Russia

It’s a crude but inescapable fact of history that many states had their origins in better-organised bandit gangs. It’s a depressing feature of the present that some states seem determined to slide back into bandit status. While Putin’s Russia retains the institutions of modern statehood, he and his clique of cronies and yes-men have no problem adopting the tactics of the thug – including kidnapping. The arrest of American journalist Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges appears to be the most recent example. The Kremlin is tiptoeing closer to a kind of ‘North Koreanisation’ Gershkovich, part of the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau, was on assignment in Ekaterinburg when he was

If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who scares me the most, it would have to be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council and the closest thing there is in the Russian system to a national security adviser. Patrushev’s profile has grown steadily as both cause and symptom of the system’s drift towards nationalist imperialism, and he best channels the worst impulses within the id of Putin’s clique. Whenever he speaks, it is sadly worth listening. After all, he does not just channel but shape those worst impulses. The Security Council itself is not the Soviet Politburo 2.0 that some assume.

In my hometown we have three Orthodox churches, two of which are formally aligned with the Moscow patriarchate. They mostly say Russian prayers but, growing up, this was not seen as important. My family would go to both and see them as interchangeable: you’d stand, pray, kiss icons, take communion. Many Ukrainians never gave it much thought. This all changed when Vladimir Putin invaded last year. Only then was it clear just how he had been using the Russian church as a tool of his state: not just in Russia, but in Ukraine too. Previously neutral priests publicly prayed for Putin’s success, telling their parishioners how to help the invading

Was it Vladimir Putin or wasn’t it? ‘Vladimir Putin’ was certainly shown on television being helicoptered into Crimea this week, meeting ‘the people’ and driving himself around reconstruction sites in the devastated city of Mariupol. In the wider world, though, there was widespread scepticism that it was the real Russian President. Clips were posted on social media showing the supposedly different chin-line and puffier cheeks of the latest ‘Putin’, while even the BBC injected a note of doubt into some of its despatches, using words like ‘reportedly’ to qualify his (potential) visit. There have long been rumours that Putin uses a body-double – although it is also possible that his

Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine has united the West. Nato has been strengthened and there has been much support for the sanctions against the Kremlin and its supporters. Public opinion in the UK is firmly behind the Ukrainian people in their suffering, even if many remain wary of direct military entanglement. For the countries bordering Russia, however, the calculations are different, and nowhere can more ambivalence be seen than in Kazakhstan, the leading economy in Central Asia. Although it is the ninth largest country in the world, Kazakh foreign policy has long been dominated by the need to carefully manage relations with its two even bigger neighbours: Russia and China.

Boris Ratnikov, a former KGB officer and retired chief advisor to Russia’s security service, gave a remarkable interview back in 2016. Ratnikov, who died in 2020, claimed his boss had penetrated and read the mind of Madeleine Albright while she was US Secretary of State in the mid-1990s. Ratnikov said his superior officer used a photograph to penetrate Albright’s subconscious where he discovered her secret thoughts about the priority of removing Siberia and the Far East from Russian territory. The senior intelligence official in question was Georgy Rogozin, a top KGB officer between 1969 and 1992, who became deputy chief of president Yeltsin’s security service. Rogozin conducted secret experiments trying to use

Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary issue. In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands 80 years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war