Putin

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Slavery continues to this day; and why Russia’s re-emergence as a world power is down to Obama’s apathy

Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in modern slavery in the UK. The CSJ’s work revealed exploitation taking place across the country, from young British men enslaved on traveller sites and forced into manual labour, to vulnerable children forced to live as slaves behind closed doors in one of Britain’s thousands of cannabis farms, to young British girls being trafficked into sexual

Peter Jones

Cicero would have agreed with Putin

Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world and the prevailing of international law over the rule of brute force. How very Roman of him. Cicero pointed out that if one wanted violence to end, the law must prevail; if it did not, violence would reign supreme. To no avail. Every five years, the Roman censors asked the gods ‘to improve and strengthen the position of the Roman people’. There was nothing unique about this. Many states prayed for a similar outcome for themselves, while the historian Polybius

David Blackburn

Our own folly may yet lead us to a second dishonourable Yalta

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

Ian Birrell

Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’

Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little as possible as they invade this holiday region in their unmarked uniforms and vehicles. It is remarkable how soon you get used to shouting questions at these heavily armed special forces soldiers while they pretend not to be Russians. They tend not to take the bait: the most you’ll get out of them is a curt ‘Nyet’. I wandered up to an officer who seemed to be in charge of seizing a Ukrainian naval base in the old Tartar capital of Bakhchisaray. He wore all black, his face hidden by

Wednesday

Brooks Newmark

Ukraine and Syria expose the West’s lack of appetite for protecting human rights

‘We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.’ So wrote Vladimir Putin in The New York Times in September last year. Last week, he invaded Ukraine. A system of ‘international law’ which gives a man like President Putin the right to decide whether a proposed action is legal or not, is morally bankrupt. Yet that is how the United Nations Security Council functions – and that is why Western democracies should not shrink from taking action even when the Russian veto stands in the way. President Putin’s New York Times piece was about Syria. He was appealing to the American

Friday

Alex Massie

The clock is ticking for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. He has missed his best chance of victory.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Time is running out in the Ukraine. Time passes and cements the “facts on the ground”. Russia controls the Crimea and, one way or another, we should probably expect the province’s referendum to endorse a return to Moscow Centre. Whether Crimea’s plebiscite can or will be conducted honestly is a different matter but that, in the end, is not the most important issue. Indeed the fate and future of Crimea is, if hardly an irrelevance, a question of secondary importance. It is not the major front in this struggle. Russia’s actions in the Crimea are plainly illegal and unjustified but they were supposed to be the

Thursday

Molly Guinness

The Spectator: on 150 years of punishing Russia

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine has left western diplomats scrabbling for sanctions that won’t backfire on to the rest of Europe and America. The foreign secretary William Hague said Russia must ‘face consequences and costs’. When a policy paper was photographed that said the UK should not support trade sanctions or close London’s financial centre to Russians, Mr Hague said it did not reflect government policy. But punishing Russia is sure to be an expensive business. Just before the Crimean War, when Russia invaded Turkish Moldovia and Wallachia in 1853, a Spectator editorial took a hard line; Russia should be punished on principle. The present operations of Russia proceed entirely

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Ukraine special, with Matthew Parris, Anne Applebaum and John O’Sullivan

Should we leave Ukraine to the Russians? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Matthew Parris debates Anne Applebaum on whether the crisis should concern Britain and whether Vladimir Putin has valid reasons to intervening in Crimea. Would Putin have acted differently if Ukraine had NATO membership? What should America do now? And will the West’s behaviour so far embolden other dictators? John O’Sullivan also discusses his Spectator cover feature this week on why we shouldn’t be afraid of Putin. With a lack of actions from the West, is it game, set and match to Putin? Why is he perceived to be so strong? Is John Kerry a dying breed of Americans who really care about Europe?

John Osullivan

Europe’s ‘new world order’ is letting Vladimir Putin run riot

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”John O’Sullivan discusses why we shouldn’t be so afraid of Putin” startat=1088] Listen [/audioplayer]If Vladimir Putin’s invasion and occupation of the Crimea brings to an end the Pax Americana and the post-Cold War world that began in 1989, what new European, or even global, order is replacing them? That question may seem topical in the light of Russia’s seemingly smooth overriding in Crimea of the diplomatic treaties and legal rules that outlaw aggression, occupation and annexation. In fact, it is six years behind the times. To understand the situation in the Ukraine, we need to go back to the Nato summit in Bucharest, in April 2008. There, Putin

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Britain’s chaotic energy policy puts us in Putin’s hands

To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon hardly makes me Nostradamus — but sure enough, the tension between Russia and Ukraine have caused stock markets to quiver and the price of UK gas for one-month delivery on the ICE Europe futures exchange in London to rise 10 per cent on Monday. But it was more impressively far-sighted that way back in the winter of 2005/6 we commissioned a Spectator cover showing wicked Vladimir Putin sitting astride a knotted gas pipeline: one sixth of all gas consumed in Europe arrives from Russia across the Ukraine, and another sixth

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Vladimir Putin is losing the battle for Ukraine

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate how far we should let Russia push” startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]It is always tempting, in the field of foreign affairs, to suppose we are led by dupes and fools while our opponents enjoy – or endure –  leaders of boundless cunning. We are over-matched; they are playing three-dimensional chess. We are weak, they are strong. We are easily distracted, they are single-minded. We compromise, they are implacable. It is easy to over-estimate the opposition while under-estimating our own capabilities. Sometimes this has unfortunate consequences. Saddam Hussein, for instance, had to be hiding something. The Iraqi dictator – notoriously full of dark cunning – would not be

Patrick Allitt

How America’s shale gas revolution makes Putin ever weaker

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate the Ukraine-Russia situation”] Listen [/audioplayer]Once or twice every century something good happens to Russia, but then another long night of suffering closes over the great Asian wastes. In 1917, the Russians managed to overthrow their hated Czar and proclaim a democracy. It only lasted a few months before being swept away by a much worse autocracy, which stayed in power until 1991. The sudden prospect of post-Soviet freedom was accompanied by the promise of long-delayed prosperity, as the liberated nation began to develop its vast resources, one of which was natural gas. For a few years, Putin’s Russia dominated the international natural

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through the Ukraine crisis

First published in 2014, this bluffer’s guide may still help you feel like Chatham House’s finest at your next dinner party… We’re all journalists now, apparently, so when a major foreign policy crisis comes along it is important to be prepared. Everyone must learn the art of winging it as the big news breaks. That’s not easy these days. What with Wikipedia on every mobile phone, our understanding of international relations can be called into question at any moment. So here, as a beginner’s guide, are ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through a conversation about the situation in Ukraine: ‘It’s simplistic to think in terms of east versus west

Ed West Ed West

How many people would lay down their lives for the European Union?

Whatever Russia does in the Ukraine, we know that Britain isn’t going to do much more than say ‘dear, dear’, something that was accidentally revealed when a British official was photographed bringing a document to Downing St stating as much. We’re not going to help for a number of reasons, one of which is that Ukraine is incredibly complicated and historically and psychologically is sort of a part of Russia, or at least the eastern half is. As for the Crimea, Russia certainly has as much right to that province as the Albanians have to Kosovo. Russia is a great power with legitimate claims to that region, and unlike Iraq,

Monday

Isabel Hardman

The challenge of challenging Putin

How does the West challenge Vladimir Putin? James explained in his blog earlier that it is essential that the Russian president is challenged. But this evening’s snap by the ever-watchful Steve Back of a government document stating that the UK ‘should not support for now trade sanctions… or close London’s financial centre to Russians’ shows the difficulty countries including Britain will have in doing that challenging. The UK worries about the impact of sanctions on London, which as the ‘capital city of the world’, has an interest in keeping its doors open to Russian money. Meanwhile, as a country that relies so much on Russian gas and oil, Germany worries

James Forsyth James Forsyth

If left unchallenged, Putin will attempt to create a new Russian empire

In Ukraine, the West has played—quite disastrously—into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The mistakes go back almost a decade. But the most recent one occurred when protesters took to the streets to oppose the Yanukovych government. The West, by which I mean Nato and the European Union, should have made clear that whatever sympathies they had with the protesters’ aims, the right way to change the government was by the ballot box. The failure to do that has provided Putin with the pretext he needed to have Russian forces seize control of Crimea. Putin’s motivating factor is his desire to avenge, what he sees as, the humiliation of Russia at the end

Anne Applebaum

Letting Russia into the G8 gave tacit approval to Putinism

Expelling Russia from the G8 is an option being urged on Barack Obama this morning. The logic for admitting Russia in the first place was always tenuous – as Anne Applebaum argued in the Spectator when it last hosted the summit. For sale, the advertisement might read: One very large Russian energy company. Estimated assets, including oil wells, reserves, refineries: $60 billion. Possible liabilities: four major international lawsuits, a part-time CEO who works full-time as President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff, and a certain — shall we say — lack of clarity about whether the company legally acquired most of those assets at all. I am talking here about Rosneft,

Sunday

Rod Liddle

What exactly should the West do in Ukraine?

I’ve seen and read an awful lot of criticism about how weak and pathetic the West has been in responding to the developing crisis in the Ukraine, but scarcely a single word offering advice as to what it SHOULD do. It may well be that making vague threats about the Sochi G8 Summit and a few muttered threats of economic ‘isolation’, whatever that is, may fall a little short of say, Operation Barbarossa as a statement of intent. But none of the pundits I have read come close to suggesting that the West should take any form of military action (or ‘World War Three’, as it used to be known),

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Conservative ministers link Russian aggression to Miliband’s Syria stance

Sajid Javid isn’t the only observer of Russia’s behaviour over the situation in Ukraine to link Vladimir Putin’s aggression to the situation in Syria. Perhaps the West’s decision not to intervene in that conflict has given Putin the sense that he can do what he wants without any response from other countries. But Javid’s suggestion in a tweet this afternoon that there is a ‘direct link between Miliband’s cynical vote against Syria motion and Russia’s actions on Ukraine. Completely unfit to lead Britain’ goes rather further than that. It also doesn’t fit particularly comfortably with the fact that 30 of Javid’s own Conservative colleagues rebelled on that motion and many

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Putin asks the Russian parliament to approve sending troops to Ukraine

Vladimir Putin’s decision to ask the Russian parliament to approve the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine makes the situation there even more serious. The request shows that Putin has no intention of heeding Western warning to request the sovereignty of Ukraine. It is also noticeable that the request doesn’t simply cover the Crimea, with its ethnic Russian population, but the whole of Ukraine. It now seems that at the very least this situation will lead towards the de-facto partition of the Ukraine. But the question is whether Putin will be satisfied with this. His ambition has always been to restore Russia’s pride about its place in the world, ‘defeating’