Russia

Yesterday

Owen Matthews

Will the Abu Dhabi talks lead to peace in Ukraine?

Is Vladimir Putin serious about ending his war on Ukraine? Or are the peace talks that began today in Abu Dhabi just a cynical smokescreen to buy time while Russian forces kick Ukraine’s cities to pieces?   Early readouts from both sides suggest at least three new initiatives that make these talks difference from previous fruitless sit-downs between Russia, Ukraine and the US. One is a reframing of the conflict’s solution away from just Ukraine to take in the bigger picture of what the Kremlin calls the “security architecture of Europe.” Translated, that persistent Kremlin demand means the creation of an effective Russian sphere of influence beyond its borders into which NATO and its forces cannot step.

abu dhabi peace ukraine

Saturday

Bethany Elliott

Are the dirty tricks of Russia’s FSB getting even dirtier?

If your toilet is full of excrement that you don’t remember depositing there yourself, you may be the victim of a particularly unsanitary Russian intelligence operation. Or perhaps you’re just going mad. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think. That is the unsettling possibility confronting Finnish MPs, several of whom have, it was revealed earlier this month, reported break-ins at their homes. One found human waste in his lavatory; Ben Zyskowicz, of the country’s National Coalition party, suspects the hand – well, not quite the hand exactly – of Russian spies. At first glance, such reports could easily be attributed to Russophobia, paranoia or simply the poor state of Finnish plumbing.

fsb

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Russians read more. Do they think more, too?

The kids aren’t reading. Across the western world, Gen Zers are reading far fewer books than their parents. Many can barely read at all. In the US, 40 percent of fourth-graders have “below basic” reading abilities, while the same percentage of American adults reported reading no books at all in the previous year. Professors at elite US universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a 30-page extract. In the UK, the National Literacy Trust found that just 33 percent of schoolchildren enjoyed reading in their free time, a 36 percent decrease since 2005. Does the rise of the postliterate society amount to a death knell for liberal democracy?

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Trump is cynical and shocking about Ukraine – but is he also right?

What does ‘victory’ in Ukraine mean – or ‘defeat’? Can there be lasting peace without justice? Direct talks between Russia, the US and Ukraine will finally commence in Abu Dhabi early next month, marking the beginning of the end of this bloody war. As Kyiv and Moscow, plus their respective allies, prepare to thrash out the details of a grand bargain, it’s vitally important to clarify what we mean by ‘victory’ or ‘capitulation’, as those terms get thrown around by politicians observing the war’s closing act. A hot mess of false starts, betrayals, Russian dissembling and European denunciation lies ahead.

Charlotte Hobson

Evan Gershkovich – a pawn in the complex game of hostage diplomacy

From our UK edition

In 2017, Evan Gershkovich arrived in Moscow to work at the Moscow Times. Both his parents had emigrated from the USSR in 1979; yet once they’d met and settled in New Jersey, they were determined that their children should grow up knowing their Soviet roots. Evan and his sister Danielle – Vanya and Dusya at home – had Russian lessons every Saturday, even if they made Dusya sob. They watched Soviet cartoons and read Krylov’s fables, not Aesop’s. It wasn’t until Evan chose a career in journalism, however, that Moscow called. Russia, with its habit of newsworthiness, is the gift that keeps on giving to the international press. By 2023, he was making plans to settle permanently in Moscow. The one thing he was not intending was to become a major news story himself.

Monday

David Whitehouse

Is Putin getting ready for space war?

In a provocative and unprecedented act over the past two days a Russian military “inspector” satellite has been maneuvering closer and closer to a US-registered, European-built, all-weather earth observation satellite that provides data vital for Ukraine's war effort. It is the first time non-consensual close proximity action has been carried out in low-Earth orbit between two satellites. It has alarmed western space war fighters who see it as a hostile demonstration of future orbital conflict. Russia is a declining space power and watches the growing military space prowess of China and the US with alarm There can be no doubt of the intent of the mission which must have been planned for some time.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Has Trump changed sides?

Has Donald Trump effectively changed sides in the Ukraine war? Over just a few tumultuous days, Trump’s already rocky relations with Volodymyr Zelensky have tumbled into something close to irreconcilable breakdown. After Trump announced that he would be de-sanctioning Russian diesel exports in an attempt to lower global prices, Zelensky had the temerity to call him ‘weak’. Trump responded bluntly that ‘it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president’, then squarely (and unfairly) blamed Zelensky’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries for an international fuel price spike.

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Trump’s diesel deal with Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine

From our UK edition

Donald Trump has called for President Zelensky to be removed from office. The US President is furious following a series of drone strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries, which came hours after Trump has signed a deal with Vladimir Putin lifting sanctions on millions of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Trump told reporters last night about a conversation he’d had with Zelensky. ‘I said to “Do what you want. Don’t hit refineries. There’s plenty of targets, don’t hit refineries...” I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.

Owen Matthews

Trump has found his midterms scapegoat

Donald Trump has called for President Zelensky to be removed from office. The US President is furious following a series of drone strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries, which came hours after Trump has signed a deal with Vladimir Putin lifting sanctions on millions of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Trump told reporters last night about a conversation he’d had with Zelensky. “I said to him, ‘Do what you want. Don’t hit refineries. There’s plenty of targets, don’t hit refineries...’ I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine

Has the plague broken out in Russia?

On the evening of Friday October 2, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district hospital in the Russian city of Shelekhov. Her place of work, and the rumored circumstances of her death, have triggered a public health emergency in the region and a slew of questions: did the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, kill Shipilova? Could this metastasize into a plague epidemic in Russia? Should we – abroad – be worried? The Russian authorities have done their best to play down the link between the plague and Shipilova’s death. According to Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, Shipilova had been diagnosed with pneumonia of “unknown etiology” – i.e. of unknown origin.

plague

Tuesday

Elisabeth Braw

Is the West ready for the undersea war?

Last spring, a Chinese icebreaker turned up in the tropical waters of Palau. That was after Chinese research vessels arrived uninvited in the waters off Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines. In Europe, Russian research vessels and navy ships turn up uninvited too. The ships reveal nothing about the nature of their visits, but create fears of impending cable sabotage. These days, Russia and China are also building lots more submarines, and they’re impressive. Western countries, too, are building submarines, and all the while they’re trying to defend their cables and pipelines. Last week, the UK’s 12-meter Excalibur drone submarine used a testing range off the coast of Scotland to fire a torpedo.

Saturday

Scott Diel

Is Estonia really preparing for war with Russia?

“Prepare for war,” was the message from Estonian EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas to the European Defence Agency last year. And Estonia has: its 2026 defense expenditure is 5.4 percent of GDP, the second highest in Europe. Citizens are advised by the government to keep an emergency supply of 21 liters of drinking water per person permanently on hand. A survival checklist has also been published, including ready-to-eat, high-energy foods, prescription medications, a bank card, cell phone with charger and a stock of ready cash. The country’s authorities don’t mince their words.

estonia

Monday

Mark Galeotti

Putin’s miserable election rigging

After the counting of the ballots comes the number crunching to identify the level of fraud in this weekend’s Russian elections. The Kremlin has claimed a crashing victory for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, but preliminary analysis paints a picture of voter disillusion and frantic electoral manipulation. The more blatant the rigging, the less plausible the fiction Putin had framed these elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian legislature, as a referendum on his rule and the war. In a TV address on Wednesday, he told his people that “your choice and your will shall once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our soldiers, that we are a united people bound together by shared values, historical memory, and love for our motherland.

election

Friday

Freddy Gray

Peace in Ukraine – or more war in Eastern Europe?

"GREAT NEWS," hollered @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social yesterday. "Thanks to the bold leadership of my friend, Karol Nawrocki, President of Poland, major progress is being made toward establishing a US Army base in Poland." A lot is going on on Europe’s Eastern Front. The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared around the same time that Russia is planning "hybrid strikes using drones and missiles against countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland.

ukraine

Tuesday

Iuliia Mendel

Zelensky’s strategy is national suicide

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it’s September, and Ukraine says it’s facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

Monday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine is losing the war

Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages. Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff. On the eve of their departure, Trump said his boys would be presenting “a new plan” for Ukraine. It quickly became clear that no such initiative existed.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

What was the CIA doing in Moscow?

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Moscow yesterday, spending eight hours in the Russian capital before returning to the US. Though he visited the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that they had met – though Ratcliffe certainly spoke to his counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, and other top Russian security officials.  The list of topics urgent enough to prompt the first personal visit of a US cabinet-level official to the Kremlin in six months is short.

James Delingpole

The terror of Russian prisons

The competition must be pretty stiff for ‘World’s worst airport to be caught with drugs in your baggage’: Bogota? Miami? Singapore? Ciudad de la Paz? Gatwick? But Moscow would surely have to be a strong contender. I’ve been detained there myself, only for an hour. But you’re never told why you’re being kept waiting, how much longer it will be, or whether this is routine or serious. The young men and women in those oversized peaked hats are perfectly civil but apart from the impenetrable language barrier you’re dealing with several centuries’ worth of culturally-inbred opacity and bureaucracy. And the prisons don’t bear thinking about.

Wednesday

Mathias Döpfner

There’s still time to save the West

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening at all but the truth is that the West has become an invalid. What exactly, though, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not a location. It is not a matter of geography, it is a way of life. The idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the centre.

Owen Matthews

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes simply strengthening Putin’s hand?

From our UK edition

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russia helping Kyiv win the war or strengthening the hand of Kremlin hardliners? Since early summer, an escalating barrage by Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles have devastated oil refineries, sunk or damaged more than 220 ships in the Black Sea and burned at least a dozen large warehouses of Russia’s Wildberries online retail chain. The result has been a nationwide fuel crisis and deepening economic pain. For millions of ordinary Russians, the conflict has finally moved off the television screen and into their daily lives. In public, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that he’s not for turning. The purpose of Ukrainian deep strikes is to ‘undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities’, he told state TV last month.