Russia

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

How to save Oxford Street – and your high street

Oxford Street is ‘a dinosaur district destined for extinction’, says Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Machin – whose plan to replace its ‘flagship’ Marble Arch store with a new ten-storey retail and office block has been referred to a public inquiry by Michael Gove as Housing Secretary, despite winning approval from Westminster council. Machin points out that his real flagship nowadays is M&S’s website, which accounts for a third of the group’s clothing and home sales, while much of its pre-second-world-war store estate stands in sad need of repurposing or right-sizing. And he’s not wrong about the decline of what used to be Britain’s premier shopping boulevard – with its

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Nato is no longer ‘brain dead’

Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join Nato today. Them joining the alliance will bolster Nato’s presence in the Baltic and make it easier to defend Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The alliance now has a clear, strategic purpose again Turkey had objected to the two countries joining, regarding them as too soft on Kurdish separatists, whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees as ‘terrorists’ threatening his country. But having received some concessions on that front, Erdogan has dropped his objections. There’s also speculation that the US will sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Turkey in exchange for its cooperation on this matter. It is remarkable that Sweden, a country which has so

Tuesday

Svitlana Morenets

Is Russian Orthodoxy dying in Ukraine?

Ivano-Frankivsk has just become the first city in Ukraine to have no Russian Orthodox Church, amid a mass defection of churches away from the Moscow patriarchate and towards the breakaway Orthodox Church of Ukraine.  At the start of the invasion in February, almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches were still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church whose leader – Patriarch Kirill – is a close ally of Putin. Until recently, the Russian Orthodox Church claimed dominion over Ukraine for centuries. The 2014 invasion of Crimea dampened its appeal. In 2019 a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognised by Patriarch Bartholomew – the archbishop of Constantinople and the de facto leader

Matthew Lynn

Macron’s Russian oil plan is bound to fail

It will drain Vladimir Putin of funds for his war machine. It will bring down inflation. And it might even be enough to stop the global economy from tipping into recession. As President Macron put forward his wheeze for solving the energy crisis this week, he no doubt had plenty of persuasive arguments. He appears to have brought the rest of the G7 on board for his plan for a global cap on the price of oil. There is just one problem. Like most price controls, it is not going to work. Indeed. It will only make the crisis worse. Of course, everyone can see where Macron is coming from.

Friday

Gus Carter

Zelensky’s peculiar Glastonbury appearance

Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t quite make it onto the Glastonbury line-up posters. Perhaps Michael Eavis, the owner of ever-so Worthy Farm, had last-minute difficulties with the Ukrainian President’s booking agent. No matter. An eight-foot-high image of President Zelensky’s face graced the Pyramid Stage on Friday, right before ageing indie rockers The Libertines belted out their two-decades-old bangers. ‘Time for Heroes’, but not before festival-goers had enjoyed a brief set by Europe’s very own hero. You’d be forgiven for thinking the shtick’s getting a bit tired – but at least Pete Doherty can just about hold a tune. ‘Glastonbury is the greatest concentration of freedom these days,’ Zelensky told the festival. And

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rail strikes, rates rise and a record-breaking stingray

Home A rail strike on three alternate days, bringing the system to a standstill for a week, was organised by the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union. On the first day, the London Underground came out too. Tram drivers in south London arranged a strike of their own. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, instructed his frontbenchers not to join strikers’ picket lines, but some did. EasyJet announced plans to cut 7 per cent of its 160,000 flights scheduled between July and September after Gatwick, easyJet’s main airport, said it would reduce the number of flights taking off. Flights carrying up to 5,000 passengers were cancelled at Heathrow airport on

Saturday

Mark Galeotti

How Russia’s cartoon heroine turned on Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin’s regime has a track record in building up public heroes whom it hopes to use, only to find the ungrateful wretches unwilling to play the roles it intends. The most recent is Natalia Poklonskaya, a woman whose trajectory from cartoon heroine to legal adviser has starkly illustrated the way Putin faces criticisms not just from remaining liberals at home, but also nationalists. Poklonskaya shot to fame amidst the Russian take-over of Crimea. A Ukrainian, she had been a senior prosecutor in Crimea, then in Kyiv, until she resigned in the wake of the ‘Euromaidan’ rising, ‘ashamed to live in the country where neo-fascists freely walk the streets.’ She

Justin Bronk

Is the war slipping away from Ukraine?

After the decisive failure of Russia’s attempt to overthrow the government of Ukraine by seizing Kyiv, Kharkiv and other key cities in February and March 2022, Russia has concentrated its depleted forces in the Donbas and set itself far more limited objectives. In the two months since its retreat from the north of Ukraine, Russia has finally subdued the besieged defenders of Mariupol – who had been surrounded since the second day of the invasion – and slowly gained territory in Donbas. Since then Russia’s most notable conquest has been the small but important town of Popasna and the surrounding high ground that overlooks key supply routes into the city of

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

How Michael O’Leary can stop the flying blame game

Stock markets are tumbling, but given the tide of economic news, that’s hardly surprising. The S&P 500 index dived into bear market territory – 20 per cent down since January – after a rise in US inflation for May. Our own FTSE indices reacted badly to an unexpected 0.3 per cent drop in UK GDP for April. Interest rate rises predicted on both sides of the pond this week will make investors jumpier still. So expect further falls in markets that have been driven by weight of cheap money to stay unnaturally high despite an increasingly bleak backdrop. And wait for the turn. When might that be? When investors think

Saturday

Mark Galeotti

Putin is no Peter the Great

Putin has a penchant for history, but only insofar it flatters him and his views. Last year, he gifted the world a 5,000 essay that essentially pre-justified his invasion of Ukraine with amateurish fantasy history, and now he is comparing himself with Tsar Peter the Great. It is not a comparison that fits or flatters. Peter the Great is one of the, well, greats of the Russian historical pantheon. He ruled from the late 17th to the early 18th century, and in that time became the first tsar to travel in Europe, built a new capital at St Petersburg, and was both founder of the Russian navy and victor, on

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Who dares ask how far Brexit is to blame for UK inflation?

After the Jubilee dream of a lovely lost Britain, back to reality with a face-slap: the reality of the £8 pint of beer, the £8-plus gallon of diesel and the death throes of a Downing Street regime that has no discernible answers to the cost-of-living crisis. All of which takes me back to some questions I’ve been pondering for a while: whether the UK faces higher inflation and a deeper downturn than the rest of the western world, if so why, and who we should blame. By way of caveat, let’s recall the shifting pattern of Covid statistics over time: just because the UK topped April’s G7 inflation table –

Saturday

Daniel DePetris

What if the Ukraine war is never won?

In late March, roughly a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unnamed Nato official told NBC News that the conflict was turning into a meat grinder for both sides. ‘If we’re not in a stalemate, we are rapidly approaching one,’ the Nato official said at the time. ‘The reality is that neither side has a superiority over the other.’ Sure enough, a month and a half later, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘stalemate’ is exactly what is occurring. ‘The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning, and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,’ Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

‘Famine is part of Russia’s strategy’: Zelensky’s economic adviser on Putin’s tactics

Alexander Rodnyansky has a desk waiting for him back at Cambridge, where he’s currently on sabbatical from his role as a junior economics professor. But he won’t be returning for some time. He’s working from Kyiv, prioritising his other job: as economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky. Rodnyansky was in Ukraine when the war broke out and he could easily have returned to the UK. ‘That wasn’t really much of a thought,’ he says. ‘I’m sixth-generation Kyiv. I was just going to stay.’ He became a full-time presidential adviser two years ago, hired to help reform Ukraine’s financial institutions, including the privatisation of state-owned commercial banks. ‘About 55 per cent of

The Spectator

Which monarchs have had the longest reigns?

Long to reign over us The Queen is the world’s current longest-serving monarch, but two in history have had longer reigns. – Louis XIV of France ascended the throne aged four in 1643 and served until his death in 1715 aged 76 – 72 years, 110 days on the throne. He was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson. – Rama IX was king of Thailand from 9 June 1946 until his death on 13 October 2016 – a period of 70 years, 126 days. – The Queen will overtake Rama IX on 12 June this year, but will have to reign until 21 May 2024 before she eclipses Louis XIV to

The Spectator

Letters: Who’s responsible for Putin’s rise if not Russians?

Russian misrule Sir: Your editorial (‘Sanction Schroder’, 21 May) laments that western sanctions may be harming ordinary Russians, given that they too ‘are victims of Vladimir Putin’s corruption and misrule’. Yet who if not the Russian people themselves are more culpable for the rise of Putin? The unpalatable fact that both he and his assault on Ukraine still enjoy such considerable popular domestic support cannot be put down merely to his iron grip on the levers of coercion and propaganda. For most of the last century the Russian people have allowed themselves to be misruled and oppressed by a succession of malevolent tyrants and despots. There comes a point when

Antony Beevor & Serhii Plokhy

‘Putin may be prepared to go to the limits’: Antony Beevor and Serhii Plokhy in conversation

The military historian Antony Beevor joins Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, on Spectator TV this week to talk about the war in Ukraine. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. Putin’s plan ANTONY BEEVOR: I’m alarmed by the latest developments. The encirclement or imminent encirclement of Severodonetsk could cut off a large number of Ukrainian troops, leaving them in an impossible position. It’s a move that suggests Russia’s real attempt at the moment is to seize Severodonetsk and the area around it, and to cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea entirely. This is deeply worrying because it means that Putin could then say, right, we

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The EU’s oil ban is a damp squib

When Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine on 24 February there was a conceit that this might be the first war which the West could fight – and win – by sanctions alone. The EU’s latest efforts to stop importing Russian oil show just what a folly this was. Donations of military equipment to Ukraine are certainly helping to keep Russian forces at bay, but economic sanctions? That is another story. Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas is the product of years of ill-conceived energy policy Sanctions may be helping to lower living standards among Russian citizens, but they are still a long, long way from cutting off the lifeblood

Monday

Katja Hoyer

Germany is failing Ukraine

‘A giant step for German and European security,’ is how Chancellor Olaf Scholz described his government’s €100 billion cash injection for the country’s depleted military. But while Germany’s newfound commitment to its own defence is welcome, its commitment to Ukraine’s is still questionable at best.   Over the weekend, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that it had seen documents showing that Berlin had reduced military support for Ukraine to ‘a minimum’. According to inside sources, only two German weapon deliveries have reached Ukraine since the end of March. Both contained light equipment such as mines, hand grenades and spare parts for machine guns. The last delivery of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry dates back

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

How Russia wins

It is still too early to predict the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Russia has certainly solidified its position in the east and is making small military gains. What’s become clear over the last few days is that Russia may, after all, be able to achieve at least some of its military goals. Here is an interesting, albeit disturbing, political scenario by Sabine Fischer, a senior fellow at a German foreign policy tank. She notes that the mood in Moscow itself has shifted. It is the Kremlin’s political calculation that the western nations will not sustain their massive financial and military support for Ukraine.  The German government is prioritising its commercial relations with Russia – as it

Sergey Radchenko

The West is watching the war in Ukraine like it’s sport

Every time I hear a politician speak of Munich, I suspect that something is amiss. Last week, President Zelensky accused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of living in the ‘deep past’, and demanding that ‘a part of Ukraine be given to Russia’. ‘It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead of 2022’, Zelensky said. He wasn’t alone: figures from the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the former chess champion Garry Kasparov put themselves on the record timidly or violently disagreeing with Kissinger. I wasn’t at Davos, but I learned of Kissinger’s revelations through Twitter. A major newspaper had declared that he ‘came close to