Putin

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Bullets across the strait

On Europe’s eastern borderlands, trouble is brewing. Two headstrong leaders — Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko — both with authoritarian tendencies and both facing sagging popularity at home, have swapped trading insults for exchanging bullets across the Strait of Kerch. The frightening truth is that war would suit both presidents’ short-term interests. Poroshenko faces re-election in March, and with his ratings running at 15 per cent he stands little chance of victory without a nation-uniting conflict to boost his standing. Putin, too, has seen his approval ratings sag from the 88 per cent he enjoyed in the aftermath of his annexation of Crimea in 2014 to 66

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Scumbag

President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked of Sergei Skripal, whom his agents tried to kill, ‘He’s simply a scumbag.’ Scumbag at least is how the press translated his words. I’m afraid that from my sheltered life I did not know the literal meaning of scumbag. Look away now if you’d rather not know and I’ll join you at the next paragraph. Literally it is ‘a condom’, an Americanism first recorded in 1967, which is also the first year in which scum meaning ‘semen’ is recorded. An equivalent derogatory term also of American origin, used in the television cartoon Family Guy, is douchebag. This is older than scumbag in its literal

Thursday

Paul Wood

Desperate Donald

Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer were going to jail. Perhaps his staff have finally seized control of his phone. Perhaps his lawyers have convinced him that every time he tweets on anything relating to the Russia investigation, he is dancing on a precipice, with special counsel Robert Mueller just waiting to push him off. Whatever the reason, this was the equivalent of Trump entering a stunned, catatonic state, while his world spins out of control around him. The President merely tweeted to note that he was going to a Make America Great Again rally in

Tuesday

Tom Ball

The British government must not let Russia off the hook

On the day that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, Arsenal were hosting CSKA Moscow for the second leg of a Champions League group stage match. The game ended a goalless draw with the home side left frustrated by a series of squandered chances. Watching the game that evening from his box above the stands was Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire tycoon who had fled Russia six years earlier and been given political asylum in Britain. Two boxes over and former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi was also watching the game. As he would later claim, Lugovoi had travelled from Moscow the day before to watch his home team in action. But Lugovoi also

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Trump’s peace plan

Earlier this week, Trump met Putin. But beneath the outcry against Trump’s press conference, a peace plan for Syria was slipped out. Is America withdrawing its troops and leaving Assad in place? We also ask – should we push back the March 2019 deadline for Brexit negotiations? And last, why is communism still chic? While the Twittersphere obsesses over Trump’s Helsinki press conference, a peace plan for Syria was designed, one that would see President Assad stay in place after years of civil war. Middle East expert John R Bradley explains the complex regional relations in this week’s cover – Israel and the US both want Iran out of Syria,

Monday

Pavel Stroilov

Will Donald Trump dare to challenge Putin over his political prisoners?

From Nixon’s ‘détente’ to Obama’s ‘reset’, every new US administration makes one attempt at reconciliation with Moscow. Today it’s Donald Trump’s turn, at his summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. At first, such meetings are sensationalised as historic turning points, with the future of the world hanging in the balance. But that view doesn’t usually last long. It only takes a couple of state-sponsored assassinations by Russia, and maybe a small war in addition, for the parties to realise that they are at cross-purposes. And if you are in geopolitics, as a US president has to be, you have to talk to foreign dictators from time to time. That

Thursday

William Cook

Donald Trump is wrong about Germany being a ‘captive’ of Russia

“What good is Nato if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy?” tweeted Donald Trump on 11 July. Trump was surely referring to Nord Stream 2, the controversial deal between Russia and Germany, whereby Russia will pump natural gas direct to Germany through a new pipeline across the Baltic Sea. Trump reckons such arrangements make Germany a ‘captive’ of Russia. Is he right? America isn’t the only country that’s getting hot and bothered about Nord Stream 2. Denmark and the Baltic States have also voiced concerns. The most vociferous opponent of the scheme is Ukraine. Russia currently pumps gas to Europe via Ukraine, but once Nord Stream

Thursday

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: Putin’s Losing Game

In this week’s episode, we talk about Russia’s hidden fragility, and ask, is Putin surviving on luck? We’ll also be getting to the bottom of Trump’s tariffs – is there really no rhyme or reason to them? And last, with all that’s going on in the world, is kindness what we all need more of? The Russia World Cup is due to start in a week, and as the streets of Moscow are cleaned up in preparation, things seem to be going pretty well for Putin’s Russia. Russia has been asked to fill the void left by Trump in the Iran nuclear deal, Russophile parties are wreaking havoc to the

Owen Matthews

Putin’s rot

This is Putin’s time. Next week, the Fifa World Cup kicks off in Moscow, and the Kremlin has spared no expense to showcase Vladimir Putin’s new Russia as a vibrant, safe and strong nation. Half a million visitors will be welcomed — with the Russian press reporting that the notorious ‘Ultra’ hooligans have been officially warned to behave themselves or face the full wrath of the state. Despite four years of rock-bottom oil prices, Putin has nonetheless found the cash to build or refurbish a dozen new stadiums. Moscow has undergone a two-year city-wide facelift that has left it looking cleaner, fresher and more prosperous than any European capital I

Thursday

Charlotte Hobson

A brutal band of thieves

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more than timely. In these days of ever more bizarre Russian attacks, it reads like the essential companion to a bewildering and aggressive new world, a world that is no longer confined behind Russian borders but seeks actively to penetrate and disrupt our own society. Essentially a history of the development of Russia’s unique form of organised crime, it constantly illuminates and clarifies the familiar, legal narrative of Russian history and the attitudes of Putin’s clique. The Russian mafia’s distinctive culture originally emerged during the years of revolution and civil war.

Friday

Owen Matthews

The 10 graphs that explain Vladimir Putin’s Russia

This is an edited version of a presentation given by Owen Matthews at The Spectator’s What does Russia want? event. What I’d like to do is give a run-through of how we got to where we are with Russia. From the end of the Cold War onwards, focusing on the economy – and how the economy, in true Marxist fashion, has shaped the politics and political realities that we see in Russia today. The first metric is the big story of the post-Cold War world. Very simply, the graph above shows what’s happened between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present day. It’s very clear: America’s GDP has

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 April 2018

Everyone speaks about the Windrush. The boat was actually called the Empire Windrush. The full name reveals what the story was about. The boat was one of a series called Empire X, X being the name of a British river, as if each were a tributary to a common stream. Mass coloured immigration to Britain was the act of an imperial power — almost, one might say, an imperialist act. In 1948, a Labour government (Attlee’s) created a common ‘Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. Just as we wanted the raw materials of our colonies, so — later in the day — we wanted their labour. This also explains

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Corbyn shows his true colours

The Tories’ great worry after the last election was that they had effectively vaccinated the electorate against Jeremy Corbyn. They feared that the next time they tried to show that he was extreme, weak on national security and too friendly with the West’s enemies, voters would yawn and declare that they had heard it all before. They would be immune to any attacks on the Labour leader. Compounding this worry was the fear that Corbyn would present himself, as he had quite successfully during the general election campaign, as a more mainstream figure than he really is. If Corbyn had followed this ‘kindly grandad’ approach, the Conservatives would be in

Saturday

Owen Matthews

What does Russia want?

With Russian poisoners stalking the streets of Salisbury and the real possibility of a hot war with the Kremlin’s troops in Syria, The Spectator’s debate this Wednesday – What does Russia want? – could hardly be more timely. The line-up of guests we’ve assembled promises to be an explosive mixture. Russian Presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who made a doomed run against Vladimir Putin in March’s elections on a platform of liberal reform, will lead the anti-Kremlin side. Sobchak is more than just a prominent liberal politician – she’s the ultimate political insider. Sobchak’s father Anatoly was an iconic liberal mayor of St Petersburg – and was Putin’s boss and political

Friday

Martin Vander Weyer

How have the Russian oligarchs got away with swaggering around London for so long?

A decade ago I commissioned an article about Vladimir Putin’s business cronies. Among other lines of enquiry, it sought to finger ‘a coterie of wealthy and politically influential industrialists, many believed to be former or current secret service officials’ who allegedly had shareholdings in Russian companies which, if we or anyone else had been able to prove that they were controlled by the president, might have evidenced a personal Putin fortune of tens of billions. Sensibly, The Spectator’s lawyer would not let me publish — but the US Treasury has now done its own version of the job by imposing sanctions on seven oligarchs and 17 senior Russian officials who are

Thursday

Hannah Lucinda Smith

President Erdogan’s Syrian dilemma

Istanbul It is a bad time to have an ally on the fence. With US military action in Syria looking more likely by the minute, and the West’s frosty relations with Russia in danger of deepening into a new Cold War, Washington is eyeing the actions of Turkey’s President Erdogan with concern. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the ally with the second biggest army and the only one to share a border with Syria, has spent the past two years cosying up to Russia. Ankara is part of the Astana troika alongside Moscow and Tehran – an initiative that has snatched the peace-broking lead in Syria from the UN

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The US shows London how to cold-shoulder Putin’s cronies

A decade ago I commissioned an article about Vladimir Putin’s business cronies. Among other lines of enquiry, it sought to finger ‘a coterie of wealthy and politically influential industrialists, many believed to be former or current secret service officials’ who allegedly had shareholdings in Russian companies which, if we or anyone else had been able to prove that they were controlled by the president, might have evidenced a personal Putin fortune of tens of billions. Sensibly, The Spectator’s lawyer would not let me publish — but the US Treasury has now done its own version of the job by imposing sanctions on seven oligarchs and 17 senior Russian officials who

Friday

James Forsyth

Sergei Skripal being out of a critical condition doesn’t get Moscow off the hook

The latest news from the Salisbury attack is that Sergei Skripal is no longer in a critical condition and that his daughter Yulia is now talking and will be well enough to leave hospital at some point. This, obviously, has implications for the investigation into their attempted assassination. Yulia will, presumably, soon be able to tell the police about what happened in the days and hours leading up to them both being found on the verge of death in Salisbury city centre. Internet conspiracy theorists will, I’m sure, declare that the fact the Skripals are not dead is proof that the Russians weren’t behind this. But given that it appears

Peter Jones

Could the Russian economy benefit from some Roman history?

The Russian economy is not in the greatest of shapes. That being the case, one would have thought friendly diplomatic and economic relations with the West would be a priority for Vladimir Putin, given his need for cash to build weapons against threats from superpowers such as Estonia. A little Roman history would help. As has been well documented, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the 5th C ad heralded something of an economic dark age for Europe for some 200 years. The long-nurtured Roman economic networks extending east as far as China simply could not survive the break-up that would create the beginnings of today’s

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

There is no crack in Theresa May’s case against Russia

Theresa May has never published her case blaming Russia for the Salisbury poisoning. She has reason to be wary of Blair-style intelligence dossiers, and she didn’t need to make everything public to win the support of allies. But as things stand, her case against Russia is open to misinterpretation by the Kremlin. As we have seen with this morning’s headlines. Yesterday, Sky News interviewed Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of Porton Down, who said: “We were able to identify it as Novichok, to identify it was a military-grade nerve agent. We have not verified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific information to the government, who have then used