Ukraine

Wednesday

James Comey

George Washington’s lesson for Ukraine

The Australian morning TV host called me darlin’. We’d never met, but she opened with: ‘Good to have you on, darlin’. Be with you in a moment.’ Then the picture went black. When the live show returned to my Zoom screen, I was just another viewer, watching the three hosts seated on a couch half a world away chatting about the charity walk one of them had done over the weekend and the toll this had taken on his feet, which led – in a surprise twist – to a brief discussion of the strange internet hunger for images of feet. Somehow, the fetish conversation segued into a video montage

Colin Freeman

Will mounting casualties change the debate in Ukraine?

At a small army field clinic outside Bakhmut, I watched as the body of a dead soldier was carried in. Two more soldiers followed, this time seriously injured – and this was what troops described as a ‘quiet day’. Ukraine doesn’t talk about its military deaths much and refuses to reveal any figures. There’s little in the way of victim culture here; the emphasis is on how brave its troops are, not how many have perished. Most people know someone who’s died in action, but treat the collective trauma as something to worry about when the war is over. In the meantime, there’s vodka. While Russia has used the conflict

Wednesday

Robin Ashenden

How does the Russian public view the invasion of Ukraine?

‘It’s too soon,’ said an anti-war Russian friend about the crop of books which have been emerging since late last year on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps he is right. Yet, mindful of Lenin’s maxim that ‘there are weeks when decades happen’, many may feel the period since February last year to have been one of the longest of their lives. Amid the fog of war – an endless news cycle in which events pile up, too enigmatic or episodic for the big picture to emerge – one is grateful to any writer who sets out to give the wider narrative. ‘To look at Russia now, as someone who loves

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s nuclear reshuffle is designed to antagonise Nato

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

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rishi Sunak defends Kathleen Stock, food prices rise and AI extinction warning

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, supported a visit to the Oxford Union by Professor Kathleen Stock, who believes that there are such things as women: ‘University should be an environment where debate is supported, not stifled,’ he said. He said in a separate announcement that he would ban companies from giving out free samples of vaping supplies to people under 18. He then packed his bags for a visit to Washington, DC, in the coming week for talks with President Joe Biden. Delaney Irving, aged 19, from Vancouver Island, won the women’s race at the Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling event near Gloucester. Food prices continued to rise rapidly, according to the

Charles Moore

A dispatch from Ukraine

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

The Spectator

Letters: Jeremy Clarke was an example to us all

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering. As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen

Zoe Strimpel

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

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

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Can Trump’s opponents prove him wrong on Ukraine?

Boris Johnson, Britain’s most sought-after Churchill impersonator, visited Texas on Monday to urge a group of rich right-wing Americans to never, never, never give in to Vladimir Putin. ‘I just urge you all to stick with it,’ Agent Bojo told a private lunch of conservative politicians and donors in Dallas. ‘You are backing the right horse. Ukraine is going to win.’ Johnson wasn’t paid to speak at the lunch, though it’s worth noting that he only stopped over in Texas on the way to the SCALE Fintech conference in Las Vegas, where he is expected to receive a six-figure sum for talking about the future of innovation alongside Saudi Arabia’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rioting in Cardiff, rising migration and falling inflation

Home A crash in which a 15- and a 16-year-old boy riding on an electric bike were killed led to rioting, the burning of cars and attacks on police in the Ely estate in Cardiff; social media had said the deaths followed a police chase, which the police denied. But video evidence seemed to show a chase. During the riot, one of the boys’ mothers posted a Facebook message: ‘Please I beg you all to stop and let my son be moved to hospital so I can see him.’ A woman hit on 10 May by a police motorcycle escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh died. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister,

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

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

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

Why the economic war against Russia has failed

There was much mirth in the West this week when Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day parade through Red Square included just one tank, itself a relic from a museum. The inference was that Russia has lost so much military kit in Ukraine that it is a shadow of the military superpower the Soviet Union used to be. Russia has certainly borne heavy losses (although any country conducting a foreign war would presumably have its military hardware on active duty rather than on ceremonial parade). But we should avoid being smug. The truth is that the war is not going well for the West either – at least in one respect. When

Justin Marozzi

In Kyiv, tech start-ups are thriving

What better cocktail to try in Kyiv than ‘Lesya Ukrainka’s Dream’? Born in 1871, Ukrainka was a fierce feminist, poet, titan of Ukrainian literature and the angel-faced symbol of independent nationhood. In this time of war, writers like Ukrainka and Taras Shevchenko, the great 19th-century poet persecuted by the Russians, a man who has come to define Ukrainian national identity and liberation, are all the rage. The last verse of Ukrainka’s poem ‘Contra Spem Spero’ (‘I hope against hope’) captures the national mood: Yes, I will laugh despite my tears, I’ll sing out songs amidst my misfortunes; I’ll have hope despite all odds, I will live! Away, you sorrowful thoughts!

Sunday

Julius Strauss

Should Ukrainians stop speaking Russian?

A young woman called Lyudmila walks into a cafe in Odessa, the southern Ukrainian city. Her phone is switched on and the camera set to record mode. She approaches the owner and asks for service in Ukrainian. He declines. He says his Ukrainian language skills are poor. When she insists he makes excuses, then tells her the cafe is closed, and finally asks her to leave. But unbeknownst to the owner, Lyudmila is a member of a small Ukrainian-language vigilante group. The group, who call themselves ‘Getting on your Nerves’, has made it their business to turn this Russophone city, founded in 1796 by Catherine the Great, into a Ukrainian-speaking

Saturday

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti

After his trip to Moscow, Xi Jinping still holds all the cards

After his arrival in Moscow on Monday, President Xi Jinping said that China is ready, along with Russia, ‘to stand guard over the world order based on international law’. This statement came closer than ever before to articulating his view that a normative struggle is going on between a western-dominated order, and one more suited to Beijing’s interests. As he departed yesterday, he went further: ‘Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.’ Having positioned himself as a potential peacemaker, Xi clearly believes the war in Ukraine presents him with a win-win situation ­­­–

Monday

Owen Matthews

China is playing the long game over peace in Ukraine

At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi announced that his country was currently in consultations with ‘our friends in Europe’ over the framework of a peace proposal for Ukraine. It is to be laid out in full by President Xi Jinping on the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion – 24 February. Beijing’s peace initiative would, said Wang, underscore the ‘need to uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the UN Charter’ but at the same time ‘respect [the] legitimate security interests of Russia’. On the face of it, it appears that Beijing is not saying anything new. Furthermore, both German Chancellor Olaf

Sunday

Justin Bronk

The West shouldn't underestimate Russia in Ukraine

Russia’s winter offensive appears to have begun with a decidedly underwhelming series of operations in the Donbas. So far results have ranged from grinding and very costly victories in the towns of Krasna Hora and Soledar, to an outright disaster at Vuhledar where most of Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade was destroyed, and its commanding officer killed, after becoming stuck and then fixed by artillery fire in the middle of recently re-laid Ukrainian minefields.   Meanwhile, a long-running operation by Wagner mercenary troops to take the partially encircled town of Bakhmut continues, and Russian forces are making probing attacks as far north as the Russian border near Kharkiv oblast and as far south

Tuesday

Steven Casey

Are Brits losing sympathy for Ukraine?

Britons were keen to punish Russia for invading Ukraine. A month into the war, more than half thought we hadn’t gone far enough. That was after the government had frozen the assets of Russia’s banks, banned the Russian airline Aeroflot from landing in Britain, and sanctioned Putin and his cabinet. Voters wanted more sanctions, even if it hurt the economy. Now, though, it seems the public isn’t so sure. Only a quarter of Britons think we should give Ukraine more support, according to a YouGov poll this month. We’ve given it tanks. Should we now send jets? Democratic governments often find it hard to keep up support for war, especially when it entails sacrifices. But history shows

Tuesday

Anna Arutunyan

Why Putin needs Prigozhin

It’s been a tense couple of weeks for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman and founder the of Wagner Group of mercenaries. Russian troops and Prigozhin’s mercenaries have been closing in on the strategic town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, capturing territories around it. On 10 January, Prigozhin boasted that his forces had ‘taken control’ of Soledar, even as fighting continued inside the town and Ukraine disputed the claims. Two days later, Russia’s defence ministry announced that the ‘liberation’ of Soledar was complete. In a separate statement that same day, claiming to respond to various media inquiries, the ministry clarified that the urban territories of Soledar had been captured thanks to the