Ukraine

Thursday

Charles Moore

The West needs to spread doubt and fear

Zakhar Prilepin is a well-known novelist in Russia and an ultra-nationalist warrior in Donbas. Once a member of the National Bolshevik party (yes, the left/right implications of its name are as bad as they sound), he is now a strong Putin supporter. He appeared on Russian state TV last Sunday to emphasise that the Russians should not try to appear nice and humane to the West (not a clear and present danger, one would have thought). Prilepin argued that Russia’s approach should be as harsh as possible: ‘If they [the West] are seriously afraid of the conflict with Russia, of WWIII, of nuclear war or the escalation of the conflict, we should be convincing them that we’re ready for it, that we love it, that we like to make war.’ I regret to say he is completely right.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring statement, weapons for Ukraine and no more free-range eggs

Home Britain had provided Ukraine with more than 4,000 Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, the Ministry of Defence said. Shell reconsidered its decision to pull out of investing in the large Cambo oil field, 75 miles off the west coast of Shetland. The government was expected to put into special administration Gazprom Marketing & Trading Retail Ltd, with which several councils have contracts to buy gas, though it does not come from Russia. Among those seeking to buy Chelsea Football Club, on sale after the sanctioning of its owner Roman Abramovich, a group called the True Blue Consortium was given support by John Terry.

Daryna Kolomiiets

Why I’ve stayed in Kyiv

I write this from my Kyiv air raid shelter. It has become my second home, an improvised bedroom, study and kitchen. For food, we eat bread and borscht. It is a spartan existence, but conducive to reflection. I still can’t get used to the siren that sounds five times a day, although I have got used to sleeping on the floor, in hallways, subways or the metro. I keep a bag packed with essentials by the door that I can grab and run with when the alarm sounds. On the first night of the war, I spent the first hours in the subway, along with thousands of Kyivites. Nobody slept. Everyone sat in silence. From time to time in different parts of the platform, dogs barked, cats purred and, of course, babies cried.

Jay Elwes

Inside Putin’s mind: the lessons of Chechnya

As far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, ‘we are nobody, while he who chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God’. So said Anna Politkovskaya, the eminent Russian journalist, in her book Putin’s Russia. She continued: ‘In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale, to civil wars. I want no more of that.’ She wrote those prophetic words almost two decades ago. A reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya came to prominence during the second Chechen war. Her accounts of that conflict, which officially lasted from 1999 to 2000, revealed Putin’s war against separatist rebels in the Caucasus as a hideous, corrupt sham.

David Cameron

Why I drove a lorry to Poland

‘Why the hell did you hire a lorry without a spare tyre?’ asked Rizvana. Fair question. Luckily we had just pulled into a service station near Leipzig when the front tyre blew. The bang was so loud that the cashier rushed outside fearing an explosion. We waited for five hours in the biting wind. German technical prowess came to our rescue. The mechanic arrived with hydraulic lifts, the correct replacement tyre and near-perfect English. Some onlookers gathered as three of us jumped on his torque wrench to loosen the nuts. Our mission was not going to plan. Rizvana Poole is a Labour councillor in my town of Chipping Norton and she’s the reason we drove to Warsaw in a lorry filled with supplies for Ukrainian refugees.

Jeremy Clarke

The call of a blackbird’s full-throated song

Speaking pretty good English, Dr Tayeb came straight to the point. Was I eligible for the ground breaking new cancer treatment? He was afraid not. The radioactive test scan had illuminated the bone tumours very nicely, but the more dangerous one in the liver had remained occluded. So in my case the new treatment – a series of targeted infusions – could have only a ‘suboptimal outcome’. He was therefore not recommending that we go ahead. This was at 8.30 in the morning. I’d been in a taxi since 6.30.

Taki

In praise of amateurs

Two weeks ago in St Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck, two talented young men and Old Harrovians whose parents are friends of mine. This week I was proud to read the former’s byline and to see the latter’s pictures from the warzone in Ukraine. Good on them, the Fourth Estate could do with talented amateurs rather than world-weary pros. But don’t get me wrong. By amateurs I mean those who write and photograph for the love of their craft, not because it’s their job. I’ve always insisted that the amateur is superior to the pro because he or she glories in the execution of a stroke, a swing, an athletic contest or an artistic endeavour. The pro calculates the odds, whereas the amateur goes for glory. Ditto in wartime reporting.

Wednesday

James Snell

Madeleine Albright was an idealist overpowered by cynics

From our US edition

People die at random, of course, but it seems poignant that Madeleine Albright has died at the very moment the liberal post-Soviet world has met its own, more violent, end. Her term as Bill Clinton’s secretary of state coincided with the moment America, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, sat, unknowingly, at its own apogee. The Soviet Union was newly gone. America stood peerless and unchallenged. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the twenty years of War on Terror that followed, were still unthinkable. China’s GDP rivaled Italy’s, not America’s. Even offhand, Albright could describe America as the “indispensable nation.” Charles Krauthammer had called it early — this was the “unipolar moment.

Alexander Larman

Volodymyr Zelensky’s sitcom is now as sad as it is funny

From our US edition

There are few world leaders braver than Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine's president spends his time holed up in his capital, defending his homeland from an onslaught of invading Russian troops. He's addressed every major parliament in the West to plead for weapons and aid. Joe Biden calls him weekly; Emmanuel Macron has started to dress like him. Given his present international standing, it's incredible to think that just six and a half years ago, Zelensky was settling down to watch himself play the president of Ukraine in the premiere of Servant of the People, the sitcom which set the stage for his political career.

Charles Lipson

How will the battlefield stalemate end in Ukraine?

From our US edition

The simplest description of the war in Ukraine is this: stalemate, accompanied by constant, deadly bombardment. For the Ukrainians, that bombardment is aimed at the Russian military. For the Russians, it is aimed mostly at civilian targets, a deliberate strategy that is also a war crime. Russian artillery shells, cluster bombs and cruise missiles are killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroying their homes, schools and businesses. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s counterattack is imposing huge, irreplaceable losses on Russia’s army, killing soldiers, destroying their equipment and liquidating incompetent military leaders who come to the front to untangle the mess. Russia’s initial war plan failed, abysmally.

stalemate
Seth J. Frantzman

The drone era has arrived

The Ukrainian airforce has so far held out in the battle for the skies. Russia continues to rely on missiles for deep strikes into Ukrainian territory while the defenders have been able to contest the airspace by employing drones. Ukraine has proven a turning point in the age of drone warfare. The first great drone superpower, the United States, used its unmanned aerial vehicles in places like Afghanistan where few fighters had the technology to shoot them down. But Ukraine isn’t primarily using drones to hunt people, loitering over targets for days; rather, it's using them to go after Russian armoured vehicles and supply columns. This seems like a strategy designed particularly for Russia.

Tuesday

Aaron Gasch Burnett

Is Germany already backsliding on Russia?

Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. 'We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,' Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. 'If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.' Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself.

yemen
Daniel DePetris

What’s the difference between Yemen and Ukraine?

From our US edition

Millions of innocent civilians uprooted from their homes. Residential areas turned into dust, rubble and wire. Thousands of people killed in errant airstrikes. Store shelves emptied of basic staples. A humanitarian crisis dominating the everyday lives of a large swath of the population, who just want to escape the shelling and the fighting. This is the scene the world now equates with Ukraine, which has been subjected to a barbaric war of choice courtesy of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Yet for one poverty-stricken nation more than 2,400 miles to the south, this has been the grim reality for years.

Monday

Will Collins

Where Europe ends and the war begins

From our US edition

On a nondescript bridge in the northeastern Hungarian town of Záhony, the European Union ends and the war begins. Even amid the turmoil in Ukraine, the local border crossing is strangely quiescent. The flood of cars from the early days of the war has slowed to a trickle, and big eighteen-wheelers continue to cross over from Hungary into Ukraine. There are only two signs that something is amiss: a small notice on the door of the nearby Penny Market asking customers to help Ukrainian refugees, and a massive billboard of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s stern face, promising voters that he will keep Hungary safe and peaceful.

viktor orban eu hungary
Michael Simmons

How much is Europe (still) paying Putin for oil?

When sanctions were imposed on Russia there was a big exception: Europe was still buying and paying for oil – leading to a bizarre situation. The West was doing everything it could to help Ukraine while still sending Putin hundreds of millions of dollars a day. But how much was that revenue worth to the Kremlin? As sanctions began to hit Russia, the price of Brent crude (the oil benchmark) soared to $130 a barrel, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis: an increase of over 90 per cent. It’s fallen since then but today it's still sitting between $107 and $115 dollars a barrel – well above where it had been weeks ago. But are these price rises making money for the Kremlin?

Fraser Nelson

Boris’s Brexit-Ukraine comparison was a mistake

After years of post-Brexit rancour, the last few weeks have been a striking display of European (not just EU) unity. Britain was the first to send arms to Ukraine, now the EU is (for the first time) buying weapons so it can follow suit. No one forced Norway’s strategic wealth fund to disinvest all Russian assets, but it chose to. Even Switzerland is marching in lockstep with the sanctions. Putin had counted on European divisions, which had certainly been on display when Germany was still going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, in defiance of protests and pleas from Eastern Europe and the European parliament.

Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama on Ukraine, liberalism and identity politics

This week, Sam Leith spoke to Francis Fukuyama – the author of 'The End of History and the Last Man' and the newly released 'Liberalism and its Discontents' on the latest episode of The Book Club. You can watch their conversation below, listen to it here or read this transcript. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btOHGuzdDVY   Sam Leith: Liberal is a word that means something very different in Tennessee than it does in Muswell Hill. What exactly are the parameters of what you call classical liberalism? Francis Fukuyama: It does have a very different meaning in the United States than it does in Europe. My definition of it is closer to the European one.

Sam Leith

Bono’s ‘poem’ was an insult to the craft of verse

Poet', said Robert Frost, 'is a praise-word'. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm Tóibín, speaking in our current Book Club podcast, talks about publishing his fine first poetry collection Vinegar Hill – decades of international acclaim as a novelist notwithstanding. Poetry is a high-status artform, perhaps the highest. Yet unlike most other artforms, very many people seem to think of it as something that anyone can do. You wouldn’t expect to be able to write a symphony, or build a suspension bridge, or win Wimbledon, without many years of apprenticeship and intimate attention to the work of those who have excelled in those things.

Sunday

Julius Strauss

Putin and the Muslim world

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Sunak says Ukraine and Brexit are not ‘analogous’

Rishi Sunak – Brexit vote and Ukraine resistance 'are not analogous' The Chancellor was in the TV studios this morning, ahead of the Spring Statement that he will deliver on Wednesday. Economic issues, like much else, have been cast into the shadows over recent weeks as the spotlight has inevitably focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even today was no exception, as in his interview with the BBC's Sophie Raworth, Rishi Sunak was first asked to address a stir caused by the Prime Minister’s remarks at the Conservative’s spring conference yesterday in Blackpool: https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1505486969094168581?