Russia

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Is the West deserting Ukraine at precisely the wrong moment?

Moscow is coming under direct drone attack, the Russian economy is creaking, patriotic bloggers are ever more apocalyptic in their predictions of military disaster and evidence is piling up that Russia’s elites are becoming seriously disillusioned with the war and Vladimir Putin himself. Is this the moment for Britain to desert Ukraine by easing sanctions and refusing to commit more money to Kyiv’s military? Last week, the British government issued licences for the import of gasoline products from Russia refined in a third country. No. 10 also approved  licences for British companies to continue to service tankers carrying Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

How Putin got the Hollywood treatment

Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too.  Yet it turns out that TWotK, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional ‘Wizard’ of the title, a whizkid theatre and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Russians no longer believe Putin’s war propaganda

A year ago, Russia marked the 9 May Victory Day celebration with a spectacular display of fireworks that lit up the Moscow sky. This year the fireworks have again been spectacular – but this time they have been caused by long-range Ukrainian attack drones slamming into refineries, pumping stations and factories deep inside Russia. In the Black Sea port of Tuapse, fireballs of burning gasoline 15 storeys high erupted over the local oil refinery, while rivers of burning fuel ran down the city’s streets. Firefighters took three days to extinguish the inferno, which created a plume of smoke so high it was filmed by skiers from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains more than 60 miles away.

Tuesday

The Spectator

A Ukrainian win is more important than ever

On 3 April we mark 1,500 days since Russia invaded Ukraine; on 11 June, the conflict will have lasted longer than the first world war. At that point in 1918, the German army was in complete collapse amid the success of the final Allied offensive, as the Kaiser’s disillusioned troops were forced back through the battlefields of the Somme. By contrast, the Ukrainian conflict remains locked in a bitter and bloody war of attrition. The Ukrainians have displayed an inspiring level of resilience; indeed, in recent months they have made small territorial gains. But the outbreak of war in the Middle East has, for the moment, strengthened Vladimir Putin’s hand.

Peter Jones

The Trumpian appeal of a Trojan horse

Given the tonnage of missiles launched at Iran, it seems remarkable how relatively few Iranians have been killed. But the Americans have no interest in wasting multi-million-dollar ordnance on pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders. However, Donald Trump is now considering a land invasion. That would have been unwise, as the ancients knew. Understanding all about the problems of land assaults against defended cities, the ancients often preferred to lay siege. That could be a long and wearisome business and did not necessarily guarantee success. Troy was besieged for ten years, but it took the trick of the wooden horse to take it. So when the Persian king Darius (c.

Monday

Peter Pomerantsev

With no coherent strategy, Britain seems perpetually adrift in the world

The British state seems perpetually befuddled. Every international crisis catches it in its sudden glare like so many headlights trained on a nervous rabbit hopping hopelessly around a motorway. One moment Russia is invading Ukraine, then Hamas attacks Israel, Israel flattens Gaza, America knocks out Venezuela, then attacks Iran, while all the time China leers over Taiwan. Each new event leaves us spinning. Whose side are we on? What do we want? How do we get it? We use grand words to navigate our way in the confusion: ‘the special relationship’; ‘the national interest’; ‘the rules-based order’. But if these once signified some grand story we could all relate to they now feel empty and confusing.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

‘More than half our squad were executed’: Inside Russia’s rotten army

The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture ‘has shifted decisively westward’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin ‘may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine’. Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The secrets of Putin’s shadow fleet

Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s failure to shut that export business down has, so far, been the single most important factor behind Putin’s continued military resilience. Economic sanctions were supposed to be the West’s superpower to punish the Kremlin for invading Ukraine in February 2022. So how come Russia now exports more oil by sea than it did at the beginning of the war?

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Why is Ukraine trying to cancel Swan Lake?

Two of Ukraine’s most famous ballet dancers face dismissal, cancellation and possible mobilisation into the army. Their crime? They dared to dance a segment of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake during a European tour. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture slammed Serhiy Kryvokon and Natalia Matsak’s performance as ‘promoting the cultural product of the aggressor state’. The National Opera of Ukraine cancelled Kryvokon’s next scheduled performance – as well as his exemption from compulsory military service and permission to travel. If the dancer returns to his homeland, he will not be able to leave again.

Wednesday

Paul Wood

Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland.  Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

Who will rule the Arctic?

In 2007, two Russian submersibles descended from the ice at the North Pole to plant a small Russian flag on the sea floor more than two miles down. While the aquanauts were greeted as heroes in Russia, the reaction of other Arctic nations was somewhat less positive. ‘This isn’t the 15th century,’ complained the Canadian foreign minister. ‘You can’t go around the world and just plant flags.’ In response to the protests, President Putin – then Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ – reassured the world: ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The Kremlin’s plan to create a new wave of Ukrainian refugees

What is the limit of Ukrainian civilians’ endurance? In nearly four years of relentless war, Ukraine’s people have faced summary executions, ‘drone safaris’ where unmanned aerial vehicles hunt people down city streets and constant bombardment of cities by swarms of drones and missiles. This winter their remarkable resilience faces its severest test yet as Russian forces reach a tipping point in their systematic attempt to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure. In each of the past three winters, Vladimir Putin has attempted to render Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable by plunging them into darkness and cold, without success. But this time it looks like the Kremlin’s campaign to weaponise winter may be succeeding.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Donald Trump is confronting a reality that Europe has ignored

Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power, power that has underpinned the rules-based international order that protected America’s allies for decades. Now those allies fear that the rules-based order is as much a smoking ruin as Maduro’s Caracas compound. European hysteria is, however, misplaced. President Trump has not inaugurated a new era of disorder, he has responded to realities about which European elites have been in denial. The post-war international order has been crumbling for more than a decade. And British governments have been enablers of that process. One of the most determined users of hard power in subverting every restraint has been communist China.

Lisa Haseldine

European countries are expanding their militaries. Why aren’t we?

Following America’s extraordinary raid on Venezuela last week, Donald Trump has pointed to Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, as the territory he plans to turn his attention to next, staking a claim he has made repeatedly since his return to the White House. Trump said this week that America needs Greenland ‘for national security. Right now’. He told reporters he is ‘very serious’ in his intent. The US President might be claiming Greenland in the name of peace and stability, but there is every chance his neo-imperial attempts to see off the threat from China and Russia will backfire. Will his actions herald the return to a land-grabbing, power--flaunting global order like that of the 19th century?

Tuesday

Mark Cocker

Global fish stocks have been perilous for decades – so why is still so little being done?

The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of our oceans Rose George shows why. She tells us that there are four million fishing vessels worldwide, the most appallingly efficient belonging to China, the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and the USA. It is primarily these giant industrial regimes that have driven four-fifths of the planet’s fishes to the edge of sustainable limits. Much of this damage was done decades ago. Even in the 1970s the North Atlantic fisheries were declining.

Monday

Christian House

The surreal drama of Helsinki’s history

In 1920, the young Finnish architect Alvar Alto flew over Helsinki for the first time. He was aghast. ‘An aviator can see where the monkeys have been and destroyed so very much,’ he recalled. Alto’s aerial view reflected a story of fragmentation and occupation spanning some five centuries, now surveyed by the historian Henrik Meinander. The capital, explains the author, was bashed about by a series of bad actors – Swedes, Russians and Germans – until Finland stood its ground and became an independent nation in the early 20th century. Helsinki is ‘a city shaped by the sea, a city best seen from the sea’, writes Meinander. ‘Wherever you are in Helsinki’s inner city, you will always be close to the water.

Tuesday

Leon Aron

Trump’s ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine is wicked

It is necessary to deal with criminals. It is immoral – and, if history teaches, dangerous – to absolve them of crimes and reward them. Yet this is how Trump’s peace plan treats Putin’s Russia. In the morally inverted universe of the plan, there is no distinction between perpetrator and victim, aggressor and defender, militarised dictatorship and democracy. Invading a peaceful neighbour with no provocation whatsoever, Russia killed as many as 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 14,534 civilians, including over 3,000 children, who perished in incessant missile and drone bombings of residential buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, maternity wards, kindergartens and children’s playgrounds.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

The path to peace in Ukraine will be tortuous

In order to impose peace terms, you first need to win the war. That fundamental principle seems, for the moment, to elude Ukraine’s European allies. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has taken the more pragmatic – some would say more cynical – view that Ukraine will never defeat Russia and therefore needs to make the best of a bad lot. Trump’s strategy for peace in Ukraine has been to browbeat Volodymyr Zelensky into approving a deal acceptable to Vladimir Putin. In fairness, Trump has also gone some way to putting the squeeze on the Kremlin too, by sanctioning the oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, authorising the Ukrainians to use US--provided long-range weapons against Russian targets, and threatening to provide Kyiv with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine is on the verge of political collapse

Defeat, political implosion and civil war – those are the jeopardies that Volodymyr Zelensky faces as Ukraine heads into the most difficult and probably the last winter of the war. Evermore effective Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure are likely to plunge swaths of the country into cold and darkness. Russian troops continue to push forwards slowly and bloodily in Donbas and, more dangerously, on the southern flank in Zaporizhzhia. Desertions from the Ukrainian army are up four times since last year and the number of deserters now matches the number of active fighters. The US has turned off the money taps and Europe struggles to produce the cash Kyiv needs to keep its war effort going.

Tuesday

Charlotte Hobson

Laughing at Putin is a powerful form of protest

Penal Colony No. 2. A girl in a green coat. Red splashes of fireworks against the night sky. She arrives back in Moscow: photographers, a clamour of questions, what is it like to be free? Meetings, cops, her little six-year-old son with a sparkler, a video being recorded, her mother nearby, anxious. Like the flickering, scratchy lens of a film projector, Maria Alyokhina’s Political Girl illuminates the story of her life from the moment she and the other members of Pussy Riot were let out of prison in 2013 until, in 2022, she finally fled Russia disguised as a delivery driver. Nine years of fighting the slowly tightening noose of Putin’s regime with an endless, almost crazed persistence.