World

Sunday

Francis Pike

Putin’s Russia is part of a global Orthodox revival

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, was found hanged in his Sunningdale home in March 2013. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Berezovsky converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1994. His leap of faith, I suspected, was more political than spiritual. ‘So why,’ I asked him at dinner one evening, ‘do you buy Russian Icons?’ Berezovsky told me that he tried to bribe Vladimir Putin with motor cars, but he refused them. He was more successful with gifts of Russian Icons, which Putin passed on to churches and monasteries. Throughout his political career, the Russian president has taken care to look after the Russian Orthodox Church. Does this reflect a genuine religious belief?

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What could France possibly teach America about free speech?

Nearly 300 academics have contacted a French university after it declared itself a safe space for those looking to flee Donald Trump’s America. Aix-Marseille University on the Mediterranean coast responded to the president’s pursuit of American universities he deems to be anti-Semitic by launching a ‘Safe Place for Science’ programme.  Described as a ‘scientific asylum’, the French university will offer three years of funding for up to 20 researchers. So far 298 academics have applied, including staff from Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Johns Hopkins University. Liberation, a left-wing French newspaper, says that some of the applicants have described ‘sometimes chilling accounts from American researchers about the fate reserved for them by

Geoff Hill

Easter means hope in South Africa

For urban South Africans – now 70 per cent of the country’s population – there’s much to celebrate this Easter because, in addition to the four-day weekend, there are two more breaks within a fortnight. On Monday 28 April, we remember the first democratic election in 1994, and in the same week is International Labour Day on 1 May, marking the strike of 1886 that shut America in a quest for better pay and conditions. How does it make Easter special? Because in South Africa, urban growth is recent, and the bonds to rural family are strong. In black culture, the children of anyone with blood-links to your parents’ generation are thought of as siblings.

Saturday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Why Putin wants a truce

At 4 p.m. UK time today, Russian troops were instructed to temporarily lay down their weapons in Ukraine. The order, issued by Russian president Vladimir Putin to mark the Easter weekend, is nominally in force for 30 hours until midnight on Easter Monday. ‘We are proceeding on the assumption that the Ukrainian side will follow our example,’ he said. All military operations, the President added, would supposedly be halted during that time period. From Putin’s statement it doesn’t look as if this ceasefire was discussed with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, or anyone from his administration, before he announced it. But it appears that for the rest of this weekend

Nicholas Farrell

Giorgia Meloni is Europe’s most important leader

Giorgia Meloni has confounded her critics yet again as she proves herself to be the most important leader in the European Union. She has shown in the past two days that she is the vital bridge between America and Europe. As a result, Italy looks set to play a major role on the world stage which it has never done before since the founding of the Italian Republic in 1948 after the defeat of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In Washington on Thursday, where Meloni met Donald Trump for a bilateral summit, she achieved a major breakthrough when the US President accepted her invitation to come to Rome ‘to meet Europe’ about

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Giving Putin Crimea will not end the war

When Volodymyr Zelensky speaks of the Ukrainian territories under Russian control, he always calls them ‘temporarily occupied’. The phrase, first used by Zelensky’s predecessor, has been engraved into Ukrainian politics since 2014, after Vladimir Putin seized Crimea. That terminology is more than symbolic – it’s a promise that Ukraine will one day, even if it takes decades, reclaim all of its land. Now, Donald Trump wants to take that chance away. Trump is reportedly considering recognising Crimea as part of Russia in exchange for a ceasefire in Ukraine. And if the peace agreement isn’t reached soon, he threatens to walk away. ‘If for some reason, one of the two parties

Friday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is keeping Trump waiting for a Ukraine deal

There is an odd contradiction in Russian attitudes to the current negotiations with the United States. On the one hand, a sense that the window of opportunity may be closing, on the other no real rush to take advantage of it, or at least to offer Donald Trump any concessions to show willing. Mikhail Rostovsky, a columnist in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, put it best when he noted that the window is likely to close at the end of this month, which marks the end of the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term: ‘No one expected Trump to fulfil his boastful campaign promise and stop military actions during

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump vs Harvard

23 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to Peter Wood who is the President of the National Association of Scholars about Trump’s decision to block Harvard funding after the university denied the President’s DEI demands. 

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Meloni’s mission to ‘make the West great again’ will infuriate Macron

Giorgia Meloni met Donald Trump in the White House on Thursday and stated her ambition to ‘make the West great again’. The Italian prime minister is closer to the Trump administration than any other Western European leader, and later today in Rome she will host J.D. Vance. The American vice-president could be described as Meloni’s ideological soulmate, and it was noteworthy that when Meloni spoke of her ambition to reinvigorate the West she added: “When I speak about (the) West mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilisation, and I want to make that civilisation stronger.” This will be music to the ears of Vance This

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Katy Balls, Olivia Potts, Benedict Allen, Cosmo Landesman and Aidan Hartley

40 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Would Trump really bomb Iran, asks Paul Wood (1:38); Katy Balls interviews Health Secretary Wes Streeting on NHS reform, Blairism and Game of Thrones (8:38); Olivia Potts examines the history – and decline – of the Easter staple, roast lamb (18:25); the explorer Benedict Allen says Erling Kagge and Neil Shubin were both dicing with death, as he reviews both their books on exploration to earth’s poles (22:13); Cosmo Landesman reflects on what turning 70 has meant for his sex life (28:46); and, Aidan Hartley takes us on an anthropomorphic journey across Africa (33:55).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The plight of Nigeria’s Christians

The persecution of Nigeria’s Christians is medieval in its horror. Villages are surrounded in the dead of night by bandits who rape and kill the inhabitants. No one is spared: women and children are among those butchered. The Makurdi Diocese, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Benue state, has been hit badly by this savage violence. In 2024, 549 locals in this diocese alone were murdered and dozens more kidnapped. Over 3,700 people in Makurdi have been killed since 2015. Villages have been effectively wiped off the map. Over a million Nigerians, terrified of what might await them, have chosen instead to live in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. Wilfred Anagbe, the

Zoe Strimpel

The trouble with Harvard

Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at Harvard became a blueprint for campus protests throughout the US, especially at Columbia, UCLA and the University of Michigan. These all-campus jamborees of Israel-loathing were looked on benignly, and sometimes even joined, by faculty that are otherwise easily angered by crimes such as using the wrong gender pronoun. Now, as threatened, Donald Trump is taking

Daniel DePetris

What will Trump do if the Ukraine peace talks fail?

With the war in Ukraine now in its fourth year, Trump administration officials, including Donald Trump himself, have spent the last month dialling their Ukrainian colleagues, jetting to foreign capitals to meet with Ukrainian and Russian officials and huddling with European ministers in an attempt to bring the conflict to a conclusion. The latest meeting happened this week, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, traveled to Paris for an all-hands session. Trump, however, doesn’t have much to show for his efforts. U.S. officials continue to put on a brave face and insist that Trump, and only Trump, has the knowledge, skill-set and experience to negotiate

Thursday

The Spectator

Watch: Douglas Murray on Israel’s plight and the plague of western guilt

On Monday evening, The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove and Spectator columnist and associate editor Douglas Murray sat down for a live event at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.  In front of a packed auditorium with 1,500 guests, they discussed the October 7th massacre; Douglas’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West; and the best and the worst aspects of the MAGA movement. This is a video exclusively for Spectator subscribers.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Britain and France are too scared to tackle the migrant crisis

France has overtaken Germany as Europe’s top destination for asylum seekers. During the first quarter of 2025, France registered more than 40,000 applications, just above Spain (39,318) and Germany (37,387). This is a 41 per cent drop in German applications for the same period in 2024; Interior Minister Nancy Faeser attributed the fall to a ‘strong package of measures, Germany’s own actions and close European cooperation’. Germany has been Europe’s destination of choice for asylum seekers since 2011. The country was considered the most welcoming, in part because of the impression cultivated by the former chancellor Angela Merkel, who issued an open invitation to migrants and refugees in 2015. Successive

Nicholas Farrell

Can Giorgia Meloni sweet-talk Trump on EU tariffs?

We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D. Vance – a Catholic – on Friday, who is in Rome for Easter hoping to meet the Pope as well. Certainly, Meloni is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing Italy’s first female prime minister travels to Washington bearing the cross of the EU on her small but sturdy shoulders. For

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s cronies are enjoying needling the West

Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is in many ways an uncomfortable and ephemeral spy chief, but an enthusiastic information warrior. In recent talks with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, he accused Nato of threatening Moscow and Minsk by increasing the size and activity of its forces on the border – or rather, certain nations within the alliance: We feel and see that European countries, especially France, Britain and Germany, are increasing the level of escalation around the Ukrainian conflict, so we need to act pre-emptively. We are ready for this. Playing up a supposed ‘threat’ to Belarus is a way of threatening Poland and the Baltic

James Hanson

The case for chlorinated chicken

As a UK-US trade deal moves closer, an age-old fear is rearing its head once more: that Britain will be forced to accept imports of American chlorinated chicken. Ever since Brexit, politicians of all parties have decried the prospect. The Labour manifesto ruled it out and even Rishi Sunak promised farmers in 2023 that there would ‘be no chlorine-washed chicken… on the UK market. Not now, not ever.’ But here’s the thing: isn’t chlorinated chicken a small price to pay for a deal with our biggest trading partner? I have never understood the scaremongering that surrounds chlorinated chicken. First of all, washing poultry in chlorine-based solutions poses no harm to

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The biggest threat to Trump is Trump

Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per cent of Americans own stock; unsurprisingly, I do, too. A believer in the joys of denial, I’ve refused to even peek at my portfolio since the President’s ‘Liberation Day’. I guess not worrying my pretty head about my finances constitutes liberation of a kind. While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the

Toby Young Toby Young

Can Trump keep me on side?

I’m in danger of falling out of love with Donald Trump. I was ecstatic when he beat Kamala Harris, delighted with his flurry of executive orders, particularly the one entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’, and thrilled by his appointment of Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But his flip-flopping over tariffs and the resulting market turmoil has led to a smidgen of buyer’s remorse. At the end of last week, my pension pot was worth 10 per cent less than it had been a couple of weeks earlier. But then he does something that reminds me of what it is that I like about