Russia

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The Wagner Group isn’t Russia’s only private army

From our UK edition

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. Only one of them, the official Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, is directly subordinate to the Kremlin. Pay can run to £2,400 a month, an attractive offer when the average wage in the provinces is under £600 The 12,000-strong semi-irregular forces of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, officially known as the 141st Special Motorised Regiment but more famous as the ‘Kadyrovsty’, are effectively the Praetorian Guard of a regional leader.

Monday

Chuck DeVore

Russian failure is a lesson for America

We may never understand the series of events and decisions that led Yevgeny Prigozhin to stage an armed rebellion against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s administration with his Wagner Group private military company, or PMC. Prigozhin was opposed to the planned forcible incorporation of Wagner into the Russian armed forces. He also came to be a sharp critic of the fabricated rationale for Russia’s war on Ukraine and the sloppy way it was being waged by its generals, who are more focused on politics than on defeating Kyiv.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin influencer
Katherine Dee

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the world’s strangest influencer

How did Yevgeny Prigozhin, the hot dog vendor-cum-leader of the Wagner private military company, become addicted to the allure of likes, retweets and digital validation? From the outside looking in, the warlord posts like a rich kid splayed over his dad’s Porsche — except rather than a swanky car, Prigozhin brags of the travails of the world’s deadliest private military, replete with tanks and artillery.   The early war days of PMC Wagner’s social media presence could be compared to that of ISIS or other paramilitary groups: the posts had a clear agenda, including intimidation, like the “hammer of revenge” video they circulated over Telegram, which documented the brutal murder of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former Wagner Group member.

Sunday

Konstantin Sonin

The Wagner uprising has left Putin isolated

From our UK edition

Both Vladimir Putin and the mercenary Wagner Group have been dramatically weakened by yesterday’s attempted coup. Wagner’s nominal leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, goes into exile while his group will no doubt lose its privileged status. Putin, meanwhile, has been publicly and massively humiliated, a dangerous position for an autocrat. Firstly, Putin’s famed security forces proved completely helpless during a mutiny. Secondly, the mutineers – whom he called ‘traitors’ and promised to severely punish – will go unpunished. Putin had to make major concessions to bring an end to the coup, although what those concessions include is not yet clear. What is clear is that he was unable to crush the most serious threat to his authority in 23 years.

Saturday

The Spectator

Prigozhin turns back, halting ‘coup’ attempt

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, has tonight halted his march on Moscow, in return for assurances from the Kremlin on his men’s safety. Alexander Lukashenko, Belarusian president, brokered the agreement. Prigozhin has just released the following statement on Telegram: We marched out on June 23 on the Justice March. In one day, we got within 200 kilometers of Moscow. During this time we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now comes the moment when blood may be spilled. Therefore, understanding the responsibility that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and retreating in the opposite direction to the field camps.

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Sergey Radchenko

This failed coup will be just the beginning

From our UK edition

Yevgeny Prigozhin has just exposed the full extent of Vladimir Putin's weakness. In less than 24 hours, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group made extraordinary progress - taking control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of the Southern Miliary District, and posing the most serious challenge to Putin’s leadership. The president did not look all-powerful, but unable to control Prigozhin as he said his 25,000 troops were willing to march on Moscow. Back on 9 May, when Prigozhin's challenge to Vladimir Putin first became evident, I argued in The Spectator against the idea that Putin was ‘in charge’ of the situation.

Coffee House

Prigozhin leaves Rostov

From our UK edition

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, has left Rostov-on-Don and ended the armed insurrection against Vladimir Putin. After one of the most extraordinary days in Russian history, he said he marched within 125 miles of Moscow but said he decided to go no further to avoid bloodshed. Putin, who had ordered his army to crush Prigozhin and imprison his men, has agreed to drop all charges. After a Belarus-brokered peace deal, Prigozhin will self-exile in Minsk, according to the Kremlin. Footage emerged showing him being bid farewell by cheering crowds in Rostov and winding down his window to greet them. A few hours earlier, he released the following statement on Telegram: We marched out on 23 June on the Justice March.

Friday

John Pietro

Wagner Group leader claims Russian forces attacked his troops

The leader of Russia’s Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed Friday that Russian forces targeted his private military company, with “many victims.” The attack occurred after Prigozhin produced a video where he lambasted the Russian military brass for peddling falsehoods about the war to the Russian public and to President Putin. “The ministry of defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side,” said Prigozhin according to The Guardian, “and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block.” “When Zelensky became president,” he added, “he was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.

yevgeny prigozhin

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris locked out, mortgage misery and Titanic submarine search

From our UK edition

Home Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, was ritually buried by the House of Commons voting by 354 to seven to approve the Privileges Committee report that found he had lied to parliament about observing coronavirus regulations. He would have been suspended for 90 days had he not left parliament; as it was, his pass to enter the Houses of Parliament was withdrawn. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, having remembered an important long-standing engagement, was among 225 MPs who were absent or abstained. David Warburton, an MP who sat as a Conservative until last year, said he was leaving the House. In the King’s birthday honours, Sir John Bell, Ian McEwan and Dame Anna Wintour were appointed Companion of Honour.

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Reminders of the Cold War in Vienna and Budapest

Apparently an acquaintance has dubbed me the “Kremlinologist of the right.” Redolent as it is of the Cold War-era drama surrounding the Kremlin, when the West was desperately trying to suss out what Winston Churchill called a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, I could hardly object to this quip upon learning of it. Indeed, I recently traveled to two hot spots of the Cold War, Vienna and Budapest. I went full immersion in Vienna, where I attended a screening of Orson Welles’s The Third Man, a humdinger of a movie if there ever was one. Graham Greene set it in postwar Vienna, which was divided between the four occupying powers, France, Great Britain, America and the Soviet Union.

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Daniel McCarthy

How the Ukraine war remade our world

War has a stronger appetite than any of the countries that wage it. Aggressors, defenders, small states and superpowers are all on the menu. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. The war really started in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented secession in the Donbas. America slapped Moscow back with sanctions. This was virtue-signaling. Sanctions might sting Vladimir Putin and his cronies, but how could they change Russia’s interest in Crimea? The peninsula is Russia’s gateway to the Mediterranean. Sanctions can’t alter geography. Ukraine had a friend in Vice President Joe Biden, and it had his son Hunter on a Ukrainian oil company’s payroll. Then disaster struck — the Bidens were gone and Donald Trump became president.

poland
John Pietro

The Polish miracle

Poland’s Third Republic entered the world in 1989, after a dark period of occupation and oppression at the hands first of the Nazis and then the Soviets. As democracy was taking its first tentative steps in Warsaw, the USSR still had two years left to live and Germany was not yet unified. Yet somehow, over the next thirty-four years, Poland went from a poor post-communist state to a rapidly rising economic powerhouse and serious geopolitical force. Nothing about this rise was inevitable. Human agency, unforeseen events and providence play into every historical development — and Poland’s remarkable progress is no exception. It took leadership, will and luck. A central desire of the Polish people since long before 1989 has been to become a part of the West’s vision of Europe.

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Should crypto be regulated like shares – or more like a casino?

From our UK edition

‘Crypto assets are commodities,’ said my neighbour at dinner. No they’re not, I replied, commodities are natural raw materials that have ultimate real-world uses. Crypto is merely a collection of blips in cyberspace to which adherents choose to attribute value. ‘Just like fiat currencies,’ my neighbour shot back. ‘What’s real about them? Aren’t they just an idea in the mind of central bankers?’ And off we went on a ding-dong debate.

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s nuclear reshuffle is designed to antagonise Nato

From our UK edition

Days before Nato leaders descend on Vilnius for the alliance’s annual summit next month, things will be afoot just across the border in Belarus. In a meeting with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko at his summer residence in Sochi on Friday, Putin revealed that Russia will start deploying nuclear weapons to the country on the weekend of 7 and 8 July.  Putin’s decision to move nuclear weapons into Belarus just three days before the Nato summit begins in Lithuania is almost certainly no coincidence. As the alliance he regularly rages about prepares to sit down to discuss defence and deterrence, the Russian president is metaphorically puffing out his chest to remind them that he is worth taking seriously, actually.

Thursday

John Pietro

RFK Jr. is as mad on foreign policy as he is on vaccines

Did you know that the Biden’s State Department is run by neocons? Or that Biden’s foreign policy is “bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive”? Ask the people of Afghanistan suffering under the Taliban or the millions of Ukrainians trying to fend off an imperialist Russia. They would tell you that that is news to them. Those assessments come not from the soft-isolationist right, but rather from Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined Elon Musk, David Sacks, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Shellenberger and others for a Twitter Spaces chat on Monday.

rfk jr kennedy

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

If inheritance tax can’t be scrapped let’s change it for the better

From our UK edition

I’d happily jump on the Telegraph bandwagon for the abolition of inheritance tax, even in the company of Liz Truss and Nigel Farage. The urge to provide a cushion of capital for children and grandchildren is an honourable one. Recipients of already-taxed cash from deceased relatives are arguably less likely to be burdens on the state in their own later lives, just as the state is unlikely to spend the same money, if confiscated, in efficient ways for the greater good. And to argue against inheritance is to put socialist hostility to wealth ahead of the worthy aim of family betterment. Enough said. The trouble with this campaign, however, is that it’s also a call for a £7 billion tax cut for the better-off, which simply isn’t going to happen.

Wednesday

Charles Moore

A dispatch from Ukraine

From our UK edition

Last week, I visited Ukraine – Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk. Impressions crowded in. Here are a few: Air-raid sirens sound every night at present. Almost no one goes to the shelters until actual explosions start. It is the repeated disturbance of sleep, more than risk of death, which frays people’s nerves. And not only people’s. A woman I met for breakfast brought along her poor toy poodle, frightened after a noisy night. Courage is visible in so many one meets; but a notable branch of it is those who admit they are scared of fighting. I met two such men, so far not summoned. Both have family responsibilities and do valuable work for their country and yet, they tell me, they feel ashamed. A friend showed me the result of his online Airbnb searches in Kharkiv.

Zoe Strimpel

The lives of even anti-Putin Russian artists are being made impossible

From our UK edition

Swift and sure, the guillotine blade came down on Russians in the West on 24 February last year, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The logic was clear as concerned Putin loyalists; cutting them off from western gravy trains in the face of their dear leader’s grotesque aggression made some sense. They could bed down with the devil, so to speak, but not on our buck. So one doesn’t weep much over the relegation to Europe’s fringes of the likes of openly pro-Putin musicians such as pianist Denis Matsuev or the former LSO and Munich Philharmonic chief conductor Valery Gergiev. Then there’s the soprano Anna Netrebko, who, seen as being close to Putin, was sacked immediately by the Met when she didn’t condemn the Russian President fast enough.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Lithuania’s PM: ‘If Russia is not defeated it will come for somebody else’

From our UK edition

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 – a move that would make Ukraine’s front lines Nato’s own. Simonyte believes that the war could have been avoided if Nato had accepted Ukraine and Georgia’s membership bids back in 2008. Before Putin invaded Ukraine last year, she says, ‘western leaders and western organisations were ready to abandon their positions every time Russia was pressing’.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Coronation protests, new powers for pharmacists and Labour gains ground

From our UK edition

Home The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the peace’, charging four, two of them for the possession of Class A drugs.