Ukraine

Tuesday

Frank Lavin

Why Biden should let Ukraine strike Russian targets during the lame-duck period

From our US edition

On the back of President Trump’s victory November 5, the end of the election season will open an interesting eleven-week window. President Biden will assume lame-duck status and be freed from any concern that a more aggressive posture toward Russia might hurt Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Biden might also be considering the implication of handing over Ukraine policy to an individual who has repeatedly signaled his pro-Putin views. Both of these factors argue for Biden breaking from his self-imposed restrictions and supporting Ukraine striking targets in Russian territory during this lame-duck period. Imagine a moderately successful Ukraine attack now, after the November 5 election, on a moderately relevant target, such as a railroad terminal fifty miles inside of Russia.

Kyiv

Wednesday

The Spectator

The top election takeaways from Trump’s beatdown

From our US edition

President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States after a historic political comeback and complete annihilation of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called Trump to concede this afternoon after failing to appear at the campaign’s planned victory party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, DC. Instead, she delivered her concession speech there this afternoon. More on that below the fold. Biden is also said to have called Trump to congratulate him and express his desire for a smooth transition. It was a relatively short night compared to most predictions, with Trump sealing victory a couple of hours after midnight (although the result seemed obvious by that point).

donald trump victory
Charles Lipson

What comes after Trump’s decisive victory?

From our US edition

The candidate who said Americans should be “unburdened by what has been” is now a has-been. The irony will be lost on her.  Also lost was the traditional graciousness — and normative necessity — of conceding defeat clearly and publicly as soon as the loss is certain. When Donald Trump failed to take that step in 2020, after exhausting his court challenges, he violated that norm and deepened our national divisions. He deepened that chasm on January 6 and later by continuing to challenge the rightful winner. Those challenges threaten the peaceful transfer of power and undermine the public consensus that the winner holds office legitimately.  Kamala Harris learned from Trump’s mistake and repeated it.

Thursday

Michael Evans

Can Zelensky and Putin do a deal?

Warring parties often strike deals. Exchanges of prisoners, ceasefires to deliver aid, covert talks between intelligence services – and eventually, hopefully, peace. But since Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops across the Russian border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, there have been no peace negotiations and no sign of meaningful compromise from either Moscow or Kyiv. But now, after nearly three years of horrendous casualties and destruction in Ukraine, preliminary talks are underway, according to the Financial Times, for a deal in which both sides would agree to stop or reduce attacks on energy installations. While it might seem a bizarre development, it’s now in Moscow’s interest as much as in Kyiv’s to end the continuous targeting of power plants.

Christopher Caldwell

How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?

For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own. The next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back involvement in Ukraine irresistible Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian war effort. His patience with this war would not extend 24 hours into his presidency, he warns. For J.D.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Meet the western conservatives moving to Russia

Tofurious Maximus Crane was sitting in a barber’s chair in Moscow when he received the greatest news of his life. It was 19 August, the day Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to immigrate to Russia. Now, the 46-year-old native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, could finally achieve his life’s dream of remaining in Russia for ever. ‘For me, the decree is the best thing that ever happened in my life besides, you know, family and children,’ says Crane, a charismatic bear of an American who sports a long Old Testament beard and perfectly coiffed hipster hair. ‘I got the notification about the decree, and I jumped up out of the chair and was crying. I was very excited.

Monday

Daniel DePetris

The endgame: Biden’s quest for a foreign policy legacy

From our US edition

President Joe Biden only has a few more months before he steps out of the White House, hands over the keys to his successor and spends his remaining days soaking in the Delaware sun. But before he enjoys retirement, the lifelong public servant has a big piece of unfinished business: scoring a major foreign policy win that will secure his place in the history books. Unfortunately, dreaming about being a statesman is one thing; being one is quite another. The two conflicts that would give the president that coveted status — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — aren’t presently amenable to diplomatic resolution. And while Biden and his advisors may be committed to doing the impossible, all the commitment in the world won’t do much if the combatants are intent on slugging it out.

Biden
Rebel
Saffron Swire

How music can be weaponized

From our US edition

A noise booms from a downtown district of Kyiv. It’s not the screech of a piercing siren or a building collapsing into rubble but the pumping beat of electronica. Throughout the deafening clamor of the Russia-Ukraine war, Gasoline Radio has kept broadcasting, mixing contemporary electronic music with traditional folk to fortify Ukrainian national identity. Whether pumped out by electronica DJs, violinists playing for families in shelters or singers performing in the shelled-out carcasses of cities, all is far from quiet on the cultural front of Ukraine. Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance, and music has long been a weapon for these war-weary civilians.

art
Alexandra Bregman

War, one artwork at a time

From our US edition

The chaos of the conflict in Ukraine is difficult to track, let alone to reflect on a human scale. After ten years of destruction and occupation, analyzing the situation from afar is a challenge. For many in Ukraine, art provides a way to communicate about a culture under siege, a sense of identity and a concrete way of engaging with people outside the country. While art can speak for itself, it requires human cultural ambassadors. To this end, Ukrainian nationals and their allies have been working tirelessly to promote the voices of a people under siege through museum exhibitions and events the world over.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Why won’t David Lammy help Jimmy Lai?

As I write, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is flying to China. So I am only guessing when I say that I expect he will ‘raise’ the case of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, businessman and Democratic party supporter, a British citizen. Mr Lai has now been imprisoned in Hong Kong for four years with his numerous trials not yet completed. ‘Raise’, yes, but not as in ‘do anything about’ the situation. So far, the best the Foreign Office has done is to ‘request consular access’ to Mr Lai.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s Nato fantasy

Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month. Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia has never attacked a Nato country, because of the Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Therefore, Ukraine will never be safe from Russia unless it joins. The US government wants to avoid the war that Ukrainian membership would oblige it to fight But there’s a fundamental flaw to this logic: Ukraine cannot join Nato in the foreseeable future.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sue Gray resigns and the Chagos Islands are handed back 

Home Sue Gray resigned as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister. She will become Sir Keir’s envoy for the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. She was replaced by Morgan McSweeney, 47. James Lyons, a former political journalist who has more recently worked for the NHS and TikTok, was brought in to take charge of strategic communications. Sir Keir paid back more than £6,000 for gifts and hospitality, including six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and a clothing rental agreement with his wife. More people in the United Kingdom died than were born in the year to mid-2023, according to the Office for National Statistics. Nonetheless, the population grew by 1 per cent to 68.3 million, because net migration was 677,300.

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Ukraine becomes another battlefront in the American election

From our US edition

They were the odd couple, one lumbering in his trademark oversized Brioni suit, the other ripped in his olive green military attire. The two had been engaged in a kind of mano-a-mano verbal combat before their official meeting in Manhattan at Trump Tower. It was getting ugly. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that J.D. Vance’s plan, such as it was, for ending the war between Ukraine and Russia was “too radical.” Add in Zelensky’s visit to an armaments factory together with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Trump and his flunkeys went nuts. House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote a sniveling letter demanding the ouster of Ukrainian ambassador Oksana Marakarova.

zelensky
Dalibor Rohac

Slating Nato won’t help Donald Trump

Reacting to Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Scranton, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, Donald Trump reiterated his long-standing ambition to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to a quick negotiated settlement instead of continuing with open-ended military support to Kyiv. If he wins the election, Trump said, ‘the first thing I’m gonna do is call up Zelensky and call up President Putin and I’m gonna say, “You gotta make a deal, this is crazy”.’ Trump is often seen as mercurial and unpredictable – an impression he revels in – but his desire to solve conflicts with real estate-like deals forms a consistent pattern of his foreign policy.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

What does ‘victory’ for Ukraine look like?

This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line of a Ukrainian victory remains ‘the occupation army [being] driven out by force or diplomatically, in such a way that the country preserves its true independence and is freed from occupation’. He has also rejected the idea of a ceasefire, saying that any ‘freezing of the war or any other manipulations… will simply postpone Russian aggression to a later stage’.

Thursday

Boris Johnson

It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato

Kyiv The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands. The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had lost his left leg up to the hip. ‘When are you going to let us use the Storm Shadow?’ he asked – amid a general murmur of agreement.

Monday

The Spectator

Trump survives second assassination attempt

From our US edition

Former president Donald Trump survived a second assassination attempt on Sunday, this one at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump reportedly decided yesterday morning to play a round of golf at the Trump International Golf Club and, as the president arriving on the fifth hole, Secret Service officers noticed a gun muzzle sticking out through a chain-link fence between 300 and 500 yards away. Secret Service exchanged fire with the suspect, who fled in a black Nissan and was later captured and charged. He left behind a scoped AK-47 and a GoPro camera.

Thursday

Will Collins

The end of the Orbán era

From our US edition

Over the headline “Peace Mission,” a recent cover from the conservative Hungarian periodical Mandiner shows an awkwardly photoshopped Viktor Orbán mediating between a bemused-looking Vladimir Putin and a grim Volodymyr Zelensky. Behind Orbán, a map of the world connects Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, Washington and Budapest. One of these capitals, as they say, is not like the others. Even before Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, the chances of Orbán’s July trips to Kyiv and Moscow producing a peace settlement were slim. The Mandiner cover, however, is a revealing window into the mindset of Orbán’s conservative fans. The idea of a Hungarian prime minister mediating between squabbling great powers is both attractive and plausible to many of Orbán’s fervent supporters.

Orbán

Thursday

Owen Matthews

What China wants from Russia

On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’ that would ‘continue for many years’. Russia’s trade with China has more than doubled to $240 billion since the invasion, buoying the Kremlin’s coffers with oil money and substituting goods sanctioned by the West. Moscow and Beijing have also stepped up joint military exercises.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sir Keir’s tax warning, Russian air attacks and another prisons crisis

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, speaking in the garden of 10 Downing Street, warned that the Budget in October is ‘going to be painful’, and that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. ‘I didn’t want to means-test the winter fuel payment, but it was a choice we had to make,’ he said. ‘A garden and a building that were once used for lockdown parties are now back in your service.’ Meanwhile, it was discovered, a pass to Downing Street had been given to Lord Alli, the Labour peer and party fundraiser, who gave £10,000 to the Beckenham and Penge constituency party; the seat was won by Liam Conlon, the son of Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff.