World

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What’s going on with the Russian economy?

The Russian economy is headed for its deepest recession since 1991. That’s the British government’s latest assessment of whether sanctions are successfully, in the words of Liz Truss, ‘choking Putin’s war machine’. As the West’s most effective non-military tool for putting pressure on the Kremlin, sanctions have been under the microscope from the beginning: are they working? Are they targeting the right people? Could they actually benefit Putin’s regime? Indeed, just last month it was reported that Russia had doubled its fossil fuel revenues since February, by some accounts raking in as much as €62 billion (approximately £53 billion), benefiting from global prices driven skywards by the sanction-induced shortages. By

Robin Ashenden

Why Georgia is going mad for Ukraine

Georgia seems to have gone Ukraine crazy since the outbreak of war in February. Taxi drivers have the Ukrainian flag on their dashboards. Takeaway coffees come in blue and yellow paper cups with ‘Glory to Ukraine’ written on them. Medicines come in blue and yellow bags. There are Ukrainian-coloured scooters for hire in Tbilisi and written on the huge city metro telescreens are the words ‘Be Brave like Ukraine’. There is so much glory for Ukraine in Georgia you wonder whether the Georgians have any left for themselves. They might well argue, however, that the two things are inseparable. In a recent interview, the Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili described Ukraine

Dalibor Rohac

How Poland came back from the brink

Poland is back. Not so long ago, the country was seen as an effigy of democratic backsliding, rather than a post-communist success story. In 2017, the European Commission made its first use of the Article 7 procedure against Poland over concerns about eroding separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden warned about ‘what’s happening from Belarus through Poland and Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world’. In doing so, he placed the Polish government in the company of some of the worst dictators on the planet. But within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland managed to

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Were Liverpool fans sexually assaulted at the Stade de France?

The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths. What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Biden’s Ukraine policy should bolster the Western alliance

After the confusion about what weaponry the US would supply to Ukraine and growing talk of divisions within the Western alliance, Joe Biden has a piece in the New York Times trying to clarify what US policy is. Biden makes clear that he, like Zelensky, accepts that the war will end through diplomacy rather than total victory for one side or the other. He says that the US will supply Ukraine with weaponry, including longer range artillery, to ensure that it enters those negotiations in the ‘strongest possible position’. He is also adamant that the US will not pressure Ukraine to cede territory to try and bring an end to

Simon Cottee

We need to talk about Salvador Ramos

It’s been over a week now since Salvador Ramos burst in to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers. Still a question remains: why did he do it? One answer is that he was evil: evil people do evil things. Another is that he was crazy: crazy people do crazy things. And yet another is that he was made to do bad things because of all the bad things that had happened to him: Ramos reportedly had a childhood speech impediment and was subjected to bullying because of this. These explanations all share one thing: the conviction that human behaviour is broadly explicable. But

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The closing of the Chinese mind

I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the Communist party’s brutal suppression had been scrubbed clean. So Tiananmen was not part of the national conversation when I was growing up. I only fully grasped what had happened when I visited Hong Kong in my early twenties (that would be harder now under the city’s new national security law). Tiananmen isn’t just absent from history books; the Chinese authorities keep an eye on literature and film, so anything that’s politically subversive is censored or driven underground and abroad. One film that fell victim to this regime is Lan Yu,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

‘Famine is part of Russia’s strategy’: Zelensky’s economic adviser on Putin’s tactics

Alexander Rodnyansky has a desk waiting for him back at Cambridge, where he’s currently on sabbatical from his role as a junior economics professor. But he won’t be returning for some time. He’s working from Kyiv, prioritising his other job: as economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky. Rodnyansky was in Ukraine when the war broke out and he could easily have returned to the UK. ‘That wasn’t really much of a thought,’ he says. ‘I’m sixth-generation Kyiv. I was just going to stay.’ He became a full-time presidential adviser two years ago, hired to help reform Ukraine’s financial institutions, including the privatisation of state-owned commercial banks. ‘About 55 per cent of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Jubilee celebrations, energy bill discounts and a trade deal with Indiana

Home The Jubilee for the Queen’s 70 years on the throne was marked by two days of public holiday, 16,000 street parties, a service at St Paul’s, Trooping the Colour, late pub opening, beacons, bells, and anxiety about the Queen’s health. After Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced in parliament that he had added £15 billion of public money to the £9 billion allocated in the spring statement to relieving energy bills, the nation questioned what it meant for their pockets and for Conservative politics. The government would get some of the money for the plan from a windfall tax, or ‘energy profits levy’, of 25 per cent

Antony Beevor & Serhii Plokhy

‘Putin may be prepared to go to the limits’: Antony Beevor and Serhii Plokhy in conversation

The military historian Antony Beevor joins Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, on Spectator TV this week to talk about the war in Ukraine. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. Putin’s plan ANTONY BEEVOR: I’m alarmed by the latest developments. The encirclement or imminent encirclement of Severodonetsk could cut off a large number of Ukrainian troops, leaving them in an impossible position. It’s a move that suggests Russia’s real attempt at the moment is to seize Severodonetsk and the area around it, and to cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea entirely. This is deeply worrying because it means that Putin could then say, right, we

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

Boris is a saint compared to ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi

It was only a matter of time before someone really twisted the knife in and compared Boris ‘partygate’ Johnson to Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi. Rory Stewart, who is now an ex Tory and was rejected in the leadership contest won by Boris, has done just that. The British Prime Minister’s sins, he claims, make Britain feel like ‘Berlusconi’s Italy’. Sorry Rory: no they don’t. The truth is that compared to Berlusconi, Boris is as pure as the driven snow. Yes, BoJo may once have invented a quote in an article for the Times, and he is all too often economical with the actualité on money and much else besides. But he has

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The EU’s oil ban is a damp squib

When Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine on 24 February there was a conceit that this might be the first war which the West could fight – and win – by sanctions alone. The EU’s latest efforts to stop importing Russian oil show just what a folly this was. Donations of military equipment to Ukraine are certainly helping to keep Russian forces at bay, but economic sanctions? That is another story. Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas is the product of years of ill-conceived energy policy Sanctions may be helping to lower living standards among Russian citizens, but they are still a long, long way from cutting off the lifeblood

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How the Cultural Revolution shaped China’s leaders today

54 min listen

All eyes are on the Communist leadership this year, as the months count down to autumn’s National Party Congress, where Xi Jinping may be crowned for a third term. But how much do we really know about the Party’s leadership? In particular, can we better understand them through looking at the experiences that they’ve had? Take Xi Jinping, who is what is known as a ‘princeling’ – his father was the Communist revolutionary Xi Zhongxun, one of the Party’s early cadres. Growing up, the younger Xi would have been steeped in Communist lore. Yet his father’s downfall, at the hands of a paranoid Mao, as well as the Cultural Revolution must

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany is failing Ukraine

‘A giant step for German and European security,’ is how Chancellor Olaf Scholz described his government’s €100 billion cash injection for the country’s depleted military. But while Germany’s newfound commitment to its own defence is welcome, its commitment to Ukraine’s is still questionable at best.   Over the weekend, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that it had seen documents showing that Berlin had reduced military support for Ukraine to ‘a minimum’. According to inside sources, only two German weapon deliveries have reached Ukraine since the end of March. Both contained light equipment such as mines, hand grenades and spare parts for machine guns. The last delivery of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry dates back

Nicholas Sheppard

Jacinda Ardern is New Zealand’s Gorbachev

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is currently leading a trade mission to the United States, with a meeting between her, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pencilled in for later this week. Her appeal on the world stage is evident – the New York Times over the weekend hailed her ‘inspiring’ – but there is a considerable disconnect now between her high regard internationally and the discontent she is facing domestically. Ardern has several goals. One is spreading the word post-Covid that New Zealand is open for business. But she also wants to beef up international trade and regional security. The US has attempted to pivot to Indo-Pacific in recent years, but that plan

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

How Russia wins

It is still too early to predict the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Russia has certainly solidified its position in the east and is making small military gains. What’s become clear over the last few days is that Russia may, after all, be able to achieve at least some of its military goals. Here is an interesting, albeit disturbing, political scenario by Sabine Fischer, a senior fellow at a German foreign policy tank. She notes that the mood in Moscow itself has shifted. It is the Kremlin’s political calculation that the western nations will not sustain their massive financial and military support for Ukraine.  The German government is prioritising its commercial relations with Russia – as it

Sergey Radchenko

The West is watching the war in Ukraine like it’s sport

Every time I hear a politician speak of Munich, I suspect that something is amiss. Last week, President Zelensky accused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of living in the ‘deep past’, and demanding that ‘a part of Ukraine be given to Russia’. ‘It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead of 2022’, Zelensky said. He wasn’t alone: figures from the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the former chess champion Garry Kasparov put themselves on the record timidly or violently disagreeing with Kissinger. I wasn’t at Davos, but I learned of Kissinger’s revelations through Twitter. A major newspaper had declared that he ‘came close to

Sunday

Lionel Shriver and Freddy Gray

Lionel Shriver on mass shootings, gun control and American carnage

This is an edited transcript of a conversation between Freddy Gray and Lionel Shriver on The Spectator’s Americano podcast, which you can listen to here. Freddy Gray: Lionel, I feel a bit guilty asking you to talk about this, because I know you’ve become a kind of go-to person about mass shootings in America because you wrote a very significant novel – We Need to Talk About Kevin. You’ve written before about how awkward it is that every time there’s a mass shooting in America, people ask you to come on and talk about it. But in your book, the killer was using a bow, not a gun. So you don’t

Bill McMorris

After Biden, who?

Joe Biden is telling everyone he will seek re-election in 2024 – including those who don’t want him around. After Barack Obama gave him the cold shoulder at an April White House event, sources revealed to the Hill that Biden had told his former boss he planned to go for it in 2024. You get the sense the leak did not come from Obama’s camp. ‘I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,’ Biden said at a Michigan rally in March 2020. ‘There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country’. Every candidate sounds a conciliatory tone in victory, particularly when

Richard Dearlove

How our pro-Brexit group was hacked by Russia

Britain is not at war with Russia but in cyberspace Russian activity against Ukraine and its allies is unrestrained, as I have recently found. Indeed, it is flattering 18 years after my retirement as head of MI6 to be still considered a worthwhile target of a cyber-attack by the Kremlin. The story of how I and a small group of pro-Brexit individuals were hacked by the Russian state and accused of plotting to overthrow the British government begins in 2017. A number of citizens, concerned that the Brexit vote of 2016 was being subverted, met in a pub to see whether they could do something about it. As a joke,