Russia
Why the Biden-Putin summit wasn't a waste of time
The meeting between U.S. president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Geneva started cordially enough. A quick handshake, toothy smiles…
Why Russia and China are competing to woo Belarus
Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko has been roundly condemned following the arrest of Roman Protasevich, but he still has one ally. Lukashenko…
For journalists like Protasevich, free speech is a matter of life and death
Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of…
Russian memoirs are prone to a particular form of angst
Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…
Why sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work
Sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work
The sweet smell of success: the story behind Chanel No 5’s popularity
This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt,…
The Belarus hijacking reveals the West's complacency
On Sunday evening an act of appalling state kidnapping took place over the skies of Europe. Four alleged KGB officers…
Why Lukashenko keeps getting away with it
The diversion of a Ryanair flight bound for Lithuania from Athens and the arrest of passenger Roman Protasevich – an…
A nuclear crisis is closer than you think
It has long been widely accepted as orthodoxy that the world was saved from nuclear war during the Cuban Missile…
Why did Hitler’s imperial dreams take Stalin by surprise?
The most extraordinary thing, still, about Operation Barbarossa is the complete surprise the Wehrmacht achieved. In the early hours of…
Putin and Biden need one another
Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. ‘Mmm-hmm, I do,’ answered the President.…
Alexei Navalny's big gamble
Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24…
Why isn't the West standing up for the Czech Republic?
The discovery by Czech intelligence services that a bombing of an ammunitions and weapons depot in 2014 that killed two…
Putin’s on manoeuvres – are we ready?
‘What follows plague?’ I asked a medieval historian at the start of the pandemic. ‘War,’ he replied. In recent days,…
Putin steps back from the Ukrainian brink
After weeks building up forces in Crimea and close to the Ukrainian border — over 100,000, all told — Moscow…
The rules of Putin's game
What does Putin want? It’s more straightforward than you might think: usually the answer is ‘what he says’. It’s worth remembering…
Can Biden bring relations with Russia back from the brink?
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a depressing assessment on the state of U.S.-Russia relations earlier this month. While holding…
Two spies, an explosion, and the new Czech rift with Russia
‘Putin is a murderer,’ read the signs carried by protestors outside the Russian Embassy in Prague on Sunday. On Saturday…
The truth about Russia’s hidden Covid deaths
Putin’s hidden Covid deaths
The Kremlin's strategy to undermine Britain
The past week has seen the war in Ukraine, which has been simmering for the last seven years, once more…
How the West can respond to Putin’s military build-up
In the last few weeks, Russia has been flaunting its military build-up in and around Ukraine, sending 20,000 extra troops,…
Biden's backhanded bid to kill Nord Stream 2
Washington, D.C. is universally known as a town divided, a place where compromise and dialogue are often sacrificed at the…
Berlin has been bounced into accepting Sputnik
Munich has had enough of the vaccine chaos in Berlin and Brussels. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Bavaria’s minister…
The EU's decline is self-inflicted
In 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, the EU demonstrated to the world its divisions and helplessness,…
What does Belarus's opposition leader want?
There is an assumption that those fighting tyranny must instead want Western-style democracy, that the arc of history bends towards…
