Vladimir putin

The universal corruption of the Russian elite suits Vladimir Putin. When everyone has a skeleton in their closet, power rests with whoever decides which closets get searched. The arrest on corruption charges of Timur Ivanov, deputy minister of defence, is noteworthy not because he was infamously corrupt, but because it raises the question: why him, why now? This could be the start of a ‘ditch Shoigu’ campaign by his enemies Ivanov was well known for his lavish lifestyle and his reputation as the ‘king of the kickback.’ Since 2016, he had been in charge of the Defence Ministry’s property portfolio, construction projects and medical services.

Political commentators and mainstream journalists are apoplectic over remarks former president Donald Trump made at a rally in Ohio over the weekend. Speaking to supporters on behalf of Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, Trump warned that if President Joe Biden is reelected in November the auto industry would face a “bloodbath.’”“We’re gonna put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not gonna be able to sell those guys, if I get elected! Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it,” he said. “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.

There is a lot of war fever about. In January, Grant Shapps, Britain’s tiggerish defence secretary, said the UK was in a ‘pre-war’ period. The West’s adversaries in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are mobilising, he said. Not wanting to be outdone, Shapps’s Labour shadow John Healey wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘If Putin wins, he will not stop at Ukraine.’ Timescales for when this conflict will come vary. Shapps said it could come within the next five years, whereas the estimates of European politicians range from three to eight years. Nato’s top military official warned that Europeans must be ready for a conflict with Russia within two decades. An Estonian military officer told Sky News that war with Russia was a matter of ‘when, not if.

It’s been almost twenty-four hours since President Joe Biden trotted out to the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room to deliver remarks about Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s retention of classified documents. If you’d like a recap of how that went, you can read my piece here. It’s safe to say that, with the exception of a few shameless administration apologists, DC collectively saw the press conference as an absolute trainwreck. Now, journalists are trying to get to the bottom of who planned the ill-fated public appearance for the president. Was it the president himself, furious at Hur’s report, who demanded he appear in a previously unscheduled event that was announced fifteen minutes prior to its start time?

Last week's White House announcement that it was pausing new permits for exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is a desperate move by a desperate president. Its principal beneficiaries are likely to be Vladimir Putin and Hamas-harboring Qatar, rather than Joe Biden’s faltering re-election campaign. The president’s political calculation is overt. “We will heed the calls of young people and frontline communities who are using who are using their voices to demand action,” Biden says. “The pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”  From a national security perspective, the pause is extraordinarily damaging.

A primetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.   Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same.

Lauren Boebert first gained notoriety back in 2019 as the pint-sized, gun-toting citizen who confronted Beto O’Rourke over his “hell yes” pledge to take our AR-15s and AK-47s. Since then, of course, Boebert has been elected twice to the US House of Representatives, where her behavior — “clashing with Capitol Police after setting off metal detectors,” feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor — habitually makes headlines.   Yesterday, news broke that Boebert and a companion had been escorted out of a musical adaptation of Beetlejuice in Denver for “vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.

With the reported arrest on Friday of Igor Girkin (aka ‘Strelkov’ or ‘Igor the Terrible’) the career of one of the Russia-Ukraine war’s most infamous, larger-than-life characters may finally have hit a dead end. Girkin, the career-killer with the sensitive face and soulful eyes, has played numerous parts in his time: activist, blogger, FSB colonel, executioner, convicted war criminal and eternal thorn in the side of the Russian Ministry of Defence. A self-professed nationalist, and founder member of the ‘Club of Angry Patriots’, he has consistently lambasted Putin’s ‘special military operation’ for its failures and perceived half-measures, calling repeatedly for martial law and mass-mobilisation to avert a likely defeat.