Putin

Sunday

Anne Jolis

Regrets on Russia, Syria, or Iran? Obama Has None

The Electoral College will cast their votes for president of the United States tomorrow without any last-minute intel on alleged Russian cyber-meddling, according to a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A group of electors had called for a briefing before the December 19 vote, though it’s unclear what they’d hoped to discover that everyone didn’t already know on November 8. President Obama acknowledged as much on Friday in a year-end press conference. ‘The truth of the matter is, is that everybody had the information. It was out there,’ he said, swatting away the suggestion that he should have made more of the Russian intrusions before

Friday

Damian Thompson

Murdered Christians are 2016’s least fashionable minority

The murderers and persecutors of Christians have had a good year. With one exception – the killing of Fr Jacques Hamel in July as he celebrated Mass in a church in Normandy – the world has continued to look away as Islamists and other fanatics have slaughtered followers of Jesus Christ. I don’t mean that we consciously look away – we simply don’t know about most of these atrocities. There are no celebs out there ‘raising awareness’; they’re too busy weeping over Brexit and Trump. In one attack last June, 460 Christians died. Can you tell me where it happened? I couldn’t have, until yesterday, when I did a Google search in preparation for today’s Holy

Ed West Ed West

Why Putin keeps winning the ideological war

I have no idea whether Russia successfully interfered in the US election; I imagine it’s one of those situations where everyone is lying but the Russians are lying twice as much. But there are a couple of questions that no one seems to be asking, which makes me curious. Firstly, how could America have got to a stage where an outside, not very friendly power could influence the course of an election? Would this have been possible in the 1950s or 1980s, for example? It seems extremely unlikely. America’s founding fathers were quite vehement on the subject of foreign influence in US politics, which they thought would lead to corruption

Tuesday

Christopher Buckley

The SpeccieLeaks take on Trump’s first encounter with Putin

SpeccieLeaks presents: Transcript of private meeting between President Trump and President Putin, 14 February 2017, Andreyevsky Hall, Grand Kremlin Palace PUTIN: So how are you liking Russia? TRUMP: Fabulous. Amazing. And this room — incredible. You have beautiful taste, my friend. Beautiful. PUTIN: You like gold? TRUMP: Very much. We used a tremendous amount of gold in the Trump Tower. PUTIN: Yes, it’s something. Truly. I have seen it on television. TRUMP: Those chandeliers there. How much were those? PUTIN: Well, I don’t know. But I will have this information provided to you. TRUMP: That would be great. We just opened a new hotel in DC, right next to the

Thursday

Christopher Buckley

When the Donald met the Vlad

SpeccieLeaks presents: Transcript of private meeting between President Trump and President Putin, 14 February 2017, Andreyevsky Hall, Grand Kremlin Palace   PUTIN: So how are you liking Russia? TRUMP: Fabulous. Amazing. And this room — incredible. You have beautiful taste, my friend. Beautiful. PUTIN: You like gold? TRUMP: Very much. We used a tremendous amount of gold in the Trump Tower. PUTIN: Yes, it’s something. Truly. I have seen it on television. TRUMP: Those chandeliers there. How much were those? PUTIN: Well, I don’t know. But I will have this information provided to you. TRUMP: That would be great. We just opened a new hotel in DC, right next to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 December 2016

Home Paul Nuttall, aged 39, was elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He said: ‘I want to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was rebuffed by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, and by Donald Tusk, the President of the European Commission, when she proposed settling the status of British and EU expatriates even before Article 50 was invoked. She made another attempt in talks with Beata Szydlo, the Prime Minister of Poland. There was some interest in a note photographed on papers being carried after a meeting in Downing Street by Julia Dockerill, an aide to Mark

Monday

James Forsyth

Trump and Fillon mean that Britain matters far more to Eastern Europe

By next summer, Britain could be the only one of the three major Western military powers unequivocally opposed to the idea of Russian domination of its near neighbours. For François Fillon, the Republican candidate for the French Presidency and the favourite to win, has — as UK security sources point out — pretty much the same view of Russia as Donald Trump does. Fillon favours allying with Russia in Syria and seeking Vladimir Putin’s help to defeat both Islamic State and the broader Islamist terrorist threat. Fillon also wants EU sanctions on Russia, imposed because of its annexation of Crimea and broader interference in Ukraine, lifted. This shift in world

Saturday

Ross Clark

Like Donald Trump, Francois Fillon is a Russian realist

One of the bonuses of a Trump presidency – of which there will be many negatives – is the prospect of a distinct lowering of temperature in relations between Russia and the West. Now, it seems that Vladimir Putin is destined to have a friend in Western Europe, too. The new favourite for next year’s French presidential election, Francois Fillon, is just as keen on forging relations with the Russian president. Asked recently whether he worried about Trump’s closeness to Putin he replied: ‘I don’t only not worry about it, I wish for it.’ He went on to demand that Russia be treated as ‘a great nation’ and not made a

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Moscow rules

 Moscow To the Union Jack pub on Potapovsky Lane for a US election night party. The jolly Muscovite Trump supporters who organised the event had gone to the effort of providing girls with tight–fitting Trump-Pence T-shirts and Make America Great Again baseball caps. In pride of place beside the bar hung a specially commissioned triptych of oil paintings — heroic Soviet-style portraits of Russia’s new heroes: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Among the guests were a group of young men from Tsargrad TV, Russia’s popular new Orthodox nationalist channel. Sporting neatly trimmed beards and sharp suits, they were a Russian version of Republican evangelicals. In one corner

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

The English right’s Trump temptation

Labour’s election then re-election of Jeremy Corbyn was the equivalent of a suicidal man who, when the noose snaps and gives him a second chance, decides to throw himself off a cliff instead. The Liberal Democrats are too small to get a hearing. The Scottish nationalists will speak only for Scotland. The only arguments that matter in England now are the arguments within the right. But what is the right today? What does it mean to say you are right-wing? You only have to look at the triumph of Donald Trump to guess the answer. He not only beat Hillary Clinton but the old Republican party, which looks like it

Wednesday

Alec Marsh

Britain should be grateful for its new aircraft carriers. They do still make waves

As the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov finally nears the eastern Mediterranean, with a trail of ugly black smoke belching from its funnels, it’s a fitting moment to acknowledge some credit where it’s due. For the waves created by President Putin’s flagship as it passed our shores – before steaming into further controversy in Spain – more than endorse the Cameron government’s brave decision to press on with Britain’s new £3 billion aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  For it was the Cameron government’s decision – in that otherwise largely unloved strategic defence review (the one that saw the abrupt consignment of the HMS Ark Royal to the scrapyard

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 27 October 2016

Bear baiting Sir: I couldn’t agree more with Rod Liddle’s exposé of western politico-militaristic hypocrisy (‘Stop the sabre-rattling’, 22 October). We’ve already poked the Russian bear way too hard — unnecessarily so. What Rod could have also highlighted was that Nato has spread so far eastwards that it’s a blessed surprise the next world war hasn’t already started. It almost did in 1962 when Khrushchev tried to move nuclear missiles into Cuba. The same principle applies to what ‘we’ are doing now — frontline, aggressive technologies, nuclear-implied, established in the old Soviet states of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and even Poland. In Moscow, the memory of 20 million dead Russians and their

Will Nicoll

The great Soviet gameshow

In the opening chapter of her history of Soviet Central Television, Christine E. Evans observes two Russian televisual displays of 2014. February saw the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics — which sought to depict a millennium of national history using glitter and gameshow grandiosity. April brought the stern, but no less theatrical, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin — an annual phone-in — during which the president celebrated Crimea’s annexation with an orgy of televisual patriotism. Although more glitzy than their Soviet-era equivalents, both can be seen as displays of continuity in Russian broadcasting, rather than incidences of invention. As Evans explains: The highly televisual Putin era represents the

Saturday

Rod Liddle

We’re too busy vilifying Putin and Russia to notice our own misdeeds

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact Nevil Shute’s On the Beach from some rocky cove near Dunedin, waiting for the fallout to arrive. I was sentient only during the latter stages of the Cold War but from what I can remember, the two sides, them and us, behaved for the most part with a degree of rationality and common sense. (I

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 20 October 2016

Russia’s war crimes Sir: In his article ‘Vanity Bombing’ (15 October), Simon Jenkins quivers with contempt at MPs digging ‘deep into the jaded rhetoric of a superannuated great power’ and ‘shouting adjectives and banging drums’. But he does Parliament and decent, careful motivation a deep disservice. I don’t know what preceded his splenetic outburst, but Syrian analysis deserves better. The position is very simple. The Russians are committing war crimes and using their position as a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council to shield themselves from international humanitarian law. They are not bombing formations of Assad’s military; they are hitting hospitals with bunker-busting bombs and attacking civilians cowering in

Thursday

Paul Wood

Syrian nightmare

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an

Sunday

Steerpike

Listen: Liam Fox savages Nick Clegg at Tory conference

On Sunday afternoon both Boris Johnson and David Davis gave speeches on Brexit in the main hall at Conservative conference. Happily, their fellow Brexiteer Liam Fox was not too left out and had a chance to share his thoughts at the Conservative Voice’s ‘Brexit, Europe and the world’ reception that evening. Clearly stung after Nick Clegg suggested he didn’t have a job at a recent Press Gallery lunch, Fox went on the offensive — branding the Lib Dem leader a ‘serial loser’ for doubting his power: ‘I hear Nick Clegg said I didn’t have a job because what we were acting on was delusional. Well I’d just ask you — before

Thursday

The Spectator

Deadly silence

There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just two weeks after a negotiated ceasefire appeared to have provided some respite, a war of attrition in Syria’s second largest city is escalating into a vast human tragedy. Last Saturday, a bomb dropped by Syrian government forces knocked out a pumping station which had been supplying water to two million people, 250,000 of whom are besieged in the rebel-held east of the city. On the same day, at least 45 people, many of them children, were killed by barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians — a now common occurrence. Food

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: The age of May

The Conservative party conference starts this Sunday in Birmingham. It will be the first time that Theresa May has addressed the membership at large as leader, but in the background there are rumblings of division. Are the Cameroons preparing a rebellion on grammar schools? Are any cabinet positions currently vulnerable? And how long can the honeymoon last for Theresa May? Isabel Hardman is joined in Liverpool by Fraser Nelson and Matthew Parris, and from London by James Forsyth, who says on the podcast: “I think the intriguing thing about Theresa May is this is a politician who’s been on the Tory front bench for 17 years, but everyone – from cabinet ministers to civil servants

Owen Matthews

Russia’s puritan revolution

Last weekend a group of young activists turned out on a Moscow street to protest against western decadence. They were a hard-faced bunch, standing defiantly in military poses and wearing uniforms bearing the logo ‘Officers of Russia: Executive Youth Wing’ as they blocked access to an exhibition by American photographer Jock Sturges that featured images of nude adolescents. ‘We are here to protect people from paedo-philic influences,’ one Officer of Russia told journalists — while another protester sprayed the offending photographs with urine. At the same time, Russia’s state–controlled airwaves filled with senators, priests and government officials denouncing the wickedness of the exhibition (which shut down immediately after the protests)