Owen Matthews writes about Russia for The Spectator and is the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.
As Ukraine marked its 32nd national holiday since independence, news from the front lines and the wider world appeared better than perhaps in any week since the recapture of Kherson in November. In Zaporizhzhia, the hard-fought front lines moved a few miles forward. In Crimea, a missile strike took out a Russian S-400 anti-aircraft complex
Yevgeny Prigozhin died, as Macbeth almost said, as one that had been studied in his death. In the last three minutes of its existence, Prigozhin’s private Embraer Legacy jet climbed fast towards the sun, reaching the giddying height of 8,800 meters before parabolically returning to earth, spinning slowly in flames before hitting the ground at
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In this week’s cover article, The Spectator‘s political editor Katy Balls takes a look at the bottom-up reform that’s happening in some parts of the country, and asks whether tough policing is making a comeback. Katy joins the podcast together with Kate Green, Greater Manchester’s Deputy Mayor of Crime and Policing. (00:50) Next, the war has
A few hours after Ukrainian kamikaze drones struck the proud towers of the Moscow City business centre, a Muscovite friend received a cold call from her insurance company. Would she like to upgrade her home insurance to include drone attacks, a chirpy salesman asked. Another couple of friends, out for a walk in the woods
The most impressive banknote I have ever seen is the 500 ruble note produced by the Imperial Bank of Russia between 1905 and 1912. About four times the size of a modern £50 note, it is magnificently emblazoned with a portrait of Peter the Great and a profusion of cupids and classical pillars. It looks
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This week: In the magazine we look at the Wagner Group’s failed coup and its implications for Putin’s reign. The Spectator’s Russia correspondent Owen Matthews examines why the Kremlin permits the existence of private armies such as Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, and joins the podcast alongside Jim Townsend, former deputy secretary of defence for European and NATO policy
Allowing a psychopath to form a private army of violent criminals may not, on reflection, have been Vladimir Putin’s greatest idea. But Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous Wagner Group is by no means the only private army operating in Russia. Over the past couple of months no fewer than five armies have been fighting on Russian soil.
As rebel tanks trundled up the highway towards Moscow yesterday morning, Vladimir Putin labelled the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin a ‘traitor’ – and vowed to crush him. But hours later Putin capitulated, allowing Prigozhin to retire to an honourable exile in Belarus and pardoning the 25,000-strong Wagner force which had spent the day in
Civil war broke on Russia like a thunderstorm, replacing weeks of mounting political heat with a deluge of fire and fury. The sound of rifles and mortars echoed around Rostov-on-Don hours after mercenaries of the Wagner private military company took over the headquarters of the Russian Army’s Southern command. Wagner troops were filmed placing anti-tank
‘Does Putin even still exist? Where is he anyway?’ asked Igor Strelkov, former minister of defence of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic last month in one of the regular video rants he publishes on his Telegram channel. It’s a good question. Since 3 May, the Kremlin has been struck by two Ukrainian drones while up
Some Turks voted for the devil they knew. More voted for the hero they knew. Either way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in the most fiercely contested election of his career last Sunday was a victory for fear over hope, for security over uncertainty, and of the past over the future. Erdogan has, over the last
Vilnius In July, Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte will welcome Nato leaders to Vilnius for one of the most important summits in the alliance’s history. Top of the agenda will be how to help Ukraine push back Vladimir Putin’s forces. But a more thorny problem will be whether to formally offer membership to Kyiv –
Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko has been missing from public view since being taken ill during a Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May. If Belarus’s dictator dies or is incapacitated Vladimir Putin – his neighbour, patron and only regional ally – will have a vast, even existential, problem on his hands. It was mass
Turkey is a strange kind of democracy. But nonetheless it is a democracy where an apparently invincible strongman can – in theory at least – be deposed after two decades in power by the will of the electorate. With over 99 per cent of the votes of Sunday night’s presidential vote counted, it looks like
Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, some of the Kremlin’s staunchest friends in Europe were the energy executives who lobbied for ever greater dependence on Russian gas and their political allies. The war – and the still-unexplained destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines which connected Germany directly to Russia last September – sent Russia’s share
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This week: In her cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls writes that as Labour prepares for government, Keir Starmer is rooting out the far left sections of his party and replacing them with moderates. She is joined by John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair, to discuss the return of the
There was a time before the invasion of Ukraine when even the Kremlin’s opponents would talk of living in ‘vegetarian’ times. Before 2022, independent news organisations like Dozhd TV, the New Times and Novaya Gazeta were marginalised but not banned. Public protest was punished, but for the most part with sentences in days and months,
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud, Svitlana Morenets talks about how the lines between patriotism and profiteering are being blurred in Ukraine; Owen Matthews interviews Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff; and Ysenda Maxtone Graham calls for help from a 15-minute city. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.
Ever since the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges in January 2021, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has fought tirelessly to keep its leader in the public eye – and to continue his work exposing the corruption of the regime. Just under 130 million people viewed the FBK’s YouTube video
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This week: In her cover piece for The Spectator, Harriet Sergeant asks what’s happened pupil absence which has increased since the pandemic. She is joined by The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons to account for the staggering number of children who were failed by the government’s Covid response (01:08). Also this week: Owen Matthews, The Spectator’s Russia correspondent, looks at
