Russia

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The next PM must be ready for Putin

From our UK edition

Westminster is understandably obsessed with the question of who makes the final two of the Tory leadership race, but today has also brought a reminder of the crises that the new Prime Minister will have to deal with from day one.  The European Commission is calling on all EU member states to cut gas use by 15 per cent to prepare for supply cuts from Russia through Nord Stream 1, which reopens tomorrow. With the pipeline only flowing at limited levels, and the heatwave leading to higher energy use than usual, Germany will not be able to lay in stores for the winter. This means that Vladimir Putin will constantly try and use energy as a weapon in the coming months, threatening to cut off supplies completely if the West does this or that in support of Ukraine.

Monday

Daniel DePetris

Why Putin still might shut off Europe’s gas

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Europe and Russia had a mutually beneficial relationship with each other — at least in the energy field. Europe, a major oil consumer, received reliable supplies of crude and natural gas from Moscow, while the Russians received tens of billions of dollars in return. The European Union imported 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia last year, equivalent to about 45 percent of its total gas imports. There was an ingrained assumption in European capitals that, even if relations with the Russians were thorny, fossil fuels would continue to head west. War, however, can change things in a flash. European and Russian officials now talk past each other, and sometimes they leave the room when the other is speaking.

sanctions putin russia davos oligarch

Tuesday

Svitlana Morenets

How Justin Trudeau caved to Putin

From our UK edition

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West was certain that its sanctions were worth the pain. But there always was a question as to whether this resolve would last once the domestic difficulties actually started. This week, western countries moved closer to admitting it might be too much to bear. At the time of the invasion in February, a massive Russian turbine was being repaired in Montreal. It was one of many turbines used to send gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline from Russia to Germany. When the Russians moved into Ukraine, it was kept in Canada as punishment. Over the next few weeks and months Russia replied, cutting off gas supplies to the continent.

Susan Eisenhower

Enlarging Nato will ostracise Russia (1997)

From our UK edition

It's 25 years this month since Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join Nato. The Spectator’s cover story that week was this essay by Susanne Eisenhower, president of the Eisenhower Group and granddaughter of President Eisenhower. Explore The Spectator’s archive here. Washington, DC When historians, decades from now,  consider the 20th century they will probably be struck by how the major conflicts of the century were ultimately resolved. At the century's end, Germany, the country that wreaked more destruction on the world than any other power, is economically prosperous, unified and firmly locked within Nato — all due to the magnanimity of its victors.

Monday

Peter Van Buren

Why it matters that Brittney Griner was ‘wrongfully detained’

The State Department estimates that more than 3,000 Americans are imprisoned abroad, on grounds ranging from small amounts of marijuana to multiple murders. For all but a handful, the government explicitly states they cannot get you out of jail, tell a foreign court or government you're innocent, provide legal advice or represent you in court. The president certainly is not in the habit of making calls to the Russians telling them to please let you go, you didn't mean to have that vape cartridge of hash oil in your suitcase at Customs. The key to getting the full force of the United States government working for your release is to be "wrongfully detained," a qualification that applies to fewer than 40 out of those 3,000-some Americans locked up.

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

Don’t blame America for Brittney Griner’s fate

I sympathize with Brittney Griner. The WNBA star currently detained in Russia is arguably the face of her sport. This week Griner pleaded guilty in court to possession of hash oil upon her entry to Russia. She has been detained for several weeks now; her and her family have made several pleas to the Biden administration to step in and free her, which they should — without giving up notorious Russian arms dealers or criminals. (President Biden, meanwhile, has been remarkably lenient towards the Russian nationals who use illicit substances with his son — but that's a tale for another time.) The conflict in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia complicates this matter further — once again, Biden and his State Department find themselves in a jam.

brittney griner

Thursday

Sean Thomas

An existential war: even wealthy émigrés are prepared to fight for Russia

From our UK edition

If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the summery peaks of the Caucasus. I know this because I met them there last week. And what they told me – about Russia, the war, their lives since the war – was illuminating. This meeting wasn’t planned.

Monday

Susanne Mundschenk

Turkey’s grain diplomacy

From our UK edition

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is once again using Turkey's geopolitical position for his own ends, this time dictating grain shipments from Ukraine through the Black Sea. Turkish customs authorities detained a Russian cargo ship carrying Ukrainian wheat on Sunday, following a request of Kyiv. The Russian cargo ship Zhibek Zholy left the south-eastern port of Berdyansk over the weekend carrying 7,000 tons of grain, worth about £1.75 million. The Russian-appointed head of the occupied region had hailed it as the first commercial ship to leave a Ukrainian port after months of war. He said this would take desperately-needed supplies to friendly countries, according to Politico. The reality is, of course, that the shipment is a provocative move from Russia given it isn't Moscow's grain.

Friday

Svitlana Morenets

Russia’s referendum weapon

From our UK edition

Preparations for a ‘referendum’ have begun in Kherson Oblast, the Russian-occupied region north of Crimea, according to Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration and one of Moscow’s puppet governors. ‘Kherson Oblast will never return to an environment of Nazism, debauchery, and cynicism,’ he said. A date for the referendum has not yet been announced, but Stremousov previously mentioned that it could take place in the autumn.
 The residents of Kherson are currently forced to have Russian passports or their salaries and pensions will be cut off Russian troops went into the region at the beginning of March. Since then, the Kherson city has been under occupation.

Thursday

Svitlana Morenets

The recapturing of Snake Island shows what Ukraine can do

From our UK edition

After days of missile strikes, Ukrainian forces have forced Russia off Snake Island in the Black Sea. ‘The enemy hastily evacuated the remnants of the garrison in two speedboats and left the island’, according to the Ukrainian Operational South Command. Russia's defence ministry appeared to concede defeat, saying that ‘Russian forces have completed the assigned tasks and withdrew as a step of goodwill’. The retreat is huge news in Ukraine, as Snake Island is not only important strategic territory, but has acquired a cult status as a representation of Ukraine’s resistance. Snake Island became world famous on the first day of the war when Ukrainian troops broadcast a message saying: ‘‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself’.

Sara Wheeler

How inoculation against smallpox became all the rage in Russia

From our UK edition

The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book focuses on two individuals: the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale, who, from his small Hertfordshire surgery, pioneered a simple smallpox immunisation; and Catherine the Great, who summoned him all the way to St Petersburg to inoculate her and the teenage Grand Duke Paul. Despite success all round, though, it turns out that anti-vaxxers are nothing new. After revealing the destructive force of smallpox – in one period of the 18th century, 400,000 perished annually in Europe – Lucy Ward, a journalist and former lobby correspondent, recapitulates the history of inoculation against the disease.

Wolfgang Münchau

Cold war: Putin’s plan to hold Germany to ransom

From our UK edition

Russia has a long history of using the cold to defeat Europe. The winter of 1812 arrested Napoleon’s special military operation. Hitler’s troops hit the deep-freeze outside the gates of Moscow in December 1941. Now Vladimir Putin has the option to turn off the gas sent to Europe – a strategy against which Germany appears to have no defence. Gazprom, the monopoly supplier of piped Russian gas, has been giving Germany a taste of what life might be like, should Moscow play nasty. It recently halved the amount of gas sent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, using bogus technical excuses. Germany, which still relies on Russia for more than a third of its gas, is now realising it may have to cope with a total gas embargo – and a cold winter.

Katja Hoyer

East Germans still find it hard to see Russia as the enemy

From our UK edition

Not all of Germany is against Vladimir Putin. Sahra Wagenknecht, a Left party MP, recently defended him, saying he is not ‘the mad Russian nationalist’ of caricature and sending weapons to Ukraine was a ‘US-driven policy’ which played a role in provoking his invasion. Her views are quite common in East Germany and not only among the left. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has most of its support in the East, opposes sanctions and providing weapons. A recent opinion poll asked whether Berlin should ‘be tough on Russia’: half of West Germans agree, but just a third of East Germans do. Some 58 per cent of East Germans want Berlin to take an approach that doesn’t ‘provoke Russia’. Only 40 per cent of West Germans agree.

Martin Vander Weyer

How to save Oxford Street – and your high street

From our UK edition

Oxford Street is ‘a dinosaur district destined for extinction’, says Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Machin – whose plan to replace its ‘flagship’ Marble Arch store with a new ten-storey retail and office block has been referred to a public inquiry by Michael Gove as Housing Secretary, despite winning approval from Westminster council. Machin points out that his real flagship nowadays is M&S’s website, which accounts for a third of the group’s clothing and home sales, while much of its pre-second-world-war store estate stands in sad need of repurposing or right-sizing.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Boris gaffes, Russia laughs

Cockburn woke up this morning to a good laugh over his coffee when he saw that British prime minister Boris Johnson had attributed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to “toxic masculinity.” Johnson, the Conservative PM of the UK, told German broadcaster ZDF, “If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn't, but if he were, I really don't think he would've embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has." He proceeded to say that the war is a “perfect example of toxic masculinity,” urging more countries to have “more women in positions of power.” While Putin’s bare chest on horseback may be the source of endless memes, Cockburn believes Johnson is focusing on the wrong things here.

James Forsyth

Nato is no longer ‘brain dead’

From our UK edition

Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join Nato today. Them joining the alliance will bolster Nato's presence in the Baltic and make it easier to defend Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The alliance now has a clear, strategic purpose again Turkey had objected to the two countries joining, regarding them as too soft on Kurdish separatists, whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees as 'terrorists' threatening his country. But having received some concessions on that front, Erdogan has dropped his objections. There’s also speculation that the US will sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Turkey in exchange for its cooperation on this matter.

Tuesday

Svitlana Morenets

Is Russian Orthodoxy dying in Ukraine?

From our UK edition

Ivano-Frankivsk has just become the first city in Ukraine to have no Russian Orthodox Church, amid a mass defection of churches away from the Moscow patriarchate and towards the breakaway Orthodox Church of Ukraine.  At the start of the invasion in February, almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches were still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church whose leader – Patriarch Kirill – is a close ally of Putin. Until recently, the Russian Orthodox Church claimed dominion over Ukraine for centuries. The 2014 invasion of Crimea dampened its appeal. In 2019 a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognised by Patriarch Bartholomew – the archbishop of Constantinople and the de facto leader of Orthodoxy.

Matthew Lynn

Macron’s Russian oil plan is bound to fail

From our UK edition

It will drain Vladimir Putin of funds for his war machine. It will bring down inflation. And it might even be enough to stop the global economy from tipping into recession. As President Macron put forward his wheeze for solving the energy crisis this week, he no doubt had plenty of persuasive arguments. He appears to have brought the rest of the G7 on board for his plan for a global cap on the price of oil. There is just one problem. Like most price controls, it is not going to work. Indeed. It will only make the crisis worse. Of course, everyone can see where Macron is coming from. Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, and embargos started to be placed on its energy, the price of oil has soared. From $74 a year ago it has risen to $117 a barrel and could go a lot higher still.

Daniel DePetris

Defending Ukraine should be a European project

NATO gatherings at the head-of-state level are ordinarily placid, even boring affairs. But this week’s three-day NATO summit in Madrid will be quite different. For the first time in twenty-three years, the alliance is meeting as a war churns on European soil. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been an electric shock to the continent’s defense establishment, at least if their rhetoric is any indication. European officials have finally come around to noticing that Europe isn’t an exceptional zone of peace and tranquility, but a region no more immune to armed conflict than any other. NATO, which was straying out of theater in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, is now back to performing the defensive mission it was meant to do.

Monday

Peter Van Buren

What happens to US fighters captured in Ukraine?

Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh are two former American military members now in Russian custody, captured by the Russians in Ukraine, where they were fighting for the Ukrainian government. What is going to happen to them? The most likely thing is that both men will eventually be traded to the US in return for captured Russians. Prisoners are very valuable and rarely wasted in executions unless those carry much more value than the prisoners held by the other side. The deal may be public or secret, and the US can expect to pay a premium. Israel usually releases ten or more Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one of its captured troops.