Sergey Radchenko

As the Russian-Ukrainian full-scale war nears its fourth anniversary, Vladimir Putin looks confident, even cocky. It is not that he has achieved great breakthroughs on the battlefield. The Russians have managed, haltingly, to occupy a little more of Donbas, but one would have to zoom in on the map to see these gains, which amount perhaps to 1 per cent of the (now hopelessly ruined) Ukrainian territory – paid for with hundreds of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers. True, these things are never linear, and no one could rule out that this war of attrition will still lead to Ukraine’s military defeat. Putin probably feels that the goal is within his reach, or, if he doesn’t, he would like us to think that he does because such perceptions – i.e.

After Ukraine accepted America’s 30-day ceasefire proposal, all eyes are on Russia’s reaction. Will Vladimir Putin – who, as President Trump has incredulously claimed, has all the cards, and at the same time no cards at all – go along with the US proposal, or choose to snub it? To answer this question, it is important to understand what Putin is trying to do. On the one hand, he did not spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this war, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives, and put Russia’s entire economy on a war footing in order to claim a devastated strip of territory in eastern Donbas. Putin wants to reassert effective control over Ukraine, something he can claim as his life’s work and his legacy for Russia.

The American President has pioneered a new form of diplomacy: betrayal by tweet. The mean-spirited, autocrat-indulging Donald J. Trump has in a Truth Social post called President Volodymyr Zelensky a ‘dictator’, falsely accused him of scamming America out of billions dollars of military aid, and demanded that he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.’ By ‘moving fast,’ the US President presumably means Zelensky’s immediate agreement to the recently leaked plan that would hand the United States a $500 billion stake in Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Zelensky has so far refused to accept a plan that would amount to a colonial sacking of Ukraine, already battered and brutalised by the Russian invasion. In return, Trump has promised ‘peace.

Ten years ago, Putin saved Bashar al-Assad from certain defeat. Russia’s intervention raised Putin’s profile in the Middle East, and gave him some ground to claim that Russia was still a ‘great power’. Assad’s fall shows that claim was without foundation. Distracted by the war in Ukraine, Putin has been unable to save his client, even if the Russians whisked Assad out of the country and provided him with political asylum.  It is too early to speak of Putin’s strategic defeat in the Middle East It is, however, too early to speak of Putin’s strategic defeat in the Middle East. For now, at least, Russia still has its naval facility at Tartus and an airbase in Hmeimim. It has several thousand servicemen in Syria.

At the very moment most people seem to have forgotten of his existence, President Biden has slowly but purposefully shuffled across Vladimir Putin’s latest red line in Ukraine. After months of President Zelensky’s tireless pleas, the United States has finally given Kyiv a green light to use American missiles (ATACMS) for strikes deep inside Russia. Putin may well decide that it is safer to swallow his pride and pretend nothing has happened Reports indicate that Biden’s permission applies in the first instance only to the Russian and North Korean troops deployed in the Kursk region.

In just a few months we will mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, and has left millions displaced. Ukraine’s infrastructure – in particular the energy infrastructure – is in shambles. The costs of recovery will likely be in the trillions of dollars. And still, there is no end in sight. As the war drags on, calls for negotiations are becoming louder. President Volodymyr Zelensky has been trumping up support for his Victory Plan. The details are unclear – presumably the ‘plan’ is to negotiate new military aid and viable security guarantees for Ukraine in return for the promise of a ceasefire and a probable forfeit of the occupied territories.

It was brave. It was foolhardy. It was almost unbelievable. After his near-fatal poisoning by the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexey Navalny returned to Russia. He was taken away as he disembarked from the plane in Moscow, and thrown into prison on a made-up pretext. After three years of torture, Navalny has been done away with. The Russian prison authorities have reported his death from an unspecified cause.  Putin’s regime has murdered another opposition leader, and not just any. Navalny, like no one else in Russia, stood for the unlikely promise of change. His charisma, his humour, his clarity of vision, and, above all, his awe-inspiring disdain for Putin’s gangster state, made Navalny into a larger-than-life figure, a David, laughing in Goliath’s face.

They say that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon. But, driven by vanity and unconstrained by any understanding of Russia’s history or politics, Tucker Carlson slurped up the intoxicating broth of Vladimir Putin’s falsifications this week in his interview with the Russian president. Carlson took to Moscow well. His Russian hosts rolled out the red carpet, fawning over him with an admiration and servility that betrayed their sense of exasperation at being long shunned by the West. They saw him as a glittering American Prometheus who might just be gullible enough to take the fire of Russian disinformation back home. It was not the first time Putin has played this trick on his interlocutors Putin was different from his lieutenants.

On Henry Kissinger’s passing, Xi Jinping published a letter, extolling this ‘old friend of China’ as a man of ‘outstanding strategic vision’, whose exploits not just benefited the relationship between China and the United States, but also ‘changed the world’. Xi’s tribute reads like an indictment of the current lamentable state of Sino-American relations (clearly by design). Xi presents Kissinger as a model statesman that China would like to have in place of the current US foreign policy elite.  Russia’s Vladimir Putin, too, sent a rare letter of condolences, praising Kissinger as an ‘outstanding diplomat, wise and farsighted statesman’, who pursued ‘a pragmatic foreign policy’ and helped broker détente.

The recent spat between Kyiv and Warsaw over grain – with Ukraine suing Poland at the WTO – has come at bad time. In normal times, a trade dispute (however meaningful for those directly affected) would barely register. At a time of mortal danger, however, rifts between allies are grounds for profound concern.   For Poland’s right-leaning Law and Justice Party (PiS), banning the sale of Ukrainian grain is an electoral matter. With a mid-October parliamentary election it may well lose, the populist PiS wants to appease Poland’s rural constituencies (the party’s base) by being seen to be protecting farmers from a deluge of foreign grain.

Yevgeny Prigozhin has just exposed the full extent of Vladimir Putin's weakness. In less than 24 hours, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group made extraordinary progress - taking control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of the Southern Miliary District, and posing the most serious challenge to Putin’s leadership. The president did not look all-powerful, but unable to control Prigozhin as he said his 25,000 troops were willing to march on Moscow. Back on 9 May, when Prigozhin's challenge to Vladimir Putin first became evident, I argued in The Spectator against the idea that Putin was ‘in charge’ of the situation.