Russia

At first, the Spanish marines are just a distant dot on the horizon. A few minutes later their speedboat is on our starboard side. The marines clamber aboard, disarm the irregulars who’ve seized this Romanian frigate, and secure the helicopter landing pad on the windswept stern. Watching from a safe distance, you’d never know this was just a wargame. As a Romanian sailor told me, as I struggled to control my seasick stomach, the way you fight in a real war depends upon the way you train. Welcome to Sea Shield, a naval warfare exercise involving 21 ships and 12 aircraft from seven Nato allies: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Spain, Turkey, the US and the UK. And welcome to the Black Sea, the front line in the new Cold War.

Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen is playing a starring role in a riveting drama featuring the President, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Putin-connected oligarchs, shady vory v zakone-adjacent moneymen, and American and Russian corporations seeking influence with the Trump Administration. For Americans, this is a new lurid political drama, but it’s one London has seen up close for two decades. It’s the story of the inevitable consequences that result when Russian money, influence and corruption slither up on Western shores.

Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, announced on Friday that the Cold War is “back with a vengeance”. Although the US and Russia are squaring off militarily in a way that has not been seen for decades, Guterres is wrong. This is not a return to the Cold War. This is something new. His error is partly a challenge of vocabulary. It may appear pedantic in the context of rapidly escalating geopolitical tensions, but naming a phenomenon is intimately linked to our ability to understand it, and to recognise it as a reality. When Tolstoy came up with the title Voyna i Mir, War and Peace, for his vast 1869 Napoleonic and Tsarist epic, he – like his contemporaries – worked on the assumption that the two words, together, are all-encompassing.

In my researches for the final volume of my Thatcher biography, there is plenty, of course, about the Cold War, and its end. A constant bone of contention with the Russians was defection to the West. They were particularly furious about the MI6 exfiltration of the KGB man and British double agent Oleg Gordievsky in 1985. For several years afterwards, despite persistent personal pleas from Mrs Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union refused to allow his wife and small children to join him in Britain. The KGB persecuted her, and told her untruthfully that her husband had remarried. The family were not allowed out until 1991. But what is striking is that the underlying conversation about wider issues between London and Moscow was well sustained.

Istanbul It is a bad time to have an ally on the fence. With US military action in Syria looking more likely by the minute, and the West’s frosty relations with Russia in danger of deepening into a new Cold War, Washington is eyeing the actions of Turkey’s President Erdogan with concern. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the ally with the second biggest army and the only one to share a border with Syria, has spent the past two years cosying up to Russia. Ankara is part of the Astana troika alongside Moscow and Tehran – an initiative that has snatched the peace-broking lead in Syria from the UN and Western-back Geneva talks.

The latest news from the Salisbury attack is that Sergei Skripal is no longer in a critical condition and that his daughter Yulia is now talking and will be well enough to leave hospital at some point. This, obviously, has implications for the investigation into their attempted assassination. Yulia will, presumably, soon be able to tell the police about what happened in the days and hours leading up to them both being found on the verge of death in Salisbury city centre. Internet conspiracy theorists will, I’m sure, declare that the fact the Skripals are not dead is proof that the Russians weren’t behind this. But given that it appears that the Skripals absorbed the nerve agent through their skin rather than breathing it in, it is unsurprising that it was less effective.