Ukraine

How the Bank broke Britain, Zelensky’s choice & the joys of mudlarking

49 min listen

First up: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy Britain’s economy is teetering on the brink of a deep fiscal hole, created by billions of pounds of unfunded spending – never-ending health promises, a spiralling welfare bill and a triple lock on the state pension, which will cost three times as much as originally estimated. Although politicians ‘deserve much of the blame for the economic state we’re in’, it’s Andrew Bailey – Michael Simmons argues in the magazine this week – who ‘has enabled their recklessness’. He joined the podcast to discuss who really broke Britain with Kate Andrews, Deputy Editor of The Spectator’s world edition and former Economics

Ukrainians have lost faith in Zelensky

Donald Trump this week boosted Ukraine’s air defences with new Patriot batteries, threatened Vladimir Putin with sanctions if he does not agree to a ceasefire, and even reportedly gave tacit approval to more Ukrainian strikes on Moscow. Trump’s newfound support for Ukraine is a welcome lifeline. The question is whether his help will be enough to stop Russia’s relentless attacks before Ukraine is engulfed in a critical military, political and social crisis that threatens to destroy it from within. Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right. Ukraine is running out

Portrait of the week: Inflation up, hosepipes off and grants for electric cars

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, agreed with President Emmanuel Macron of France that Britain could return perhaps 50 asylum seekers a week to France and accept in their place the same number of applicants through a regulated system. To celebrate, 573 people arrived that day in England in small boats, bringing the total for the week ending 14 July to 1,387. Moygashel Bonfire Committee in Co. Tyrone defended the placing of an effigy of a small boat with 12 migrants on a bonfire to usher in 12 July. Britain had, it was revealed, offered asylum to thousands of Afghan soldiers and their families caught by the accidental publication

Trump – the conventional foreign policy President?

28 min listen

Trump has said he’s “very, very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened severe tariffs against them if there’s no deal on Ukraine within 50 days. He’s also sending more weapons to Ukraine in coordination with NATO. What’s behind his change of heart on foreign policy, and how’s his MAGA base responding? Freddy Gray is joined by deputy US editor Kate Andrews, and Sergey Radchenko, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. You can watch this episode here.

Portrait of the week: Welfare rebellions, Glastonbury chants and Lucy Letby arrests

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in the face of a rebellion by 120 backbenchers over the welfare bill, undertook to limit to new claimants restrictions on personal independence payments (Pip). Modelling by the Department for Work and Pensions predicted that 150,000 people might be pushed into ‘relative poverty’ by the revised welfare cuts, compared with 250,000 before. Still fearing defeat, the government made more last-minute concessions, postponing changes to Pip rules until after a review by Sir Stephen Timms, the disability minister. The government then won the second reading by 335 to 260, with 49 Labour MPs voting against. It was not clear that the eviscerated bill would

Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press

Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian press has been slowly, methodically strangled, which has forced existential choices on newspaper and TV journalists. Twenty-one have been killed – beaten, poisoned or gunned down. Others, such as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, highly regarded investigative reporters, have been forced into exile. Yet others, like the ‘dear friends’ of this book’s title, have chosen a different path – to cleave ever closer to the regime. The authors tell the fascinating story of those choices and allow us a glimpse of why they were taken. In 2000, Soldatov and Borogan were employed by the political department of the newspaper Izvestiya,

Portrait of the week: Spending review, LA protests and Greta Thunberg deported

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the NHS and defence were settled there wasn’t enough to go round. The police wanted more. Everyone over the state pension age in England and Wales with an income of £35,000 or less will receive the winter fuel payment after all, at a cost of £1.25 billion, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced. Capital spending included £39 billion on social housing over the next ten years. The government also committed £14.2 billion for the new Sizewell C nuclear power station, but did not say where the money was coming

Portrait of the week: Liverpool parade crash, Starmer sacrifices Chagos Islands and an octopus invasion

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.

Putin orders new offensive

‘You want a ceasefire? I want your death,’ said Russia’s chief propagandist Vladimir Soloviev during prime time television, the camera zooming in on his face. His message was aimed at both Ukrainians and Europeans urging the Kremlin to stop the war. Soloviev, alongside a chorus of other Kremlin loyalists and military experts, has lately been gloating about how Vladimir Putin weathered western pressure and secured Donald Trump on his side. There will be no peace, they say, until Ukraine capitulates to Russian demands. Putin, as if to prove the point, announced yesterday that he had ordered the military to begin creating a ‘security buffer zone’ along the Ukrainian border –

Putin only wants to talk to one man

A week of diplomatic manoeuvring, ultimatums and psychological gambits has ended with a sadly predictable result: Vladimir Putin will not be coming to the negotiating table in Istanbul. Nor will he be sending a single cabinet-level negotiator. Instead the Russian delegation will be headed by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky – the same low-level minion that Putin sent to the last round of talks in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Instead of a breakthrough, the great diplomatic effort led by Zelensky and the combined leaders of Europe have elicited nothing beyond a calculated insult from a defiant Kremlin.  This latest cycle of hope and failure in the endgame to the Ukraine

Putin and Zelensky just want to appease Trump

Ceasefire then talks, or talks then ceasefire? This has emerged as one of the pivotal issues in the diplomacy around the war in Ukraine, even if one could question just how genuine both sides are in their respective positions. The proposed talks in Istanbul on Thursday may help clarify matters, but both sides seem more committed to appeasing the White House than talking peace. On Saturday, the usual suspects of Europe – the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and Poland – met in Kyiv and demanded Vladimir Putin call an immediate 30-day ceasefire, on pain of further sanctions. The usual pattern for peace talks is indeed a cessation of

What does Putin want? Whatever he can get away with

The US general Mark Clark knew a thing or two about dealing with Russians. In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Clark commanded the American occupying forces in Austria. His Soviet opposite number, and nominal ally, was Marshal Ivan Konev. The two war heroes were tasked with pacifying the conquered and divided country at the dawn of the Cold War. ‘The Russians were not interested in teamwork,’ recalled Clark in his 1950 memoir, Calculated Risk. ‘They wanted to keep things boiling… They were accustomed to the use of force. They were skilled in exploiting any sign of weakness or uncertainty or appeasement. This was their national policy.’ Two

Will the assassination of another Russian general change anything?

Friday morning, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik was heading out from his flat in Balashikha, a commuter town east of Moscow, when a car bomb exploded, killing him. There can be little doubt this is an operation by Ukrainian intelligence, another example of their capacity to launch skilful targeted assassinations in the heart of Russia. But will it actually change anything? That is more doubtful. It is hard not to assume this was another killing by the Ukrainians Moskalik was not a high-profile figure, but as deputy head of the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate (GOU), he was a capable officer and potentially on a career track for even higher office.

Portrait of the week: Pope dies, EU cheese banned and trans women aren’t women

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, no longer believes that a trans woman is a woman, his official spokesman said at a lobby briefing. He was asked about this six days after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex in equalities law. The justices unanimously allowed an appeal by the campaign group For Women Scotland in a case against the Scottish government. Sex-based protections, notably in the Equality Act 2010, the court found, only apply to people who are born in that sex, not to those whose gender is reassigned. The court emphasised that transgender people still have protections against

There was Easter but no truce on Ukraine’s frontline

Kramatorsk, Donetsk region In a wooden Greek-Catholic church on the frontline of a warzone, encircled by red tulips and military vehicles, the priest’s sermon is woven through with the war – just like the soldiers’ Easter baskets, packed not only with paska bread, pysanky and sausages, but also with drones, waiting to be blessed. ‘This drone will be at work tonight – enforcing the ceasefire,’ a soldier whispers to me, smiling. The priest looks over a hundred soldiers in front of him, the church so packed that some must listen from the outside, and says that Ukraine will defeat evil, just as Jesus did. ‘The enemy is killing Him in

Portrait of the week: Trump’s tariffs, a theme park for Bedford and a big bill for Big Macs

Home In response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘This is not just a short-term tactical exercise. It is the beginning of a new era.’ He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm.’ The FTSE100 fell by 4.9 per cent in a day, its biggest such fall since 27 March 2020. The government published a 417-page list of US products upon which Britain could impose retaliatory tariffs after 1 May. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that, although in 2023 the UK imported £57.9 billion of goods from

Gavin Mortimer, Colin Freeman, Lawrence Osborne, Lionel Shriver and Anthony Cummins

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Gavin Mortimer looks at how the French right can still win (1:48); Colin Freeman interviews Americans who have fought in Ukraine and feel betrayed by Trump (11:01); Lawrence Osborne details his experience of last week’s earthquake, as he reads his diary from Bangkok (18:38); Lionel Shriver defends traditional, monogamous marriage (24:07); and, Anthony Cummins examines media satire and settled scores as he reviews Natasha Brown’s Universality (31:13).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

‘Trump is a coward’: meet the US soldiers who served in Ukraine

The Ukrainians of Alabama are not the kind of lobbyists whose visits strike fear into pro-Trump politicians in Washington. They are an ad hoc campaign group of expats and refugees who do their best to put Kyiv’s case politely to representatives of Congress and Senate. They do, however, have a secret weapon, in the form of an ex-US soldier from the town of Tuscaloosa, whose backstory is the kind the Beltway finds hard to ignore. Alex Drueke, 42, is an Iraq veteran whose ancestors served in every major American war since the War of Independence. Appalled at Vladimir Putin’s invasion, he joined Ukraine’s International Legion, only to be captured on

America’s involvement in Ukraine is finally being revealed

The US-led coalition to help Ukraine was always more than just a production line of arms deliveries to the Kyiv government. Much of what has been going on over the last three years has been secret: a covert collaboration between Ukraine and the West involving commanders at the highest level, and special forces out of uniform. Now the full extent of the extraordinary partnership between Ukraine and the West has been revealed after a year-long investigation by Adam Entous, a reporter at the New York Times. While the sheer detail of the covert meetings and level of high-powered cooperation provides an insight for the first time into the extent of the

Steve Witkoff is wrong to see peace in Putin’s eyes

Kyiv ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by what Steve Witkoff said on the Fox channel, neither history nor geography are taught in America.’ Team Trump’s energetic but purposefully misdirected attempts to push the negotiation processes forward have left Ukrainians in shock. Each day reveals new depths in the Oval Office’s inadequacy and we can only shrug when we hear things like ‘Putin is not a bad guy’ or ‘I feel that he wants peace’. President Volodymyr Zelensky said something similar after his election in 2019, when he promised to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin within