Putin

Monday

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’

Thursday

Taki

The week that tripled the size of my liver

 Gstaad Walking into a dinner party for 50 chic and some not-so-chic people in a nearby village last week, I was confronted by a tall man with horn-rimmed glasses who called me his neighbour, but then added, ‘No, you’re not my neighbour what’s your name?’ No cunning linguist I, nor used to being barked at by nouveaux-riches whippersnappers, I turned my back on him and told him to ‘look it up in the Almanach de Gotha, asshole!’ He wasn’t best pleased, especially as I also called him a dickhead. Now please don’t think for a moment that I approve of my bad manners. But nor do I accept some haemorrhoid

Molly Guinness

The Spectator – on 400 years of unease between Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1991, but Moscow has made sure it’s remained heavily involved in Kiev’s affairs ever since. That has been relatively simple. Soon before independence, Anne Applebaum described how Russia’s ruthless annexation of its neighbour had left Ukraine without much identity of its own. ‘It took 350 years of Czarist domination, several decades of Stalinist purges, two collectivisation-induced mass famines, two world wars, and the refusal to teach Ukrainian children how to speak Ukrainian, along with the systematic elimination of anyone who might be thought a leader, an intellectual, a capitalist, or even a wealthy peasant. But they did it. The Russians have managed to

Monday

Isabel Hardman

William Hague: Ukraine is not about a strategic competition between East and West and we must engage with Russia

Russia has been presented as one of the bad guys in the coverage of the turmoil in Ukraine. But today, Sir Menzies Campbell told the Commons that the one thing that linked the three countries mentioned in William Hague’s urgent statement on Ukraine, Syria and Iran was that ‘progress, however limited, was made as a result of engagement with Russia’. Hague’s reply made clear that bad guy or not, the UK needs to continue engaging with Russia: ‘This is a very important point and again this is why the Prime Minister spoke to President Putin on Friday, why I have spoken to Foreign Minister Lavrov today, and agreed to speak

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s turmoil highlights Vladimir Putin’s battle lines

After two decades in the economic basket, Russia is decisively back as an ideological force in the world — this time as a champion of conservative values. In his annual state of the nation speech to Russia’s parliament in December, Vladimir Putin assured conservatives around the world that Russia was ready and willing to stand up for ‘family values’ against a tide of liberal, western, pro-gay propaganda ‘that asks us to accept without question the equality of good and evil’. Russia, he promised, will ‘defend traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years’. Crucially, Putin made it clear

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: The friends of Putin taking home gold from the Sochi Olympics

Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.4 billion rail-and-highway link between Olympic sites: keep your eye on Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, who used to be the President’s dacha neighbour…’ And so on through a roll

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Wind and bias, and the Scots at war

Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists. With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February). Replete (as one would expect from an organisation that previously went under the name British Wind Energy Association) with dismissive assertions and bogus statistics, Weber’s letter exemplifies the

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Julie Burchill vs. Paris Lees, Putin’s plan to rule the world and Cameron’s love for Angela Merkel

What is intersectionality and why is it ruining feminism? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Julie Burchill and Paris Lees debate the current state of feminism and whether intersectionality has been damaging to the left. How are the feminists of today different from those in the past? What does the treatment of Julie Bindel show about feminism infighting? And is there any chance of returning to a more traditional strand of socialism? Mary Wakefield and Freddy Gray also discuss Vladimir Putin’s new plan for world domination. What do the Sochi Winter Olympics tell us about Russia’s hard and soft power in the world today? Why are social conservatives looking

Owen Matthews

Vladimir Putin’s new plan for world domination

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris discuss how far we should let Putin go”] Listen [/audioplayer]It’s been a generation or so since Russians were in the business of shaping the destiny of the world, and most of us have forgotten how good they used to be at it. For much of the last century Moscow fuelled — and often won — the West’s ideological and culture wars. In the 1930s, brilliant operatives like Willi Muenzenberg convinced ‘useful idiots’ to join anti-fascist organisations that were in reality fronts for the Soviet-backed Communist International. Even in the twilight years of the Soviet Union the KGB was highly successful at orchestrating nuclear

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger

Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than academic rigour. This has changed, thanks to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras when he is not presiding. This semester, I am teaching a class in literary journalism. I asked my students to write a short essay about their favourite writer of non-fiction. This proved to be difficult for some, since they had no favourite writers of non-fiction; indeed they had never read any literary non-fiction at all for pleasure, certainly not at book length. But several did come up with

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Ukraine reinforces the case for a wider but shallower EU

With Ukip heading for possible victory in the European elections and anti-EU fervour growing across the continent, it is hard to imagine a country where people are so desperate to join the EU that they are prepared to take on water canon in order to make their point. But that country is Ukraine. The violence which has been brewing for weeks and which erupted yesterday has its source in many tensions in the country, but one issue defines the two sides: protesters who are looking westwards towards EU membership and a government which rejects this and looks eastwards towards Russia. Maybe President Viktor Yanukovych and Nigel Farage should make a pact: if

Thursday

Taki

Why doesn’t Stephen Fry boycott the Saudis as well as the Russians? 

Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and in many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer in War and Peace who seduced Natasha. All those hysterics about boycotts and terrorism, they were just hypocritical sensationalism by those PC jerks that seem to be running our lives nowadays. We westerners are averse to any discipline, impervious to duty, and disinclined to belong to a nation. We owe allegiance only to ourselves and love only ourselves. Not so over in Russia, where there’s a mystic connection

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Putin: ‘Oi, Europe, you’re a bunch of poofs’

Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians. The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Enjoy the Winter Olympics but remember – and listen to – Pussy Riot as well.

And so to the winter Olympic Games which should not be hosted by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Sure, Putin’s Russia is not nearly as horrific as Stalin’s Russia but when that’s the yardstick for decency you know you’ve bankrupted yourself. Was anyone taken in by Putin’s decision to release a handful of political prisoners recently? Shame on them if they were gulled by such an obvious play. Again, it is better that the likes of Mikhail Khodorkhovsky and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova freed but they should never have been in prison in the first place. The upside, as so often in Russia, is heavily qualified. The Pussy Riot girls

Thursday

James Kirchick

Sochi Olympics: Why picking on gays has backfired so horribly for Vladimir Putin

After all the fuss, the billions spent, the calls for boycotts and so on, the Sochi Winter Olympics will begin next week. Given the incredibly low expectations, the Russian Games may even be judged a success — as long as the weather stays cold and no terrorist attack takes place. But Vladimir Putin should not be too smug, because his broader campaign against homosexuality has backfired spectacularly. The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time. This measure, along with one that bans the adoption of Russian children not just by homosexuals

Thursday

Roger Alton

Five reasons to be cheerful about British sport (yes, even the cricket)

James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of angry Hawaiians in 1779. The latest Captain Cook’s third tour since taking charge of the national cricket team has been just as successful, with Alastair’s England given the Hawaiian treatment by Australia. But don’t despair: for the British sports fan there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Try these: 1. Our women cricketers are thumping the Aussies, and it’s the women’s Ashes that matters, right? Just remind any passing Australian of that, and last summer’s Lions tour too, if you’ve got the time. Thanks to seven wickets from Anya

Monday

Hamish Macdonell

Putin’s strange intervention over Scottish independence

Is it useful to have Vladimir Putin on your side or not? One would have hoped anybody in the UK Government would have considered this question before, apparently, asking for the Russian President’s help in their battle with the Scottish nationalists over independence. Many people saw President Putin’s intervention in the Scottish independence debate on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday morning. Far fewer, however, are aware of the rather murky background to the exchange between Putin and Marr which seems to have preceded it. For the record, this is what the Russian President said in response to a question from Marr about Scottish independence: ‘It is not a matter for Russia, it is a