Putin

While in the West, the debate seems to be about which statue to topple next, in Russia it’s rather different. Felix Dzerzhinsky – ‘Iron Felix,’ founder of the Bolshevik secret police – looks like he may be coming home, thirty years after his statue was pulled down from its place in front of the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters. Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat turned revolutionary, was charged by Lenin in 1917 to form what was then called the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage – rather more concisely known as the Cheka after the Russian initials for ‘extraordinary commission’ – and lead it into the coming civil war. This would

Two months ago, a Russian pipe-laying ship called the Akademik Cherskiy left the Baltic island of Rügen to finish the last few miles of the most controversial gas pipeline in the world. Germany hopes that Nord Stream 2 will improve its access to Russia’s vast reserves of natural gas. In America, however, the project is seen as a way for Moscow to exert influence over Europe. Its completion marks the biggest diplomatic crisis in transatlantic relations since the Iraq War and now, as then, we see Germany pitched against the US. But this time, Germany is far more determined. Since its inception, the pipeline —which runs directly from Russia to

Only half a year ago the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was a non-person on Russian state media, and Putin’s opulent palace built on the Black Sea was largely unheard of inside the country. Navalny had his loyal base of supporters who followed him on YouTube, and the palace had been discussed in the West for a decade. But for the overwhelming majority of Russians, both were unknown. Today, Navalny is everywhere on the Russian media. Vladimir Putin himself may still not be willing to name ‘that man’ – which after a certain point begins to look downright strange – but the President’s loyal army of pundits, news anchors and state

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, demonstrated unfathomable courage in returning home after the Kremlin had poisoned him with Novichok. Arrested on arrival, Navalny is now holed up in Moscow’s notorious Sailor’s Silence transit prison. Yet as he languishes behind bars, Navalny poses his greatest threat yet to Vladimir Putin’s regime. And today, on the streets of Russia, things could come to a head in the fight between Navalny and Putin. This week, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation released its biggest exposé yet: a YouTube investigation of Putin’s voracious greed. Providing new, detailed images of the Russian president’s gargantuanly gauche billion-dollar palace, the video has been watched 50 million times in just 72 hours. It has

‘Arrest me? Why would anyone arrest me?’ said Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny to reporters last week as he boarded a Moscow-bound plane. Four hours later he was in jail — but not before spending an hour circling above the Russian capital as riot police shut down the airport where 2,000 supporters awaited him and diverted his plane to another. Did Navalny truly believe he would not be arrested? Did anyone? A week before his planned return from Berlin, where he had been recovering from being poisoned by Russia’s security services, Navalny posted a video on social media in which he openly taunted Vladimir Putin. ‘Putin has been stamping his

For years, Alexei Navalny had been – barely – tolerated by a Kremlin that was willing to permit very limited opposition and criticism. When security officers tried to poison him last year, it reflected a distinct swing towards more ruthless authoritarianism. Back in Russia, and back in prison, Navalny likewise seems to have taken off the gloves. Until now, everyone was fair game for Navalny’s investigations into official corruption – except for Vladimir Putin and his family. Yesterday, after Navalny had been sent to Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison until his next trial date in February, his team released their latest investigation. In a characteristically slick and entertaining video, almost

The man with no name is now a prisoner with a number. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader poisoned by security officers back in August, flew back to Moscow yesterday and was promptly arrested. Whether this is symbolic catch-and-release or a sign that the Kremlin plans to bury him – literally or metaphorically – in its prison system remains to be seen. The Kremlin certainly did everything they could to prevent his return being a media event. He was due to arrive at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, where a crowd of journalists, supporters and riot police jostled in anticipation. So too did a rent-a-mob of supposed fans of a Russian media

Churchill, FDR and Stalin could cooperate against Hitler, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that even amidst talk of a new Cold War, sanctions and more than a little sanctimony, people in the West are willing to make deals with Moscow in the name of fighting the new global threat, Covid-19. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine may have been rushed through its certification at home and been the subject of some overblown nationalist hype (not that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been entirely free of the latter), but so far it appears to be a serious and effective jab, with a potential 91.4 per cent efficacy. Although based on a different

Even in tough times, Russia tends to put on a show to welcome the New Year, and 2020/21 is no exception. But what may be on Vladimir Putin’s New Year’s resolutions this time round? Most immediately, to test Joe Biden’s incoming administration. We have already had a taster, with alternating calls for renewed arms control talks and tough rhetoric about the need for Russia to field advanced new weapons. Beyond a not-so-secret relief at having a White House that will at least be relatively stable and predictable, the Kremlin is not expecting an easy time from a Biden administration on a range of fronts, from sanctions to Ukraine. However, it

From vicious tragedy to outright farce, the saga of the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has acquired a surreal new chapter. Pretending to be an aide to the powerful secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Navalny actually rang up one of his would-be assassins and got him to confess, on tape. It’s hilarious; it’s astonishing; it’s embarrassing. Does it prove that Russia’s security agencies are the Keystone Kops of the intelligence world? Citizen investigator outfit Bellingcat and the Russian journalists of the Insider recently published the results of an extraordinary inquiry into the attempted assassination in August 2020, when he was on a campaign visit to Tomsk, in Siberia.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. When a reclusive figure comes bearing gifts, when the air is full of familiar golden oldies, and when time itself seems to stand still. I am talking, of course, of Vladimir Putin’s annual marathon press conference this week. Stretching for hours – four-and-a-half in this case – these carefully choreographed events have in the past been opportunities for Putin to present himself in a variety of roles: the omnicompetent chief executive; the caring father of the nation; the stern defender of the Motherland. This one was much the same, but somehow the magic has been slipping away. The coronavirus precautions probably didn’t

Never one to let a bandwagon pass by, Vladimir Putin launched his own national vaccine programme the moment Britain said it was starting its roll-out. Given how badly Russia has been hit, you would expect it to be a popular move. But Russians themselves seem cautious, not least because they mistrust the Kremlin. On Thursday, Russian health officials announced a new record of more than 28,000 coronavirus cases reported in a single day, bringing the total caseload to almost 2.4 million. Russia has the world’s fourth-worst case numbers, behind only the USA, India and Brazil, with over 41,000 deaths to date. Or at least 41,000 according to official statistics —

There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom, unknowable menace, and this will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories far more corrosive and confusing to our politics than any Moscow-generated Twitter-storm or document leak. There’s no smoking gun on Brexit. Yet the government-induced delay in publication allows anyone that way inclined to imagine a cover-up. Even the insistence that the state should do more

It’s rare for a Government minister to make an announcement that is universally welcomed in the House of Commons. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the foreign secretary Dominic Raab introduced long-awaited sanctions against human-rights abusers. Raab’s announcement appeared on the Commons’ Order Paper under the rather mundane title ‘Introduction of the Global Human Rights sanctions regime’, but what he said will have far-reaching consequences. The measures Raab announced include asset freezes and travel bans against individuals who not only commit human-rights abuses but also those who benefit and profit from them. The names of such individuals will be made public, in a so-called ‘Magnitsky List’. The measures

Vladimir Putin knows that a poor state is a weak state. As a middling KGB apparatchik in Dresden in 1989 he saw the USSR’s authority over its empire collapse along with its economy. Two years later, the Soviet state itself imploded, unable to feed its citizens or command the loyalty of its own security forces. Rebuilding Russia’s security apparatus back to Soviet levels and securing it against another systemic collapse has been the touchstone of Putin’s two decades in power. With the coronavirus crisis, the Putin system faces a stress test every bit as radical as that which brought down Mikhail Gorbachev. The proximate cause of the USSR’s collapse was

Vladimir Putin is observing the old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. With the world’s attention focused on halting the spread of Covid-19, the Kremlin is grandstanding on the international stage. Russia has sent medical aid to Italy, sold medical aid to the US, and proposed a draft UN General Assembly resolution calling for global solidarity (and an end to economic sanctions) in the effort to combat coronavirus. At home, however, Russia is in crisis. While the Kremlin acted decisively in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, its response since has mostly focused on harassing doctors who dare speak the truth about the