Putin

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

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

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

As I say in The Sun this morning, one of the things about the Salisbury attack that has disconcerted the UK government is how–relatively obvious–the Russians have made it, that it was them. They clearly wanted to send a message. In Whitehall, the thinking is that there were three things that Moscow was trying to achieve with the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. First, to show Russia’s enemies that they are never safe. If they can hit a former spy for Britain who was keeping a low profile in a small English City then they can get to anyone. Second, they think that the Russians were trying to test Britain. This

‘Any fool can commit murder, but it takes an artist to make it look like suicide’ the KGB used to say. But whoever put Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in hospital was rather less subtle: police have identified 240 potential witnesses, according to Amber Rudd, and have extensive CCTV coverage to go through.  I write in The Sun this morning that anyone capable of getting hold of the nerve agent used was capable of killing him in a far more subtle manner – with no witnesses and nothing in CCTV. Whoever carried out the attack on Skripal wanted to send a message. They wanted to prove that enemies of

The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight from a cold war thriller. Unfortunately, though, the case is not going to be solved in 500 pages — nor will it be solved by June, when the Foreign Secretary has threatened to withdraw a British delegation of dignitaries, if not the English team, from the opening ceremony of the World Cup. It was inevitable, as soon as Sergei Skripal was taken acutely ill on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. He did, after all, pass a law to give the FSB, the successor organisation

Next week at Davos, world leaders – including President Trump and Emmanuel Macron – will gather at the elite meet-up to flex their diplomatic muscles and prove how big a player they are on the global stage. Happily, Vladimir Putin has offered them an early lesson in how to show you’re a hard man. The Russian president joined millions of Orthodox believers in plunging bare-chested into icy water – with the temperature below -5C – in a Russian tradition marking the Epiphany. Captions in the comments please.

In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives of Russian citizens — of why post-Soviet Russia, rather than embracing Western liberal democracy, took a darker turn. We talk about how she put the book together, what went wrong, whether there’s any hope for the future — and what it was like to meet one on one with Vladimir Putin. You can listen to