Ukraine

Thursday

Roger Alton

Murray shouldn’t have relied on injury-prone Raducanu

Talk about raging against the dying of the light: Andy Murray and President Biden both. Murray because he is no longer as quick on his feet and Joe Biden because he’s no longer, well, quick. At all. Biden has said he will only step down if the Lord Almighty tells him to, and ethereal intervention might not be too far away, after the BBC’s Thought for the Day turned its spiritual gaze on to the Biden/Murray dilemma the other day. Raducanu’s dodgy wrist was not good enough for tiger mum Judy Murray Poor old Murray had tried to keep the end at bay with a mixed doubles partnership with golden girl Emma Raducanu. But this always seemed like a ropey idea dreamed up on the back of a PR man’s napkin after a few too many Pimm’s.

Charles Moore

What the Tories got wrong on housing

Sir Keir Starmer may be our first atheist prime minister, but his manner in parliament resembles that of what, in House of Lords terminology, is called a ‘Most Reverend prelate’. There is a lot of sonority about serving others, disagreeing well etc. These are good sentiments but, when trying to be good, ‘show, not tell’ is better. Adopting an archiepiscopal tone, a political leader is quickly tripped up. For example, Sir Keir wants to drive peers aged over 80 out of the Lords, thinking this conducive to the public good; and yet, as I write, he is having his first much-prized bilateral with Joe Biden, who is six years older than the Nato alliance whose 75th anniversary western leaders have gathered to celebrate.

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Elbridge Colby on why America must pivot from Ukraine to Taiwan

29 min listen

The war in Ukraine is only bogging America down, says Elbridge Colby, a former national security adviser to the Trump administration. On this episode of Americano, Colby tells host Freddy Gray why the US should – and likely will – reduce its support to Ukraine and Europe, to focus on the increasing threat China poses over Taiwan. Europe, he says, can pick up the slack on its own continent. Colby has been tipped to become Trump's national security adviser should he win in November this year. Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.

Thursday

Radek Sikorski

Brexit has helped the EU

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the country. The British do not appreciate this miracle. In Poland five days before an election, every other fence would be disfigured with photoshopped faces. Our lovely lunch hosts seemed resigned to the coming Red Terror: a purge of the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, a new relationship with the European Union, inheritance taxes. I tried to cheer them up with a piece of Central European wisdom: there is always time for a magnum of champagne between the revolution and the firing squad.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Downfall: how Nigel Farage became the left’s greatest weapon

44 min listen

This week: Downfall. Our cover piece examines Nigel Farage’s role in the UK general election. Spectator editor Fraser Nelson argues that Farage has become the left’s greatest weapon, but why? How has becoming leader of Reform UK impacted the campaign and could this lead to a fundamental realignment of British politics? Fraser joined the podcast to talk through his theory, with former UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn (02:10). Next: Spectator writer Svitlana Morenets has returned to Ukraine to report on the war, which is now well into its third year. How are Ukrainians coping and what is daily life like? Svitlana joined the podcast from Kyiv with Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (21:53). And finally: has ‘cancel culture’ been cancelled?

Michael Evans

Sending US contractors to Ukraine could provoke Moscow

Call it ‘slippery slope’ or ‘mission creep’, America’s strategy for helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion has adapted and expanded many times in the last 28 months. However, there was a golden rule laid down by President Biden almost on the first day of Russia’s aggression against its neighbour. There would be no ‘boots on the ground’, he said. No US troops would be deployed to fight the Russians. Civil contractors have played a significant role in the field in every US war in modern times. But the US is not at war in Ukraine That Biden doctrine has not changed.

Ivan Krastev

Putin is trying to annexe people, not just land

On 1 September 2021, six months before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was speaking at the All-Russian Children’s Centre, known as ‘Ocean’, near the harbour city of Vladivostok. He turned to a topic that obviously haunted him during his long Covid-19 isolation. He told his audience of children that Russia’s population could have been about half a billion today, rather than the current 146 million, if it hadn’t been for the shocks of the past century: two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Svitlana Morenets

My return to Ukraine

I arrive at Lviv station just before 9 a.m. As the clock strikes, the conductor announces a minute’s silence: a daily commemoration for those who have fallen in the war. But it’s observed only by the railway staff, who stand up to bow their heads. The passengers just carry on. After all, isn’t part of the resistance to carry on life as normal, despite the war? This was the idea at first, but soldiers at the front line have come to resent the chasm between those who are fighting and those who don’t want to have any part in the war. It’s just one of many ways in which, returning to Ukraine, I can see the Russian invasion reshaping my country. Coming home to my village in the west of Ukraine, I see how the war is draining the life out of it.

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Inside the debate over Ukraine joining NATO

From our US edition

NATO’s summit in Washington, DC will be full of pomp and circumstance. The gathering, from July 9-11, is intended in part to celebrate the Alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary, a symbolic and emotional event for the leaders in attendance. You can expect the red carpet to cover the entire city. Dozens of speeches will be given about how NATO is the oldest and most successful military alliance in history and why the bloc remains a crucial check on Russian expansionism. Some will even claim matter-of-factly that NATO enlargement over the last twenty-five years — NATO has doubled its membership during that period of time — was sound policy and had nothing to do with Russia’s decision-making calculus on Ukraine.

nato

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why should Putin be allowed to keep seized Russian assets?

The seizure of enemy treasure, formerly known as plunder and pillage, is an ancient tool of war. Though still practised in the world’s nastiest conflict zones, it’s a tricky business within a rules-based international order. The G7’s agreement to lend $50 billion to Ukraine – using income from $300 billion of frozen Russian assets to cover interest and repayments on the loan – is a vivid case in point. And some would say, a lily-livered half-measure. The key feature of the deal is that it does not actually claim ownership of Russian loot – which however ill-gotten is mostly held in EU banks in the form of western government bonds. It merely diverts interest payments due on the bonds from the issuing governments.

Owen Matthews

Zelensky’s peace summit flop

Volodymyr Zelensky’s Global Peace Summit in Switzerland was meant to demonstrate the world’s support for Kyiv and underscore Russia’s isolation. It did the opposite. Russia wasn’t invited. China didn’t send a delegation. Other major countries that might influence the Kremlin – including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE – refused to sign the watered-down final communiqué. According to a former senior member of Zelensky’s administration, Ukraine’s leader had ‘hoped the conference would mark a new benchmark of international support… [but] it just showed how badly we have lost the support in the Global South’. Take Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva.

Charles Moore

Ukraine’s greatest, yet least publicised success

Odessa Our conference here is about Black Sea security, where I am the guest of UK Friends of Ukraine. Its subject reflects one of Ukraine’s greatest, yet least publicised successes. Almost a third of the Russian fleet has been destroyed, mostly by sea drones. The rest is trapped in ports much further east. As a result, almost normal amounts of grain and other goods flow to the wider world. It says something not good about third-world politics that all 11 recipients of WFP relief in the form of Ukrainian grain, including Nigeria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gaza, support Russia in international forums. Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia, gives us a rousing keynote speech, praising Ukraine for ‘defeating the Russian fleet without a navy’.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Antony Blinken embodies decades of failure

From our US edition

There is no sign marking the entrance to Barman Dictat. The bar under 44 Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv boasts the largest mezcal collection in Eastern Europe. On a typical night you can find it by noting the crowd of people wafting cigarette smoke into the evening air. Inside, you’ll find shelves of more than 400 glowing bottles perched above a steel bar stretching more than thirty feet. You’ll find bespoke cocktails — Kraken, Smoky Voice and Tickle Balls. And, on one particular May evening, you’ll find the seventy-first secretary of state of the United States of America at center stage. Clad in black and wielding a scarlet electric guitar, Antony Blinken seemed less enthused about the moment than his staff had perhaps anticipated.

Blinken
war
Daniel McCarthy

What is war good for in the twenty-first century?

From our US edition

What exactly is war good for in the twenty-first century? The US should have asked itself this before embarking on decades of aimless occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel and Russia — very different countries, morally and otherwise — should be asking themselves today. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza both began with changes in an uncomfortable but previously stable status quo. Sometimes Westerners who try to imagine a peace deal for Ukraine invoke Finland’s strategic neutrality during the Cold War. But Ukraine was Finlandized for nearly twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, precariously balanced between Russia and the West but fully committed to neither. No one was entirely happy with that — yet there was peace from 1991 until 2014.

Thursday

Ella Johnson

‘Trumpists and Communists’ on Ukrainian NGO list fight back

From our US edition

A US government-affiliated Ukrainian NGO, texty.org.ua, published a list last week of all the Americans “impeding aid to Ukraine.” There are 388 individuals and seventy-six organizations on the list, including members of the conservative media Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, members of Congress and a few Spectator writers. The piece is titled “Rollercoaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.” “The title of this article oversells the product: it is a substantively thin piece, largely an excuse to smear a large group of Americans who have been skeptical of aid to Ukraine in one form or another,” Senator J.D. Vance and Representative Matt Gaetz wrote in a letter to secretary of state Antony Blinken on Tuesday.

ukraine ngo

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Farage returns, Abbott reselected and Trump guilty 

Home Nigel Farage took over leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice and is standing for parliament in Clacton. This came as news on Monday to Tice, and to Reform’s candidate for Clacton, Tony Mack. Outside the Wetherspoons pub where he launched his campaign, Farage had a McDonald’s banana milkshake thrown over him. Farage proposed net-zero immigration. The Conservatives then said they would ask the independent Migration Advisory Committee for a recommended level for an annual cap on visas, and put that to a parliamentary vote. Invasive Asian hornets, which can eat 50 bees a day, were found to have survived a British winter and might stay permanently.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Joe Biden’s TIME interview: the good the bad and the ugly

From our US edition

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

joe biden time magazine

Friday

Svitlana Morenets

Biden partially lifts ban on strikes within Russia

David Cameron publicly said it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to use British weapons to strike targets on Russian territory earlier this month. But nothing has happened since then: no Storm Shadow missiles have flown over the Ukraine-Russia border. Last night, Volodymyr Zelensky explained why: the UK had not given ‘100 per cent permission’ to do so. ‘We raised this issue twice. We did not get confirmation from him [Cameron].’ In reality, Downing Street is waiting on the Americans, he said.The calls for the US and other allies to allow Ukraine to strike Russian territory with western arms have grown louder after Russia launched a second offensive in the Kharkiv region.

Thursday

Leaf Arbuthnot

My summer of love with God’s gift

When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’ The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t come up on her course.