Ukraine

Thursday

Charles Moore

Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad

Saturday

Eliot Wilson

How many peacekeepers can Europe send to Ukraine?

We may look back to find Sir Keir Starmer partly defined by the phrase ‘coalition of the willing’. It is hard to fault the prime minister’s energy in rallying nations to implement a peace settlement in Ukraine, but there are issues to unpick. Who makes up the coalition? What is its role in Ukraine? What forces and capabilities will it need to fulfil that role, and where will it get them? The answers to these questions are both vague and subject to change, so let us see what we can establish. Only two months ago, President Zelensky told the World Economic Forum that enforcing a peace settlement would require a

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Welfare war, gold prices soar and gang jailed for toilet heist 

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, entertained 29 other national leaders online to seek a way of guaranteeing the future security of Ukraine. He then invited European defence leaders to meet in London. He spoke by phone to President Volodymyr Zelensky after the inconclusive conversation between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, thought to be the last Battle of Britain pilot, died aged 105. The government faced resentment in its own party against welfare cuts outlined by Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary: the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments would be tightened; incapacity benefits under universal credit would be frozen for existing claimants

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ukraine is just one part of Trump’s Great Game

Washington D.C. For Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, it’s a case of today Ukraine, tomorrow the world. In their much-hyped telephone call this week, the Russian leader didn’t appear to give much away: a step towards a sort-of ceasefire, a prisoner swap and a few other bits and bobs. But Putin knows that Trump wants a lot more than just an agreement on the Donbas. Settling the most significant conflict in Europe since the second world war is merely a prelude to a much bigger deal in the Holy Land, a truly historic arrangement that could satisfy the Donald’s desire to be thought of as a peace legend. That’s why

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Putin is outwitting Trump

In the incessant conflicts of life and politics, people who know what they want tend to win. That is why Stalin won at Yalta and why, despite the extreme disadvantages of his country’s polity and economy compared with those of the United States, Vladimir Putin is outwitting Donald Trump. He wants Ukraine (and has related revanchist imperial ambitions), and has spent many years working out how to get it. His probing has taught him just how much both the United States and Europe, in their different ways, do not know what they want. The only real mistake Putin made was to think that Ukraine itself did not know what it

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Trump wants Putin to win

It is meet, right and our bounden duty to begin any column about Ukraine with a vigorous expression of the columnist’s distaste for the President and Vice-President of the United States. Consider that done. Donald Trump is a slob, a bully and a liar: a person of low character. J.D. Vance is a nasty and morally confused little snake: a thug’s venomous sidekick. It is also an appropriate preliminary courtesy to state without hesitation that Volodymyr Zelensky is a brave and inspirational warrior whose personal qualities set his country firmly on the path of resistance to an unprovoked attack. Done. And, finally, it is necessary if superfluous to repeat that Vladimir

The Spectator

Letters: Wokery is a form of dictatorship

Democracy rules Sir: I share the sentiments of both Rod Liddle (‘Trump displays weakness, not strength’, 8 March) and Douglas Murray (‘How MAGA turned on Ukraine’). I am one of those peculiar political animals who finds himself in agreement with certain elements of the right, including those represented by Donald Trump, on just about everything except Ukraine. Nevertheless, I see his election as an essential antidote to the poisonous ideology of the woke that has all but conquered the rest of the West in terms of the manner in which we live and are governed. Nor is the US immune. Without wishing to quibble with a courageous and eloquent speaker

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spies in Norfolk, rats in Birmingham and Denmark ditches letter deliveries

Home Three Bulgarians were found guilty of spying for Russia as part of a cell that plotted to kidnap and kill targets in Europe, under a fellow Bulgarian who lived in a former guest house in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The court heard that the spies reported to Austrian-born Jan Marsalek, who sought refuge in Moscow after the collapse in 2020 of Wirecard, the German payments company he helped run. Walgreens Boots Alliance, the US owner of Boots the chemist, was taken over by a private equity firm, Sycamore Partners. The government introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will enable councils to seize land. The cost of a first-class stamp

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Trump has breathed new life into Davos Man

So bad was the debut of this Labour government that many think it has already failed. But now, I suggest, there is at least a chance it will succeed. If it leads industrial recovery based on defence and security, tackles the flawed basis of large areas of welfare spending and sweeps away planning restrictions to build more, it will have confronted problems which the Tories evaded for years. Labour can do this, of course, only if it abjures the beliefs that Sir Keir Starmer has espoused throughout his political career, but that seems to be exactly what his managers, led by Morgan McSweeney, are now (rightly) forcing upon him. Rupert

Wednesday

Oscar Edmondson

Has Ukraine called Putin’s bluff?

12 min listen

Last night there was a huge breakthrough in Ukraine peace talks, with Zelensky accepting a US proposal for a ceasefire and placing ‘the ball in Putin’s court’, according to Marco Rubio. While getting Zelensky to accept is a huge diplomatic win, the proposal hinges on Putin agree to the terms of the ceasefire – which will last for 30 days but can be extended by mutual agreement. ‘I’ll talk to Vladimir Putin. It takes two to tango,’ said Donald Trump. Can Putin afford to reject the deal? And could this be the basis for a lasting peace? Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has been getting a lot of credit for his role

Vazha Tavberidze

Oleksii Reznikov: ‘Trump and Zelensky fall-out was a clash of emotions’

‘What just happened – the suspension of military aid – was predictable. I expected it. It wasn’t too hard to predict,’ the former Ukrainian defence minister tells me. Oleksii Reznikov, speaking to me from Kyiv and wearing a ‘Saint Himars’ T-shirt, remains as upbeat as ever, chuckling as he recalls how, back in 2022, Ukraine was supposed to fall in three days. ‘We knew we wouldn’t. It was a matter of survival – three days became three weeks, three months, and now three years. These current events? Just another phase. We have tough negotiations ahead. This isn’t a two-player game – it’s multilateral, with competing interests and big personalities.’ Back

Michael Evans

Why Putin could reject a ceasefire

With all the good news coming out of the Jeddah talks about a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, there is only one question that needs to be answered: will President Putin be interested in any sort of deal right now? President Trump is convinced that Putin wants peace. But if the Russian leader really wants to bring his war to an end, will he do so on America’s terms, or wait until he has fulfilled one of his main objectives: the total subjugation of the four provinces in eastern Ukraine that he claimed he had annexed in the first seven months of the invasion? At a ceremony in St George’s Hall

Monday

Michael Evans

What Zelensky needs to do in Saudi Arabia

President Volodymyr Zelensky needs all the advice he can get, as he prepares for talks with American negotiators in Saudi Arabia tomorrow. A statement over the weekend from the Ukrainian presidential office disclosed that the latest western visitor to make the long train ride into Kyiv was Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s national security adviser and veteran crisis negotiator. The meeting between Powell and Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office, provided further evidence that the UK is currently attempting to play an influential role in moderating what might seem, at present, to be a one-sided effort by the US to bludgeon the Ukrainian president into signing a deal to

Thursday

William Moore

Why Ukraine’s minerals matter, the NHS’s sterilisation problem & remembering the worst poet in history

42 min listen

This week: the carve-up of Ukraine’s natural resources From the success of Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington to the squabbling we saw in the Oval Office and the breakdown of security guarantees for Ukraine – we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of geopolitics in the last week, say Niall Ferguson and Nicholas Kulish in this week’s cover piece. They argue that what Donald Trump is really concerned with when it comes to Ukraine is rare earth minerals – which Ukraine has in abundance under its soil. The conventional wisdom is that the US is desperately short of these crucial minerals and, as Niall and Nicholas point

Douglas Murray

The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right – when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this you have to go way, way back to Donald J. Trump’s first term in office. In that time Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice-president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The weakness of Donald Trump

Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside from away from places. It is somewhere in middle England, where the West Country merges into the Midlands and the north into the south: it is essentially delocated, it is nowhere. There are 15 or so deserted light industrial units, vast metal hangars for storing stuff, acres of car-parking spaces and a few trees suffering from rickets or polio. There are also huge and very bright lamps shining in through my hotel window, betraying no evidence of their purpose other than to keep me awake, and in the foreground a

Harry Cole

My faux pas with Washington’s most eligible bachelorette

To the Queen Anne splendour of the British ambassador’s residence in Washington for Peter Mandelson’s welcome party as our man in D.C. Downing Street did their utmost to stop lobby hacks from attending since they didn’t want us to report anything that might distract from Keir Starmer’s ring-kissing at the White House the next day. The PM’s make-or-break meeting with The Don clearly weighed on his mind. On the plane over, he looked almost ill at the prospect. Yet by the time he landed he was cracking jokes, air-kissing Tina Brown and bantering with FBI director Kash Patel – a Liverpool fan – about football. Oh, and as for Peter’s

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Starmer is the unlikely hero of the hour. Can it last?

When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed politicians in the UK, who are still playing catch-up with the President’s first 43 days. This week, Trump proved yet again that he is the biggest force in British politics. His blow-up with Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, threats of a trade war and the disparaging comments by his Vice-President, J.D. Vance, about European countries that haven’t ‘fought a war in 30 or 40 years’ dominated Westminster. Amid all the noise, UK party leaders have been drawn into new positions. Despite his close links to Team Trump, Reform’s Nigel

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The bully-boy tactics of Trump and J.D. Vance

Just before Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a ‘friendship without limits’. The phrase seems to apply equally well to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Has Trump ever breathed a word of serious criticism of Putin, questioned his democratic mandate, challenged his right to invade an independent country, condemned his kidnapping of children? Before his inauguration, Trump stepped in on behalf of ‘the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely and against their will in the Middle East’. He warned Hamas that there ‘would be ALL HELL to PAY’ for the perpetrators and that they must ‘RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!’. But although Ukraine is,

Niall Ferguson and Nick Kumleben

Dirty deal: what Trump really wants from Ukraine’s natural resources

In Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood, and Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, are rival hunters for stolen Confederate gold. The treasure, they discover, is buried in a huge Civil War cemetery. Unfortunately, they have no idea exactly where. Having earlier taken the precaution of emptying Tuco’s revolver, Blondie turns to him and utters the immortal lines: ‘You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns. And those who dig. You dig.’ This week has seen good, bad and ugly moments in geopolitics. And it’s ended with Donald Trump playing Blondie and