Russia

‘Any fool can commit murder, but it takes an artist to make it look like suicide’ the KGB used to say. But whoever put Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in hospital was rather less subtle: police have identified 240 potential witnesses, according to Amber Rudd, and have extensive CCTV coverage to go through.  I write in The Sun this morning that anyone capable of getting hold of the nerve agent used was capable of killing him in a far more subtle manner - with no witnesses and nothing in CCTV. Whoever carried out the attack on Skripal wanted to send a message. They wanted to prove that enemies of Russia are not safe wherever they may be.

The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight from a cold war thriller. Unfortunately, though, the case is not going to be solved in 500 pages — nor will it be solved by June, when the Foreign Secretary has threatened to withdraw a British delegation of dignitaries, if not the English team, from the opening ceremony of the World Cup. It was inevitable, as soon as Sergei Skripal was taken acutely ill on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. He did, after all, pass a law to give the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB, powers to execute enemies of the Russian state on foreign soil.

Next week at Davos, world leaders – including President Trump and Emmanuel Macron – will gather at the elite meet-up to flex their diplomatic muscles and prove how big a player they are on the global stage. Happily, Vladimir Putin has offered them an early lesson in how to show you're a hard man. The Russian president joined millions of Orthodox believers in plunging bare-chested into icy water – with the temperature below -5C – in a Russian tradition marking the Epiphany. Captions in the comments please.

In the historic heart of Riga, Latvia’s bustling capital, there’s a boulevard that doubles as a timeline of this proud country’s turbulent past. When Latvia was part of Tsarist Russia, it was called Alexander Street. In 1918, when Latvia won its independence, it was renamed Freedom Street. In 1940, when the Red Army invaded, its name was changed to Lenin Street. In 1941, when the Wehrmacht marched in, it became Adolf Hitler Street. When Latvia was swallowed up by the Soviet Union, it became Lenin Street once more, and in 1991, when Latvia regained its independence, it became Freedom Street again. 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of Latvian independence. There are celebratory events all over Latvia throughout the year.

In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives of Russian citizens — of why post-Soviet Russia, rather than embracing Western liberal democracy, took a darker turn. We talk about how she put the book together, what went wrong, whether there’s any hope for the future — and what it was like to meet one on one with Vladimir Putin.