Russia

On 11 August, at Russia’s initiative, an ‘extended troika’ will meet in Doha, Qatar to take stock of the Taleban’s major offensive to take over Afghanistan. The United States, scheduled to withdraw its forces by the end of this month, has been invited to this ‘Moscow format’, as have China and Pakistan. As of yesterday, the violent Islamist group had taken control of six provincial capitals in Afghanistan – though not the most important cities in the country. The US negotiator at Doha, Zalmay Khalilzad has warned that ‘a Taleban government that comes to power through force in Afghanistan will not be recognised.’ But so far the militants have refused to engage in negotiations with the elected Afghan government.

The Tokyo Olympics are over and fifth place in the medals table went to the ‘ROC’, the Russian Olympic Committee. Rather than being punished for its state-run doping programme, Russia has turned it into a perverse triumph, illustrating the weakness of sanctions as a way of trying to shape international behaviour. Of course, Moscow denied systematic cheating, but after the World Anti-Doping agency imposed a four-year ban in 2019, reduced to two years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020, they were forced to accept that if Russian athletes were going to compete, they could not do so under their own flag. They hardly went deep undercover, though. At the 2018 PyeongChang winter Olympics, they wore plain grey uniforms and took the podium to the Olympic anthem.

Will the EU stand up for eastern Europe? This question is now being asked by Ukraine following the announcement of a deal between Germany and the USA which paves the way for the completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and western Europe. The deal reached by Merkel and Biden may have placated critics in Washington, but it has failed to allay eastern European concerns over the security implications of the project. The state most affected by Nord Stream 2, Ukraine, has now requested urgent consultations with the European Commission and the German government, adding an air of legal weight to its complaints by invoking provisions of its ‘Association Agreement’ with the EU.

Skeletons don’t always lurk in cupboards, some of them hide under dance floors waiting for a particularly rousing party to dislodge them. Such is the story of one of Napoleon’s favourite generals, César Charles Étienne Gudin de La Sablonnière, whose missing remains were discovered under a dance floor in Smolensk in 2019, over 200 years after his death from a cannonball during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Yesterday, his one-legged skeleton was repatriated to France via a private jet chartered by the Russian oligarch, Andrei Kozitsyn. Not a bad way to travel for a Napoleonic soldier. The discovery of Gudin’s remains and their passage home unearths some complicated truths for President Macron.

Armed soldiers guard the barbed-wire compound. Helicopters buzz around the parameter, drifting above families on tandem bicycles. Groups of giggling bridal parties flirt with camouflaged guards. They watch on, careful to spot the light-fingered. This is Mezhyhirya, the former playground of exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. The estate has been open to the public since the former communist fled to Russia in 2014 after a pro-western revolution. Adverts peddle the autocrat's theme park as a pleasant family day out: a museum, wedding venue, water park and zoo. It's as though a group of terrified architects asked Yanukovych, 'What style would you like? Classical? Alpine? Baroque?' and the reply had simply been, 'Yes' Top of the bill is the main house, a bizarre building.

As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation. It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet forces rolled into Afghanistan. The idea was that by installing a new leader and mounting a brief show of force, the rebels would be intimidated back into line. Six months, the old men in the Kremlin told themselves, that is all it would take. And so began a vicious ten-year war that saw the deaths of 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

On Sunday, Russia released its new National Security Strategy. In many ways, it picked up from where the 2015 version left off — on a crusade to politicise and polarise every aspect of Russian culture. This is not a strategy for the country’s security but for the government: the document sets out to mobilise the Russian nation, even Russian identity itself, against western bogeymen at home and abroad. Apart from some more sober references to ecology and partnership with China, most of the strategy reads as a paranoid diatribe against Russia’s oft-cited ‘internal and external enemies’. They loom large on nearly every page, lurking within discussions of national interest, societal cohesion, economics and strategic stability.

In May 2017, TIME magazine published a cover showing the White House being infected and taken over by Russian onion domes. The image meant to suggest that Donald Trump was a sleeper agent on behalf of Vladimir Putin. This sort of thinking was the driving force behind four years of media hysterics and seemingly endless cable news segments portraying Trump as a Russian puppet. ​With Joe Biden, naturally, the media has adopted a distinctly different tone — especially when it comes to the President’s relations with Russia: this despite six months of Team Biden’s complacency towards Russia, bad actors and even Putin himself. Gone are the accusations of ransom and pee tapes, or treachery — even as Russia makes aggressive moves on the world stage and towards the United States.

When Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel unilaterally proposed a European Union summit with Vladimir Putin, they managed to open deep fault lines in the continent over the EU’s Russia policy. Soon afterwards, Macron and Merkel were forced into an embarrassing reversal, largely by the countries of Central Europe, and had to cancel the proposed summit. In the process the two world leaders highlighted that this was not the right time for a summit, that the EU is divided over Russia, and that this kind of initiative plays into Russia’s misunderstanding of the Union. The suspicion must be that Macron and Merkel wanted to emulate the success of Joseph Biden’s recent meeting with Putin. It certainly did not seem like they had a specific and sensible agenda in mind.

Assuming that reports are accurate, the world has just witnessed the most serious escalation between the UK and Russia since the poisoning of Sergei Skripal three years ago. Russian bombs and gunfire were reportedly discharged near HMS Defender, currently patrolling the Black Sea. The Kremlin has justified the supposed aggression by stating that the ship had strayed into Russian waters. The UK, meanwhile, has denied that any such incident took place.  https://twitter.com/DefenceHQPress/status/1407670812262518785?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Russia's justification, if indeed it did what it claims it did, is based on a false premise. The coastline in question does not, in fact, belong to Russia — Defender was positioned off the Crimean peninsula.

Russia made headlines last August when it triumphantly unveiled its pioneering coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V. But now, nearly a year on, it has a more dubious claim to fame – as the anti-vax capital of the world. For months now, sparkling clean pop-up clinics offering jabs to the public, with no appointment needed, have been open for business in shopping centres and food halls across the country. With three domestic formulas approved and millions of vials in reserve, there is no shortage of doses for anyone who wants one. And yet, Russians just aren't signing up.  New data from research giant Morning Consult, based on 75,000 weekly interviews with people across the globe, has found the nation has the highest level of vaccine scepticism of anywhere surveyed.