Russia

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

No one should celebrate the decline of America

Where is America? Like an old friend who hasn’t been in touch for years, you wonder if its silence is lost interest or if it just got too busy. America used to be everywhere, the dominant voice in world affairs, a desirable friend and a much-feared enemy. It intervened (and, yes, interfered) whenever it felt its interests or values were threatened. Often its involvement was unwanted and sometimes it didn’t improve matters, but there was a reliable solidity to it, a sturdiness born of military might, prosperity and national self-belief. It could be admired or reviled, but it had to be reckoned with. America shies away from it all now.

Owen Matthews

The phoney war: what’s really going on between Boris and Putin

What a lucky coincidence. At the start of a week that could see the ignominious collapse of Boris Johnson’s premiership, an opportunity to go fully Churchillian has appeared out of the blue. In an unprecedentedly detailed and direct memorandum, the British Foreign Office announced that it had exposed Russian plans to mount a coup in Kiev. Johnson was quick to back the alarming news with a grave warning to Vladimir Putin. ‘The intelligence is very clear that there are 60 Russian battle groups on the borders of Ukraine, the plan for a lightning war that could take out Kiev is one that everybody can see,’ Johnson told reporters on Monday.

Julius Strauss

Letter from Odessa: life on the front line of a new Cold War

‘God Save the Queen’ trended on Ukrainian social media over the weekend. ‘As a Brit in Kiev I have never felt so popular,’ one expat tweeted. Four hundred miles to the south, however, on the once grand, now shabby streets of Odessa, the enthusiasms of the Twittersphere seem remote. There is little optimism that Britain, or indeed any other western country, can do much to halt the tidal wave that locals fear Russia is about to release on them. At first blush, life might look normal. On the main pedestrian street, Deribasovskaya, horsemen offer children rides on ponies with pink saddles. But in the city’s cafés, markets and large open

The Spectator

Letters: The BBC licence fee is a protection racket

Russia’s star Sir: Wolfgang Münchau is surely right to highlight the risk posed to European peace and stability by Germany’s strategic myopia (‘In the pipeline’, 22 January). But he may be in error to assert that ‘Russia is in the ascendant’ — at least in terms of the fundamentals. Russia no longer makes it into the top ten of the world’s economies and is about to be overtaken by South Korea. Its poorly developed economy is unduly reliant on energy exports — a sort of Saudi Arabia with snow instead of sand. A state whose star is rising has every incentive to sit tight and allow that to continue —

John Maier

What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?

The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what came to be called the ‘Bulldozer show’ of 15 September 1974, the Soviet secret service instructed a small militia of off-duty policemen to besiege an unofficial exhibition being staged by a group of underground artists in a field on the outskirts of Moscow. As James Birch recalls, KGB goons ‘attacked the show, using bulldozers and water cannons. Artists and onlookers were beaten up, some paintings were set on fire, other works were thrown into tipper lorries where mud was piled on top by diggers’. Surviving artworks were ‘driven off to

Sunday

William Nattrass

Eastern Europe’s toxic relationship with Russia has left the EU divided

Joe Biden’s fatalistic statement this week that suggested a ‘minor incursion’ by Russia into Ukraine might be tolerated by the United States was only the latest indictment of the West’s failings when it comes to holding off Vladimir Putin. Less remarked on was Emmanuel Macron’s futile call in the European Parliament the same day for Europeans to ‘collectively make our own demands and put ourselves in a position to enforce them.’ The French President’s vision for the EU as a ‘power of the future’ hinges on member states holding a common position when it comes to international threats. But reports this week about the EU’s conflicted attitudes towards Russia are

Thursday

Wolfgang Münchau

In the pipeline: would Germany side with Russia in a conflict?

If Russia were to invade Ukraine, would Germany side with the Russians? For most of our post-war history, that would have been an absurd question, but things are changing fast in Europe. In the wake of recent events, it would not be irrational for Vladimir Putin to bet that if push came to shove, he could count on German neutrality — or even support. The Ukraine crisis continues apace, with up to 100,000 Russian troops now gathered near its border. The obvious question is: what would happen if Putin were to invade? It would split the EU, exposing its energy dependence on Russia, ruin what is left of transatlantic relations

Thursday

Charles Moore

My new nickname for Putin

According to the new Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Russians wish to ‘put at risk and potentially exploit the world’s real information system, which is undersea cables that go all around the world’. Apparently, these carry 99 per cent of international communications. The cables which serve Britain are in the Atlantic, where Russian submarines are increasingly probing. This revelation resembles the plot of a book I loved as a child, The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea, by Eric Linklater, published in 1959. Timothy and Hew are two boys living, temporarily without their parents, on Popinsay, a Scottish island. Through the good offices of Gunner

Owen Matthews

Haunted: the spectre of revolution is stalking Putin

A spectre is haunting the former Soviet Union — the spectre of people power. Every time it appears, Vladimir Putin leads an unholy alliance of all the reactionary autocrats of the former Soviet space to try to exorcise it. Last week, Putin sent 3,000 Russian paratroopers to Kazakhstan at the request of its president to crush a sudden revolution that left at least 160 protestors and 12 security officers dead. For the time being, it looks like Putin’s timely intervention — as well as an internet shutdown that paralysed protestors’ ability to coordinate — has successfully quelled the flames. Kazakhstan 2022 has not joined the list of ‘colour revolutions’ that

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: No. 10’s garden party, Djokovic’s visa row and France’s vaccine protests

Home Boris Johnson admitted to attending evening drinks for about 40 staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street on 20 May 2020, when lockdown regulations made social gatherings illegal. ‘We thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No. 10 garden this evening,’ said an email from the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. ‘Please join us from 6 p.m. and bring your own booze!’ Mr Johnson said that he had been talking to Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, about how people could be helped with soaring energy bills. Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary

Tuesday

Francis Pike

Was the Kazakhstan uprising an attempted Jihadi takeover?

The Kazakh uprising is over. The stench of burnt-out vehicles and bombed out buildings in Kazakhstan’s most populous city and former capital, Almaty, has begun to dissipate. Life is returning to normal. Banks have reopened. Salaries and pensions are being paid. The internet is up and running again. Almaty airport is expected to reopen today. As the fog of war lifts some clarity about these events is beginning to emerge. Officials have reported that 100 businesses and banks were destroyed along with 400 vehicles. Seven policemen died and hundreds more were wounded; 8,000 people have been arrested. Some 164 civilians were killed. The government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has survived

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Afghan interpreters deserve better from Britain

Welcome changes Sir: Lloyd Evans’s sympathetic piece on the fate of Afghans once they arrive in the UK made for sobering reading (‘New arrivals’, 18 December). In the Sulha Alliance we are endeavouring to support those Afghans and their families who served with and alongside British forces in Afghanistan. That is not the totality of Afghan migrants, but of the former interpreters and their families it can be truly said ‘they are here because we were there’ — and we owe them. I will not go over the whole sorry saga of the UK’s mistreatment of this group, but we really need a step change in how they are looked

Thursday

William Boyd

What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true Bond lovers — of the novels, I mean — know that he lived in a ‘comfortable flat in a plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road’, as Ian Fleming described it in Moonraker. Further internal evidence in Thunderball indubitably established that it was Wellington Square — but there was considerable mystery and doubt about exactly which house contained the Bond apartment. In my article I claimed to have identified it as No. 25, based on a certain amount of sleuthing and, I thought, convincing circumstantial evidence. No. 25 Wellington Square was

Richard Bratby

The genius of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score

By all accounts, Tchaikovsky struggled to compose The Nutcracker. It wasn’t his idea of an effective ballet scenario, and he was unimpressed with the choreographer Marius Petipa’s prettified storyline. Mid-composition, he learned of the death of his younger sister Alexandra. ‘Even more than yesterday, I feel absolutely incapable of depicting the Kingdom of Sweets in music,’ he wrote. But inspiration can be counterintuitive. On a good day, Tchaikovsky could write as fluently as any Victorian serial novelist, churning out forgettable piano pieces (as he put it) ‘like batches of pancakes’. Projects like The Nutcracker put him through purgatory but the result, with hindsight, was nothing less than the sound of

Saturday

Mark Galeotti

Is Vladimir Putin really willing to invade Ukraine?

Is Putin preparing to invade Ukraine? It certainly looks that way, with western intelligence agencies estimating this week that around 100,000 troops are now massing at the country’s eastern border. To some, this build-up is proof enough that the Kremlin plans to invade. This week the US president Joe Biden even made significant diplomatic concessions to Moscow to prevent a looming conflict. But the US president should keep in mind that capability does not prove intent: and Putin may well decide that the cost of invasion is too hard to justify. His recent Ukrainian mobilisation could still be a piece of ‘heavy-metal diplomacy’ – a show of force intended to

Thursday

Dalibor Rohac

The battle for Ukraine has already been lost

Forget the ‘commitment‘ of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the EU’s ‘firm and decisive’ support, and Liz Truss’s vow to ‘stand firm‘ with Ukraine. The hard truth is that the West has already lost, or rather abandoned, Ukraine. Even if it is not overrun by Russian tanks this winter, the Kremlin has a free hand to destabilise, threaten, and undercut Ukraine – including by intensifying the conflict in Ukraine’s east. After all, that war, initiated by Vladimir Putin, has been ongoing since 2014. And for all the tough rhetoric, countless sanctions, and the two bargains struck in Minsk, Russia continues to occupy Crimea and treat Donbas as its

Friday

Mark Galeotti

Britain’s duty to the Black Sea

With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, the Black Sea is looking choppy. While that may seem to have little significance for us, in an age of globalised supply chains, international security commitments and Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific,’ that matters more than we might think. However, there is also an opportunity for the UK. In a report for the Council on Geostrategy that was published this week, I, James Rogers and Alexander Lanoszka, suggest that the Black Sea region is at risk of becoming an anarchic environment where insecurity reigns amid Russian domination. This matters. Rather than being seen as some distant periphery, at best a ‘flank’ of Europe,

Thursday

Wolfgang Münchau

Ukrainian annexation is already happening

Nato and the EU are fearing a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. They have reason to be concerned, given that Russia would not blink to escalate while the West is still fumbling around on how best to respond. Brussels and Washington are in firefighting mode, while Russia chooses the when and the where. Annexation in the east, meanwhile, is already happening — not by force but through civil and economic ties. Military mobilisation looks like a sideshow, a distraction from what is really happening already: a slow annexation of the eastern quasi-independent republics. The pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence from Kiev in 2014 but have never been recognised by Ukraine.  Already

Daisy Dunn

The art and science of Fabergé

After all the magnificent presents she’d received from his workshop, Queen Alexandra was eager to meet the most famous jeweller in Russia. ‘If Mr Fabergé ever comes to London,’ she said to Henry Bainbridge, a manager of the design house, ‘you must bring him to see me.’ Peter Carl Fabergé paid a rare visit to the capital to inspect his new shop — the only one located outside the Russian empire — at 48 Dover Street in 1908. ‘The Queen wants to see me! What for?’ he asked an exasperated Bainbridge. ‘Well, you know what an admirer she is of all your things.’ Insisting that she would not wish to

Tuesday

David Patrikarakos

Is Russia preparing to invade Ukraine?

I can still hear the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Just a mile or so from us, thousands of Russian troops were dug in; shells landed nearby. It was so cold my phone kept switching off. Seven years later, Ukraine is heading into another sub-zero winter. And the Russian troops have returned. Moscow has now massed more than 90,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. Washington is briefing that intelligence suggests an invasion. Moscow says this is ‘alarmist’ and — as usual — accuses Nato of inflaming things. How did we get here? In truth the conflict never ended, it just froze. But it’s also true that the relationship between Kiev and Moscow