Russia

Thursday

Michael Evans

Can Zelensky and Putin do a deal?

Warring parties often strike deals. Exchanges of prisoners, ceasefires to deliver aid, covert talks between intelligence services – and eventually, hopefully, peace. But since Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops across the Russian border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, there have been no peace negotiations and no sign of meaningful compromise from either Moscow or Kyiv. But now, after nearly three years of horrendous casualties and destruction in Ukraine, preliminary talks are underway, according to the Financial Times, for a deal in which both sides would agree to stop or reduce attacks on energy installations. While it might seem a bizarre development, it’s now in Moscow’s interest as much as

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Meet the western conservatives moving to Russia

Tofurious Maximus Crane was sitting in a barber’s chair in Moscow when he received the greatest news of his life. It was 19 August, the day Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to immigrate to Russia. Now, the 46-year-old native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, could finally achieve his life’s dream of remaining in Russia for ever. ‘For me, the decree is the best thing that ever happened in my life besides, you know, family and children,’ says Crane, a charismatic bear of an American who sports a long Old Testament beard and perfectly coiffed hipster hair. ‘I got the notification about the decree, and I jumped up out of

Sunday

Robert Service

Is Stalin-worship back in Russia?

As if the Russian political barometer hasn’t fallen low enough, news comes that it has yet to reach the bottom of the glass. Official symbolism is a reliable indicator of trends, and an announcement by Georgi Filimonov this week marks a new low. Filimonov, recently appointed as governor of Vologda province, plans to erect a life-sized statue of dictator Joseph Stalin in the provincial capital. Not to denounce him but to ‘commemorate’ him.  Probably, Putin always had an admiration for Stalin Decades have passed since Nikita Khrushchëv spread the word in the Soviet Union that Stalin was a despot and a mass killer. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin expanded the

Thursday

Owen Matthews

What does ‘victory’ for Ukraine look like?

This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line of a Ukrainian victory remains ‘the occupation army [being] driven out by force or diplomatically, in such a way that the country preserves its true independence and is freed from occupation’. He has also rejected the idea of a ceasefire, saying that any ‘freezing of the war or any other manipulations… will simply postpone Russian

Thursday

Boris Johnson

It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato

Kyiv The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands. The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had

Thursday

Owen Matthews

What China wants from Russia

On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises. Last month, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers were spotted patrolling together

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sir Keir’s tax warning, Russian air attacks and another prisons crisis

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, speaking in the garden of 10 Downing Street, warned that the Budget in October is ‘going to be painful’, and that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. ‘I didn’t want to means-test the winter fuel payment, but it was a choice we had to make,’ he said. ‘A garden and a building that were once used for lockdown parties are now back in your service.’ Meanwhile, it was discovered, a pass to Downing Street had been given to Lord Alli, the Labour peer and party fundraiser, who gave £10,000 to the Beckenham and Penge constituency party; the seat was won by

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: we have let down white, working-class boys

The lost boys Sir: The only statement in your powerful leading article (‘Boy trouble’, 17 August) which can be challenged is that ‘the plight of poor white boys is a new burning injustice’. It is certainly not ‘new’. Even 40 years ago when the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) produced policies designed to counter inequality affecting girls, it was obvious that the problem was no less serious for white working-class boys. But the subject was highjacked by those obsessing about girls, with the results described in your article 40 years later. During the hijacking (for which he was not responsible), ILEA’s former leader Sir Ashley Bramall said to me: ‘Perhaps

Thursday

Svitlana Morenets

What’s the real aim of Ukraine’s Russian offensive?

On Monday morning, Vladimir Putin was briefed about Ukraine’s audacious invasion of Russian territory. With his military chiefs in front of him, he announced that Kyiv had been doing the bidding of its western masters but would succeed only in the ‘annihilation’ of the troops it had sent to Kursk. All this was, as usual, broadcast live by the Kremlin to reassure Russians that the President was in control of the situation – then everything started to go wrong. Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the invaded Kursk region, had been expected to give details of the successful evacuation of citizens. Instead, he began to reel off the extent of

Owen Matthews

Zelensky’s new offensive could push Putin to the brink

A Russian friend speaking from Kursk tells me the latest war joke. Vladimir Putin summons Stalin’s ghost. ‘Comrade Stalin!’ asks Putin. ‘German tanks are in Kursk again. I need your advice.’ Stalin’s ghost ponders before answering. ‘Do what I did. Get hold of as much American military aid as you can, and make sure to send in the Ukrainians at the vanguard of your army.’ In 1943, the battle-scarred fields of Kursk were filled with troops of the Red Army’s First Ukrainian Front, riding American-supplied aircraft and tanks as they advanced westwards towards Berlin. Today, Ukrainian troops – some in German-supplied vehicles – are fighting Russians less than 50 miles

Thursday

Lukas Degutis

Hungary is stretching the EU’s patience to its limit

Hungary is no stranger to spats with its European neighbours. Under prime minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership, it has exercised veto rights to block Ukrainian military aid and Russian sanctions, delayed the Nato accessions of Sweden and Finland and shrugged off EU asylum regulations. For Budapest, the disputes have proven to be effective leverage in unfreezing funds — once €30million (£25 million), now some €22million (£19 million) — held by the Commission over rule of law violations and corruption concerns. For the EU, Hungary is a diplomatic headache – and one that may be about to get worse. When Hungary assumed the bloc’s rotating presidency last month, Orbán flew to Moscow

Tuesday

Ian Birrell

The new alliances dedicated to destroying democracy

After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice. As Venezuela slid to ruin, Russian

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Could Ukrainians ever trust a Putin peace deal?

Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s a writer who specialises in Eastern European history, was once the Economist magazine’s correspondent in Ukraine, and made her name with a brilliant book, Borderland, which was both a portrait, a history and an appreciation of that country long before it entered the western public consciousness. It’s still worth reading today. But at Buxton she was introducing her latest book, A Nasty Little War: the Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, which opened the eyes of many in the audience (including me) to an almost forgotten but serious and

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

From the front line of the battle to save Kharkiv

Moonlight shines on the wings of the reconnaissance drone as it glides over the field. Within minutes, the Leleka – Ukrainian for ‘stork’ – crosses the border into Russia’s Belgorod region. The soldiers monitoring it wait in their car, hidden in the undergrowth. Soon the image on their laptop freezes: the Russians are jamming the signal. They manoeuvre the Leleka back and forth, eventually finding a gap in the enemy’s electronic defences. The drone is back in contact, sending footage of Russian roads and towns. The hunt for enemy troops begins. Some 30,000 Russian soldiers are amassed north of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian border town that was attacked two months ago.

Tuesday

Robin Ashenden

The rape of Ukraine continues while the world’s sympathies move on

‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that earlier sense of outrage and remind the ‘caring’ classes of atrocities closer to home. ‘My hatred flows from thesmall things to the big things. Every fibre is filled with it’ The first, Our Daily War, comes from Andrey Kurkov, the celebrated Russo-Ukrainian novelist and author of 2022’s Invasion Diary, a detailed on-the-ground account of Putin’s

Thursday

Svitlana Morenets

What I saw at the Okhmatdyt bomb site

Kyiv For weeks, Kyiv had felt relatively safe compared with just about everywhere else in Ukraine. People had adjusted to wartime life as the city’s air defences managed to intercept most of Russia’s missiles and drones. There had been a sense that things were improving. This was shattered on Monday morning when a missile struck a children’s cancer hospital in the capital. Okhmatdyt is the largest paediatric clinic in Ukraine, the equivalent of London’s Great Ormond Street. Each year, it treats more than 20,000 children with the most serious health conditions. That Russia had targeted it came as a shock but not a surprise: some 1,700 medical facilities in Ukraine

Thursday

Radek Sikorski

Brexit has helped the EU

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad. I gather that the Minister

John Keiger John Keiger

What the National Rally means for France’s foreign policy

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even circling. France is the world’s seventh-largest economic power, a prominent Nato member, a member of the UN Security Council and the EU’s leader on foreign and defence issues. It has the fifth largest strategic nuclear force and the fifth largest navy, a ‘tier one’ military and one of the highly effective ‘Nine Eyes’ intelligence services. Last year France was the world’s second largest arms exporter. It controls the third largest global undersea cables network and has the second largest coastal economic area, whose confetti territories give it a

Thursday

Michael Evans

Sending US contractors to Ukraine could provoke Moscow

Call it ‘slippery slope’ or ‘mission creep’, America’s strategy for helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion has adapted and expanded many times in the last 28 months. However, there was a golden rule laid down by President Biden almost on the first day of Russia’s aggression against its neighbour. There would be no ‘boots on the ground’, he said. No US troops would be deployed to fight the Russians. Civil contractors have played a significant role in the field in every US war in modern times. But the US is not at war in Ukraine That Biden doctrine has not changed. And yet now there is serious consideration

Ivan Krastev

Putin is trying to annexe people, not just land

On 1 September 2021, six months before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was speaking at the All-Russian Children’s Centre, known as ‘Ocean’, near the harbour city of Vladivostok. He turned to a topic that obviously haunted him during his long Covid-19 isolation. He told his audience of children that Russia’s population could have been about half a billion today, rather than the current 146 million, if it hadn’t been for the shocks of the past century: two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having a smaller population can make a country richer, but never more powerful A country’s population, Putin said, is