flags, with shouts coming from all directions. The cars had arrived earlier in the evening with crowds of locals lining the road, chanting ‘Resistance, Liberté!’ and lighting the route with red flares. Every step of the way – which started out last Wednesday in Nice and other far-flung cities – the convoy has been met with tables of food and cheers of support from the public. When I saw off a convoy from Saint Gaudens, south west

Monday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The Ukraine crisis has united the West

There has been a subtle change of tone from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson about the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has gone from ‘highly likely’ to ‘there may be a diplomatic solution’ — or from ‘almost all hope lost’ to ‘chink of hope’. So from where does that hope emanate? Largely, I am told, from noises out of Ukraine that its government is moving towards a public statement that although it retains the right to join the Nato western defence alliance, it will commit to not consider applying for at least ten years. The US president and UK prime minister are keen to encourage, through diplomatic channels, such

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Putin may yet resist a full-on invasion

The west is still in the dark on what Vladimir Putin will do next. The Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border continues but in televised meetings with Sergey Lavrov, his foreign minister, Putin was told that there is a case for ‘continuing and intensifying’ diplomatic discussions with the West. For Putin — who smarts at what he sees as the humiliation of the end of the Cold War and the decline of Soviet power — there is a satisfaction in watching the West scramble to respond to his actions. The Biden administration wanted to prioritise competition with China, but Putin is succeeding in forcing him to concentrate on European diplomacy

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

I stand with Diane Abbott

Not for the first time in her political career, Diane Abbott is getting a lot of flak online. She’s being trolled, heckled and denounced as an enemy of the United Kingdom. Only this time Ms Abbott is being hauled over the coals not for saying something silly, but for saying something sensible. Something true. Something fundamentally correct. Namely, that Nato bears a great deal of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine. Browsing the Abbott-bashing headlines you could be forgiven for thinking she had upped sticks, flown to Moscow, and sworn lifelong allegiance to Vladimir Putin. ‘Diane Abbott backs Russia!’, says the Express. In its regular feature on mad things

Charles Lipson

What really happens if Russia invades Ukraine?

Russia will pay an enormous price if it invades Ukraine, whether it goes for the whole country or only the eastern region around Donbas. Vladimir Putin has already assembled well over 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, moved in tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft, and brought in the medics and blood supplies needed to deal with casualties. Western governments have evacuated all but essential diplomatic personnel and told their citizens to get out now. Still, no one knows what Putin has decided, or even if he has decided. Visits to Moscow by senior western politicians have yielded little information and no diplomatic solution. The message seems to be that Putin remains

Jim Lawley

Spain’s shift towards the radical right

Yesterday’s snap election in Castile-León, one of the 17 regional autonomies into which Spain is divided, was another excellent day for Vox, the most right-wing of Spain’s mainstream parties. Vox, which previously had just one seat in the 81-seat regional assembly, now has 13 and holds the balance of power. Vox’s success prevented the Partido Popular, which has governed in Castile-León for over three decades, achieving an absolute majority (41 seats or more). Instead after winning only 31 seats, the Partido Popular, Spain’s main party of the right, said it would begin discussions with all the parties. But the arithmetic suggests that in order to form a stable government the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

We could learn a thing or two from Swiss democracy

There was another referendum in Switzerland over the weekend. This one was about protecting the young from the evils of tobacco by banning advertising anywhere children might see it. This strikes me as a good deal more liberal than the measure from New Zealand’s mildly fascistic Jacinda Ardern, who insists that young people must never smoke at all, ever, or indeed the situation here where none of us is allowed actually to see a cigarette packet in case it gives us ideas. But it’s not just cigarette advertisements that the Swiss were voting on. There are other referendums on animal (and human) experiments in research as well as a couple

John Smith

Is Orbán serious about leaving the EU?

First the UK decided to leave the EU. Then in Poland, lawmakers started talking about it. Is Hungary now seriously considering Huxit? For the first time ever, Viktor Orbán has insinuated that leaving the union could be a possibility. The Hungarian Prime Minister kicked off his campaign for re-election over the weekend by attacking Brussels’s ‘Jihad’ against his country and suggesting that continued membership of the EU might not be possible. This is obviously an alarming prospect for the EU. Over the course of Orbán’s premiership, Vladimir Putin has brought Hungary into his orbit. The latest step in that process was a 15-year gas deal signed in September. Russia will

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Might Macron’s future rest with the England rugby team?

After two rounds of the Six Nations, France is the only unbeaten team. Their victory against Ireland in a ferocious encounter in Paris on Saturday evening keeps them on course for the championship title. The last time France won the Six Nations crown was in 2010. The decade that followed was not kind to the national team. One might say their decline mirrored that of the country in general. They became a laughing stock, finishing bottom of the Six Nations in 2013 and suffering embarrassing defeats to the likes of Tonga and Fiji. Everything about the French team was amateur — their preparation, their fitness, their technique — compared to