Russia

Political scandals sometimes throw up deliciously eccentric minor characters. Trump-Russia — a scandal or merely a crisis, according to taste — now has one: Rob Goldstone. He is described as a British former tabloid journalist, a music promoter, former Miss Universe pageant judge, and friend of the Trumps. Facebook videos reveal a short, tubby man with a northern accent and voice that seems a couple of octaves too high for his bulk. Twitter photos show him in a black shirt with a shiny gold tie; or holding velvet loafers up to his double chin, the word ‘Sex!’ embroidered on the toecaps; or wearing a gold baseball hat bearing the legend

Let there be no doubt: it’s turning into the political equivalent of Defcon 1, the highest level of nuclear alert, for the Trump administration. There can be no greater irony than that Donald Trump, who thundered about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server during the election campaign, could be undone by an email disseminated by his own son. Donald Trump Junior, who has recently hired a former mob lawyer to represent him, revealed on Twitter (shortly before the New York Times ran a story detailing his efforts to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton) the lengthy email chain between him and the publicist Rob Goldstone. Those epistolary efforts reveal that, despite President Trump’s

What fun the internet is having now that Vladimir Putin has finally met Donald Trump. Social media is teeming with jokes, gifs, and memes about the two big dawgs of global politics finally coming together. It’s the great bromance of the populist age.  Underneath the hilarity, however, there remains intense suspicions about the relationship between Trump and Putin – it is now widely accepted, even if the evidence is still hotly disputed, that Russia ‘hacked the election’ in order to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Trump’s meeting with Sergei Lavrov in May was considered highly nefarious, especially after Trump accidentally gave away a state secret, apparently just to show off. Reports

 Washington DC Trump is a fighter – he seems to thrive on pressure – and he is lawyering up The panhandlers outside the White House hold signs saying: ‘Trump is President — saving to leave the country.’ Those signs will have to be updated if Trump’s enemies are right and the 45th President is driven from office by a scandal called ‘Putingate’. Inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump is said to be in a fury about the allegations that he is Russia’s pawn. Washington is gripped by rumours of a president sitting up in bed at night, a cheeseburger balanced on his stomach, raging at the television news. He does not,

A hundred years after the Russian revolution, Russia has a tsar and a court. Proximity to Putin is the key to wealth, office and survival. The outward signs of a court society have returned: double-headed eagles, the imperial coat of arms, the cult of Nicholas II (one of whose recently erected statues has ‘wept tears’), an increasingly wealthy and subservient Orthodox Church. In 2013, ‘to strengthen the historical continuity of the Russian armed forces’, the main honour guard regiment in Moscow was renamed Preobrazhensky, after the oldest regiment of the Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great in 1683. A statue of St Vladimir, founder and Christianiser of the Russian

Donald Trump’s Washington is a city of many secrets, but no mysteries. So much about the Trump-Putin story remains unknown, and possibly will never be known. But the fundamentals have never been concealed. In order to help elect Trump as US president, Russian operatives engaged in a huge and risky espionage and dirty tricks operation. Trump and his team publicly welcomed and gratefully accepted help from WikiLeaks, widely regarded as a front for Russian intelligence. Trump surrounded himself with associates and aides, including a campaign chairman and a national security adviser, who had in the past received pay from Russian state TV and pro-Putin oligarchs. In the wake of the

Moscow Russia’s REN TV, which published the first image of a person who planted a bomb on a train in St Petersburg’s metro, reported that the security services are not ruling out the possibility that his clothes and beard may have been a disguise used to fool the authorities. But since racial profiling is practised as a matter of course in Russia, it would seem peculiar for a would-be terrorist to dress up in an Islamic disguise, especially considering that there are even more police than usual out on the streets and in the metros of major Russian cities after the recent anti-corruption protests. Out in the Moscow snow, I heard old

Ten people have been killed and dozens injured in an explosion on the St Petersburg metro. The blast happened onboard a train travelling between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologichesky Institut stations in the city centre. Russian news agency Interfax said that at least 50 people were hurt. There are reports that the device which exploded was a nail bomb left in a briefcase on the train. The country’s president Vladimir Putin, who was in St Petersburg at the time of the blasts, expressed his condolences for those caught up in the incident. Putin described the explosions as a ‘possible terrorist attack’. He said: ‘I have already spoken to the head of our special services, they are working

Last week’s events in London raised a recurrent dilemma for journalists, including me. It is a huge story when a terrorist kills four people then is shot down in Palace Yard, Westminster. Yet dare we say how fortunate we are that since 9/11 Muslim terrorists have proved incapable of mounting an attack remotely as lethal as that on the Twin Towers? An intelligence officer told me recently that he worries far more about Russia than about Muslim suicidalists, and this must be the rational assessment. The public needs awakening to the menace posed by Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. Meanwhile, Khalid Masood’s dreadful deed reflects the flailings of a death cult. These