Russia

Friday

Spectator Editorial

How can the US run out of long-range precision missiles?

From our US edition

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been the world’s supreme power. The idea that the United States could be taken down militarily by any other country is simply implausible. US invincibility, indeed, has spawned the concept of asymmetric warfare: instead of trying to overwhelm an enemy, you prod relentlessly at its weak points. This has changed the world from one in which organized warfare would break out between the major powers from time to time to one where peace has to be maintained against the constant hum of terrorism and guerrilla action. It comes as a shock, then, to learn that the US has apparently all but run out of long-range precision missiles.

missiles

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

A grim turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine

An important turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But unfortunately for Kyiv, it’s not the “tide is turning” in Ukraine’s favor narrative that Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing ever since his long-range drone attacks began smashing oil refineries and logistics warehouses deep inside Russia and sinking dozens of ships in the Sea of Azov. Rather, last night not one of the 27 ballistic missiles fired by Russia at and around Kyiv was shot down. At least 17 people were killed and a series of huge warehouses and major Ukrainian retail outlets were devastated. No grain vessels have docked for almost two weeks as Ukraine's summer harvest season enters full swing By the terrible arithmetic of war, the casualty numbers were not in themselves game-changing.

ukraine

Saturday

Nigel Gould-Davies

Does Russia’s exiled opposition want what’s best for Europe?

The European Union has just imposed a visa ban on serving and former Russian soldiers. Implementation will not be easy – how do you tell if an applicant has served in the military? – but the principle is sound: those fighting for a state that threatens Europe should not expect to holiday there. This revives a broader debate. Who from Russia should Europe admit? Russia launched the largest invasion in Europe since 1945. It is conducting a campaign of espionage, sabotage and assassination across the continent. Its leaders openly describe relations as a state of war. In these conditions, immigration policy is an integral part of security. Europe welcomed genuine political dissidents during the Cold War, and should continue doing so. But some argue Europe should go further.

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

The West has become its own worst enemy

On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in the Syria-Iraq borderlands. It hit and killed three American soldiers and injured many other members of the 350-strong garrison. The attack was a pivotal moment. Before it, no US ground troops had been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War. But they had been now, and would be again. Two years later, a similar attack, this time by Iran itself, evaded US air defences, hit a US command centre in Kuwait and killed six personnel. It was the deadliest Iranian strike of the recent conflict. Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on technology, democracy and national security and an award-winning author.

Wednesday

Peter Hitchens

What Ukraine doesn’t want you to know about the Nord Stream pipeline

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: ‘Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home.’ The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors. It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades.

Xi Putin
Mark Galeotti

China has Russia over a barrel

From our US edition

Vladimir Putin just can’t keep away. Having visited Beijing in May on the heels of Donald Trump, it has been announced that the Russian leader – who has been to China more than two dozen times during his tenure as president – will lead his country’s delegation to the 33rd Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November. This apparent sign of amity, though, is actually an expression of Russia’s growing dependence on China – and Putin’s growing frustration with its refusal to green-light a new gas pipeline project.

Tuesday

James Phillips

Biological warfare is no longer the stuff of science fiction

In the summer of 2020, while the country was between ‘waves’ of Covid, Dominic Cummings convened a meeting at my urging in Downing Street on pandemic biosecurity. Around the table sat the types of people you would want: scientists, key national security figures and officials. They explained that the thing Cummings was worried about, namely an engineered pathogen, obtained or built cheaply by a small group or even one person, was essentially science fiction. ‘You can’t beat Darwin,’ we were told. At the end, Cummings turned to me and asked what I thought. I said that much of what had just been declared impossible I had personally seen done in a laboratory five years earlier. Such work was, and is, openly published.

Peter Hitchens

Who believes the latest version of the Nord Stream saga?

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: "Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home." The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors. It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

What Trump and Erdoğan want from each other

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s attending this year's NATO summit in Ankara for one reason only: “respect for President Erdoğan.” Trump told NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte last month that if it hadn’t been for the veteran Turkish President’s invitation, “I don't think I would have gone to it.” NATO’s summit will, therefore, be dominated by the alliance’s two most militarily powerful and at the same time most problematic members. Trump seems set on pursuing his long-held goal of making Europe pay for its own defense, while Erdoğan is determined to leverage his strategic relationship with the US, Russia and Ukraine to scrap restrictions on Turkish purchases of US military hardware.

erdoğan

Thursday

Alexander Kolyandr

Can the Kremlin afford to fix Russia’s oil crisis?

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

oil

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Putin has lost touch with reality

As dark clouds of burning oil billow like thunderheads on the skyline of Moscow and black rain falls across the capital, why does Vladimir Putin fail to see that something fundamental is changing in the dynamic of his war? Why, when Donald Trump effectively agreed to hand over every inch of the Ukrainian territory Russia has captured and offered the Kremlin an easy off-ramp studded with juicy business deals, did Putin refuse? And why, for that matter, did the Russian President choose to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place? One answer is that Tsar Vladimir is mad, so blinded by his imperialist ambitions that he deliberately chooses to ignore the reality of a crashing economy, half a million dead fellow countrymen and a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

The conspiracy of silence surrounding the Nord Stream bombings

Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Belfast riots, Starmer bans TikTok and Trump turns 80

Home The electors of Makerfield decided who might be prime minister. After John Healey resigned as defence secretary, Al Carns resigned as armed forces minister. Mr Healey had declared that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, had ‘been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country’. Dan Jarvis was appointed Defence Secretary. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said the armed forces would have to ‘dial back’ operations without more funding. Belfast had multiple nights of anti-immigrant rioting in response to the terrible knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Two Ukrainian men were found guilty of plotting firebomb attacks on properties linked to Sir Keir Starmer.

Friday

Mark Galeotti

What Tommy Robinson really sees in Russia

Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week. Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist. Robinson told the Guardian that he had traveled to Moscow “to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilized society here.” In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin’s regime “the very opposite of a dictatorship.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Forever war: will Zelensky and Putin be brought to an exhausted peace?

Volodymyr Zelensky stood proudly on the steps of 10 Downing Street earlier this month, flanked by Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Germany, ready to discuss Europe’s latest package of support for Ukraine’s ongoing war effort. Though the conflict has now lasted longer than World War One, Zelensky is in some ways in the most heroic period of his presidency. Ukraine not only continues to stand firm against intense Russian assaults but also seems to be regaining a strategic advantage with its long-range drone strikes. Europe has stepped up to replace US funding and diplomacy and the fall of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has unlocked a €90 billion loan package. Yet it is also the most sordid period of Zelensky’s presidency.

war

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Forever war: will Zelensky and Putin be brought to an exhausted peace?

Volodymyr Zelensky stood proudly on the steps of 10 Downing Street this week, flanked by Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Germany, ready to discuss Europe’s latest package of support for Ukraine’s ongoing war effort. Though the conflict has, as of this week, lasted longer that the first world war, Zelensky is in some ways in the most heroic period of his presidency. Ukraine not only continues to stand firm against intense Russian assaults but also seems to be regaining a strategic advantage with its long-range drone strikes. Europe has stepped up to replace US funding and diplomacy and the fall of Hungary’s Viktor Orban has unlocked a €90 billion loan package. Yet it is also the most sordid period of Zelensky’s presidency.

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine

Russia is relying on drones to bring it victory in Ukraine

Earlier this week, Ukraine was subjected to one of the largest aerial assaults by Russia since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion over four years ago. Overnight from Monday into Tuesday, Russia sent 73 missiles and 656 drones into Ukraine, killing at least 21 and injuring dozens across the country. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, this strike was retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on a vocational school in the occupied region of Luhansk on May 22. But, as the Kremlin’s war grinds on well into its fifth year, it also appears to signal a step change in how the Russian armed forces are choosing to fight.

russian

Wednesday

Lisa Haseldine

Russia won’t give up Armenia without a fight

Since January, Karapetyan, leader of the Strong Armenia party, has been unable to leave his hilltop mansion to campaign ahead of Armenia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. Last year, he waded into a fight between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the country’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, leader of the Civil Contract party. His call for Pashinyan to stop pursuing clergymen critical of Pashinyan’s efforts to establish peace with neighbouring Azerbaijan was interpreted as a call to overthrow the government. Karapetyan was arrested, interrogated and spent six months in pre-trial detention before his sentence was commuted to house arrest. He denies the charge. How do you fight an election if you’re under house arrest?

Peter Pomerantsev

How Iran turned Trump’s propaganda against him

On 19 November 1941, King George and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Woburn Abbey, home of Britain’s covert propaganda war against the Nazis. Surrounded by a park full of rare monkeys, and among corridors bearing Old Masters, the King and Queen were presented with ‘Britain’s Secret Army’, a fleet of radio stations that broadcast subversive content deep into enemy territory. Sefton Delmer, who before the war had been a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, presented his new German station. While the officious BBC German Service was lecturing Germans about the virtues of democracy and the evils of fascism, Delmer was trying something different.

Tuesday

Guy Stagg

Putin and Erdogan are playing with fire in the Balkans and the Caucasus

There are 34 disputed territories in and around Europe. In some cases, two or more nations claim the same patch of land. In others, separatist governments demand their own sovereignty. Many of these disputes have a quaint, eccentric interest: Italy and France struggling over the summit of Mont Blanc; or Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland arguing over the barren islet of Rockall. But a few of them – such as Cyprus, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria – provide more urgent political challenges. As Hannah Lucinda Smith argues, these places are Petri dishes – experiments in populism, nationalism and covert conflict that are being repeated across the continent. Her book Hinterlands explores several of these blind spots in most people’s mental map of Europe.