Russia
The EU is failing to stand up for eastern Europe
Will the EU stand up for eastern Europe? This question is now being asked by Ukraine following the announcement of…
Why Joe Biden’s Russia-bashing is a tactical mistake
You might not think that Geoff Norcott, the self-proclaimed conservative comedian, has something to contribute to western relations with Russia,…
How Macron was outfoxed by a dead Napoleonic general
Skeletons don’t always lurk in cupboards, some of them hide under dance floors waiting for a particularly rousing party to…
Inside a dictator’s playground
Armed soldiers guard the barbed-wire compound. Helicopters buzz around the parameter, drifting above families on tandem bicycles. Groups of giggling…
The Soviet spectre haunting Afghanistan
As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix…
The Kremlin’s plan to destabilise the West
On Sunday, Russia releasedits new National Security Strategy. In many ways, it picked up from where the 2015 version left…
Why an EU-Russia summit was always going to fail
When Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel unilaterally proposed a European Union summit with Vladimir Putin, they managed to open deep…
The real reason Putin targeted HMS Defender
When military personnel talk of ‘theatres’ they mean a zone of conflict. Moscow seems to take the term increasingly literally,…
HMS Defender: What’s behind the Navy’s Russian incident?
Assuming that reports are accurate, the world has just witnessed the most serious escalation between the UK and Russia since the…
How Russia lurched from vaccine victory to Covid crisis
Russia made headlines last August when it triumphantly unveiled its pioneering coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V. But now, nearly a year…
Biden and Putin have left Britain out in the cold
It would probably be wrong to say that Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin got on like a house on fire.…
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…
Where 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…
History endlessly repeated
Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…
Bear-baiting
Sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work
Perfume and politics
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…
Forewarned, but not forearmed
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,…
