Russia

President visits part of his own country. Shock. Vladimir Putin’s visit yesterday to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, perched precariously on the other side of the Baltic states, was not, as some overheated commentary has claimed, a threat to Nato. Rather, it was a sign of his renewed need to campaign domestically. The threat from Kaliningrad and to the Suwałki Gap is heavily mythologised Kaliningrad, once East Prussian Königsberg, is a territory a little larger than Northern Ireland that was annexed by the Soviets at the end of the second world war and subject to an intensive period of industrialisation, militarisation and colonisation. More than three quarters of the population

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war ready to be exchanged. Around 11 a.m. local time this morning an Il-76 transport aircraft crashed in a fireball near the Russian village of Yablonova in the Belgorod Region, some 35 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Everyone on board was killed. It appears that, perhaps alongside a military cargo, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs – if the claims of the Russian defence ministry are to be believed. As is always the case in this war, multiple and contradictory explanations

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

The March presidential elections in Russia will, of course, be a stage-managed farce, but that doesn’t mean that real politics has been entirely extinguished. It offers a narrow window of opportunity for the opposition to try and connect with the Russian people – so the Kremlin is doing its best to muzzle them. On the third anniversary of his return to Russia on Wednesday, opposition leader Alexei Navalny issued a statement on X (via his lawyers, his only connection with the outside world) intended to bolster his supporters’ morale. He returned from Germany in 2021 following a poisoning attempt that saw government agents lace his underwear with Novichok. Answering the

Just when you thought Putin’s regime couldn’t sink any lower, it somehow manages to. Like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that, actually, the Kremlin’s bloody war in Ukraine had had a ‘positive impact on life inside [Russia]’. Speaking at a foreign ministry press conference, Lavrov said this was because Putin’s ‘special military operation’ had united the country and ‘enabled it to be cleansed of all those who felt no sense of belonging to Russian history or culture’ after thousands moved abroad in opposition to the war. It hardly needs saying that the nearly 20,000 Russians detained for protesting against the war, and the

In his surprise visit to Kyiv, Rishi Sunak had two pieces of good news for Ukrainians: another £2.5 billion in military aid and an agreement to sign a bilateral defence deal. Ukraine isn’t going to join Nato any time soon, so the country’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky has been trying to build a next-best alternative: a series of deals with allies. Britain is the first. The UK says it will provide intelligence sharing, cyber security, medical and military training and defence industrial cooperation. And post-war, if Ukraine is ever attacked by Russia again, the UK will agree to provide ‘swift and sustained’ assistance. The Ukrainian government has been negotiating such agreements

Alexei Navalny had a brutal December. At the start of the month the Putin critic abruptly disappeared from his prison colony in Vladimir, east of Moscow. For 20 days no one knew of his whereabouts until his lawyers tracked him down to the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony of Kharp, deep within the Arctic Circle. Yesterday, he was seen by the public for the first time since his transfer.   Appearing over video link, the gaunt Kremlin critic held a short press conference ahead of his appointment in court to sue the Vladimir colony where he was being held until December. Standing behind a metal grille, head shaved and dressed in a prison jumpsuit, Navalny

Following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the calamitous, early missteps of the Russian army, many Western experts fairly crowed over the possibility of Russia disintegrating. ‘It’s high time to prepare for Russia’s collapse,’ ran a typical headline on the Foreign Policy website, while a survey of 167 foreign-policy experts by the Atlantic Council think tank last January found that 40 per cent of them expected Russia to break up internally within ten years due to ‘revolution, civil war, political disintegration’ and so on. Meanwhile, an article from the Hudson Institute was more prescriptive, issuing a list of points to consider when ‘Preparing for the Final Collapse

It has become something of a fad to try to identify and quantify the body doubles of Vladimir Putin. There are even outlandish claims that the man himself is dead and has been replaced by one. But why the fascination? It is hardly unusual for autocrats to have doubles – as a shield against assassination or simply as handy proxies to take on the more tedious and less important duties. Stalin had at least a couple; Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega apparently had no fewer than four. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was once photographed chatting with two of his identically-dressed doubles. The likelihood is that those uncharacteristic public events were, indeed,

With Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine well into its attritional phase, Western aid to Kyiv seems to be drying up. No clear strategy at all, it seems, has been found for dealing with the Russian leader. Some hope internal divisions at the Kremlin will lead to a collapse, others that an anti-Ceausescu-style uprising – as in Romania in 1989, culminating in the leader’s brutal execution by his people – will miraculously give the coup de grace to the president’s ambitions. Certainly, if Putin were to rule in a genuinely authoritarian manner, either of these things could happen. But up to now he’s been far too wily and flexible for that.

It was elaborately staged precisely to try and look unstaged. After a medals ceremony at the Kremlin for Heroes of the Fatherland day, Vladimir Putin joined an oh-so-unchoreographed gaggle of participants. One, Lt Colonel Artem Zhoga, appealed for him to stand for re-election. Although Putin admitted he had had second thoughts, he accepted ‘that there is no other way,’ and would indeed be running. This is, it is fair to say, not much of a surprise. Nor will it be a surprise if Putin wins in March. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be upsets along the way. Rig an election too much and too obviously and this defeats the

That Russia’s security services have been targeting British politicians and other high-profile figures won’t come as a surprise. But the scale of the accusations levelled today at the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) by the British government is still shocking. GCHQ has said that, since 2015, Russia has carried out hundreds of hacks against MPs, journalists and civil servants. Former trade secretary Liam Fox and the ex head of MI6 Richard Dearlove are among the victims. British intelligence revealed a surprising amount of detail about the FSB unit responsible for this hacking activity. The group allegedly goes by the name ‘Star Blizzard’ and belongs to the FSB’s Centre 18. This

One of Russia’s toxic TV presenters recently cackled that Western sanctions ‘have only helped Russia wean itself off dependence on foreign imports and given a boost to our own producers’. At a time when Russia’s third quarter growth has actually exceeded expectations, hitting 5.5 per cent, it is worth noting what sanctions can and cannot do. The bottom line is that sanctions have not failed – but were never going to be the silver bullet solution to Kremlin aggression some claimed at the start. As in so many aspects of the West’s response to the 2022 Ukraine invasion, unrealistic early boosterism has led to subsequent, and arguably equally unrealistic, despondency.