Putin

Vladimir Putin’s spies have a dizzying variety of weapons at their disposal. This week Britain learned of a new one: Novichok, a nerve agent used in an attempt on the life of a former Russian intelligence officer in Salisbury. But Putin’s real power, far more dangerous than all the rockets and poisons in his arsenals, lies in his toxic ability to corrode truth. Putin lies, barefacedly and repeatedly. So do his acolytes. Even when the forensic evidence is massive and incontrovertible, Putin tells palpable falsehoods with easy fluency. In March 2014 he insisted that there were no Russian troops in Crimea, claiming that ‘anyone could buy’ Russian military uniforms. Within a month, he publicly thanked the troops that had participated in the annexation.

‘Any fool can commit murder, but it takes an artist to make it look like suicide’ the KGB used to say. But whoever put Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in hospital was rather less subtle: police have identified 240 potential witnesses, according to Amber Rudd, and have extensive CCTV coverage to go through.  I write in The Sun this morning that anyone capable of getting hold of the nerve agent used was capable of killing him in a far more subtle manner - with no witnesses and nothing in CCTV. Whoever carried out the attack on Skripal wanted to send a message. They wanted to prove that enemies of Russia are not safe wherever they may be.

The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight from a cold war thriller. Unfortunately, though, the case is not going to be solved in 500 pages — nor will it be solved by June, when the Foreign Secretary has threatened to withdraw a British delegation of dignitaries, if not the English team, from the opening ceremony of the World Cup. It was inevitable, as soon as Sergei Skripal was taken acutely ill on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. He did, after all, pass a law to give the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB, powers to execute enemies of the Russian state on foreign soil.

Next week at Davos, world leaders – including President Trump and Emmanuel Macron – will gather at the elite meet-up to flex their diplomatic muscles and prove how big a player they are on the global stage. Happily, Vladimir Putin has offered them an early lesson in how to show you're a hard man. The Russian president joined millions of Orthodox believers in plunging bare-chested into icy water – with the temperature below -5C – in a Russian tradition marking the Epiphany. Captions in the comments please.

In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives of Russian citizens — of why post-Soviet Russia, rather than embracing Western liberal democracy, took a darker turn. We talk about how she put the book together, what went wrong, whether there’s any hope for the future — and what it was like to meet one on one with Vladimir Putin.

Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme reluctance—this is the man who threw a soiree in the Rose Garden after doomed GOP health care legislation made it through just the House. Trump, the former reality show star, only turns away the klieg lights under the most bitter circumstances, and that’s what this was.

 Kiev There is no lavatory paper to be found in government buildings in Kiev. Plan ahead, locals advise, if you visit a tax office, the council or some other arm of the bureaucracy. This state of affairs is one small sign of the corruption that pervades Ukraine. Even the trifling sums spent on toilet roll are stolen by dishonest officials. Patients bribe doctors to get treatment; students bribe professors to pass exams; citizens bribe tax inspectors… actually, many people don’t bother with tax in the first place, working instead in a vast shadow economy. Two Ukrainian journalists tell me all this as we sip drinks in a surprisingly expensive Kiev café.

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.

G20 summits are usually dreadfully dull affairs, but this week’s global chinwag in Hamburg should be refreshingly feisty. No conference with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in attendance could ever be described as boring, and although President Trump’s first meeting with Putin will provide the main photo opportunities, there are plenty of other potential flashpoints – not least the toe-curling relationship between Trump and his host, Angela Merkel. Merkel will discuss trade and climate change with Trump – two subjects about which these two leaders seem destined to disagree. No US President has been so dismissive of climate change; no US President has been so hostile to German trade.

It's in the little gestures one learns much about a man, and such is the case with Emmanuel Macron. Since his anointment as president of France last month, the 39-year-old has held talks with Angela Merkel, Recep Erdogan, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Those tête-à-têtes have made the headlines but it's what happened in Paris at the end of last month that demonstrated the steeliness of the youngest French president since Napoleon. As is customary for the head of state, Macron attended the final of the French Cup at the national stadium in Paris. There once was a time when the president of France was introduced to the two teams on the pitch before kick-off, but Nicolas Sarkozy dispensed with that tradition when he came to power a decade ago.