Russia

So much is still unclear about the fate of Wagner group head Yevgeny Prigozhin, from whether he really did die in the private jet that plummeted to the ground in Russia’s Tver region to what caused the crash. In today’s Russia, after all, ‘mechanical problems’ could be anything from maintenance issues to the difficulty in flying when a bomb has blown a hole in your fuselage. The odds are, though, that he is indeed dead. Putin himself offered lukewarm praise to the ‘talented businessman’ who nonetheless ‘made serious mistakes in his life’ (one of which may have been reassuring Putin’s guarantees). Three things would follow from this. First of all, that

When personal sanctions on Russian oligarchs and officials were imposed by the UK, US and EU after Putin’s invasion, the rationale was that this would undermine the Kremlin. In the main, this has failed – and there is still no coherent strategy to encourage those Russians willing to turn against the regime. Wider economic sanctions are slowly grinding away at the economic base of Putin’s regime and its war machine. The case for personal sanctions is much less clear. It is absolutely right and proper that those directly involved in the war, conducting repressions or justifying aggression ought to be punished. However, in their enthusiasm to be seen as taking a determined stand (and, in part,

Perfidious Albion is at it again. The Kremlin’s increasingly unhinged obsession with seeing a British hand behind its various upsets has now manifested itself in a claim that the UK is behind the establishment of a death squad operating in Africa. The claim, trumpeted across Russia’s state-run media, is that MI6 is behind a ‘punitive saboteur unit consisting of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis’ being trained for operations in Africa. According to an unnamed ‘military-diplomatic source,’ London requested in July that the Ukrainian government help it recruit this force. Russians are at once warmly Anglophile and deeply Anglophobe, a paradoxical relationship unlike any other In response, the Ukrainian Security Service and

The hacking of the Electoral Commission’s databases highlights the way that in the interconnected modern world, ‘warfare’ can be as much about undermining faith in a country’s institutions and disrupting its political processes as anything else. The Electoral Commission has admitted that ‘hostile actors’ penetrated their systems in August 2021, in a ‘complex cyberattack’ that was only detected in October 2022. In those 14 months, the hackers accessed the details (most, admittedly, openly available) of up to 40 million voters, as well as the commission’s email system. One former Russian spook from the SVR once admitted to me that ‘MI6, CIA and the rest are the opposition: it’s the FSB

The 19-year extended prison sentence handed out to Putin opponent Alexei Navalny on Friday may seem, to many, meaningless and the stuff of Kremlin fantasy. Putin himself is unlikely to be with us in 2042, and his regime will be history long before that. Nor do we know whether his successor will issue an amnesty to those Putin has singled out for persecution or take an even harder line with them. Rarely has the Russian future seemed so elastic – yet the conditions under which Navalny will be incarcerated now are anything but. Navalny’s ongoing, astonishing self-sacrifice is once again front page news and will continue to be so Sentenced

When it comes to disclosing the true cost of the war in Ukraine for Russia, the Kremlin has rarely, if ever, chosen to be honest. But occasionally, things slip out. Last Wednesday, Mikhail Teplinsky, commander-in-chief of the Russian Airborne Forces, congratulated his troops on the anniversary of the division’s founding. He said how proud he was of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and reeled off the number of soldiers honoured as ‘Heroes of Russia’, as well as the 30,000 who had received other honours from the state. A video of his speech, below, was posted to the Russian ministry of defence’s social media channels and website. But the video

Alexei Navalny – the most high-profile figure of Russia’s political opposition – has just been sentenced to 19 years in a ‘special regime prison colony’. This was no surprise. Navalny himself predicted the ‘Stalinist’ sentence for a variety of criminal charges, some relating to ‘extremism’, in a blog post the day before the sentence was handed down: ‘The formula for calculating it is simple: the prosecution’s request minus 10–15 per cent. They asked for 20 years, so I’ll get 18 or something.’ This latest verdict adds prison time to the sentence he is already serving in the Melekhovo prison colony – around five hours east by car from Moscow – which also served as the location

A drone has hit a tower in Moscow’s financial district – just two days after the building was targeted in another attack. In the early hours of this morning, the 21st floor of the IQ-Quarter building in Moscow City was hit by an unmanned drone, marking the second time in just over 48 hours that Russian governmental offices have been successfully targeted.  These attacks are bringing the idea home that Moscow is not the infallible fortress many have long believed it to be The building is home to several Russian government offices, with the 21st floor making up part of the ministry of economic development. The area damaged by the drone is said to have been

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning. Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. This isn’t the largest drone

As a founding member of the International Criminal Court, South Africa has an obligation to arrest Vladimir Putin should he ever step foot in the country. This posed a problem for Pretoria, given the Russian leader was due to attend a meeting of the Brics trading group in Johannesburg next month. No longer. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Wednesday that Mr Putin would be staying home.  Long-range warheads landing on Jo’burg, Durban and Cape Town would soon have shortened Brics to Bric The International Criminal Court has accused him of war crimes in Crimea, especially over the treatment of children, and has issued a warrant to all member states. Pretoria has been neutral on the war in

In April this year, a sombre looking Vladimir Putin attended a midnight Orthodox Easter Service in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Holding a lit red candle, the Russian President crossed himself several times during the ceremony, known as the Divine Liturgy. When Father Kirill declared ‘Christ has risen’, Putin duly responded with the congregation: ‘Truly he is risen’. It was a year after the brutal invasion of Ukraine, but the Russian leader and Father Kirill showed no remorse or compassion for the suffering caused by the war. In fact, Putin and the Kremlin has exploited the support of the Orthodox Church in an attempt to give his actions a spurious

Three weeks after marching on Moscow, the Wagner Group has seemingly been withdrawn from the battlefield in Ukraine, according to the Pentagon. Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder said there was evidence to suggest that the 25,000-strong mercenary group was not ‘participating in any significant capacity in support of combat operations in Ukraine’. The Pentagon’s statement follows weeks of rumours and speculation about how successfully Vladimir Putin is dealing with the fallout of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion. Many Kremlin-watchers expected the President to crack down hard on the Wagner leader – and were subsequently puzzled when Prigozhin was allowed to nominally retreat into self-imposed exile in Belarus.  The Kremlin’s reaction to Prigozhin’s mutiny

‘Ukrainians fight for their homeland, Russians fight for Putin’s ambitions’, declared the TV presenter on his YouTube channel earlier this year. This was not a Ukrainian propagandist. In fact, the commentator was Russian and talking on ‘TV Rain’, the most popular and effective opposition channel broadcasting into Russia.  In TV Rain’s final programme from Moscow before the station was forced to shut down and move abroad, the founder declared: ‘No to war. Putin cannot win the war’. In exile, the channel remained robust. ‘The war has no justification and has to be stopped’, says the editor Tikhon Dzyadko. ‘Russia must withdraw its troops from Ukraine’.  The most effective vehicle of