Putin

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Political football

Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of nation states competing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish to show off the greatness of their country to the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used to it’ better than a giant sporting jamboree. The 2018 football World Cup doesn’t offer quite the same degree of validation as an Olympic Games. But for Vladimir Putin, it’s still a major opportunity to demonstrate not only Russia’s new-found greatness but also its continued membership of the civilised world. For what Putin yearns for,

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How totalitarianism reclaimed Russia

In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives of Russian citizens — of why post-Soviet Russia, rather than embracing Western liberal democracy, took a darker turn. We talk about how she put the book together, what went wrong, whether there’s any hope for the future — and what it was like to meet one on one with Vladimir Putin. You can listen to

Thursday

Tibor Fischer

The problem with Hungary

The name of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is on the lips of most left-wing, liberal politicians and intellectuals in Europe. They have adorable tantrums, denouncing him as ‘authoritarian’, ‘autocratic’ or, even uglier, ‘dictatorial’, as they congratulate themselves on their righteousness and courage in speaking out. A few months ago I visited Budapest. On the way in from the airport I saw several billboards depicting Orbán and his rich chum Lörinc Mészáros, the mayor of Felcsút, Orbán’s home town. Beneath, in large letters, were two words: ‘They Steal’. It seems to me a rather poor autocracy where that sort of thing goes on. Similarly, Lajos Simicska, a former close

Thursday

Hugh Pearman

Lost in the metropolis

Richard Rogers is to architecture what Jamie Oliver is to cookery. It is not enough for either of them just to be very good at what they do and to bank the proceeds: they want so much more. They want to use their skills and money to improve society more broadly. They are old-school campaigning idealists (and Oliver trained in the kitchen at the River Café, run by Rogers’s equally committed wife, Ruthie). The downside of being a do-gooder in the UK, of course, is that people can find you irritating. Just because you and a mate (Renzo Piano) won the competition in 1971 for the Pompidou Centre in Paris

John R. Bradley

Putin the peacemaker

When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country. The dismal failure turned out to be our cynical effort to install a Sunni regime in Damascus by adopting the Afghanistan playbook from the 1980s. We would train, fund and arm jihadis, foreign and domestic, in

Thursday

Peter Pomerantsev

Punks vs. Putin

What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America during the Cold War), dissidents and dissenters could target rulers’ political ideas, whether communist or capitalist. But in regimes where ideology is used more to distract than indoctrinate (such as Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America), directly opposing the leaders’ ‘narrative’ (one which can change, depending on political expedience) risks playing right into their game. As Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon revealed in an interview with American Prospect, Trump’s race-baiting has provoked Democrats into focusing on identity issues, which is just the argument Bannon wants them to obsess over: he believes

Thursday

Matt Purple

Trump is right to be worried about the breakdown in US-Russia relations

Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme reluctance—this is the man who threw a soiree in the Rose Garden after doomed GOP health care legislation made it through just the House. Trump, the former reality show star, only turns away the klieg lights under the most bitter circumstances, and that’s what this was. A statement Trump released subsequently grumbled that the sanctions legislation

Thursday

Paul Wood

Trump’s eastern front

 Kiev There is no lavatory paper to be found in government buildings in Kiev. Plan ahead, locals advise, if you visit a tax office, the council or some other arm of the bureaucracy. This state of affairs is one small sign of the corruption that pervades Ukraine. Even the trifling sums spent on toilet roll are stolen by dishonest officials. Patients bribe doctors to get treatment; students bribe professors to pass exams; citizens bribe tax inspectors… actually, many people don’t bother with tax in the first place, working instead in a vast shadow economy. Two Ukrainian journalists tell me all this as we sip drinks in a surprisingly expensive Kiev

Thursday

Viv Groskop

Beyond the pale

You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of this book’s two sections: ‘Invisible’ and ‘Angry’. A graphic artist from Serpukhov, just south of Moscow, Lomasko spent eight years documenting people from all walks of life across Russia, producing drawing and commentary about the ‘Russia that is hardly ever seen’. Many of her fellow citizens feel invisible. Almost all of them are angry. The effect of seeing this in cartoon form is disturbing, impressive and fascinating. The subject matter she is dealing with is almost unbearable: juvenile prison wards, sex workers, protesters affected by Russia’s homophobic laws. Lomasko calls

Friday

Freddy Gray

For all the Trump-Putin hysteria, Russia-US relations are as frosty as ever

What fun the internet is having now that Vladimir Putin has finally met Donald Trump. Social media is teeming with jokes, gifs, and memes about the two big dawgs of global politics finally coming together. It’s the great bromance of the populist age.  Underneath the hilarity, however, there remains intense suspicions about the relationship between Trump and Putin – it is now widely accepted, even if the evidence is still hotly disputed, that Russia ‘hacked the election’ in order to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Trump’s meeting with Sergei Lavrov in May was considered highly nefarious, especially after Trump accidentally gave away a state secret, apparently just to show off. Reports

Thursday

William Cook

Trump, Putin and Erdogan. The G20 should be quite something

G20 summits are usually dreadfully dull affairs, but this week’s global chinwag in Hamburg should be refreshingly feisty. No conference with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in attendance could ever be described as boring, and although President Trump’s first meeting with Putin will provide the main photo opportunities, there are plenty of other potential flashpoints – not least the toe-curling relationship between Trump and his host, Angela Merkel. Merkel will discuss trade and climate change with Trump – two subjects about which these two leaders seem destined to disagree. No US President has been so dismissive of climate change; no US President has been so hostile to German

Thursday

Taki

High life | 15 June 2017

I was busy explaining to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer why the election result was not a disaster. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the result the worst news since her father had abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. Actually, it was a far better result than it would have been had the Conservatives won a majority of 100, I told her. She gasped in disbelief, but soon enough she was hooked. Do not be alarmed, dear readers. I have not taken LSD. Nor am I suffering from populist-nationalist rage at global elites and starting

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron mania is still sweeping across France

It’s in the little gestures one learns much about a man, and such is the case with Emmanuel Macron. Since his anointment as president of France last month, the 39-year-old has held talks with Angela Merkel, Recep Erdogan, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Those tête-à-têtes have made the headlines but it’s what happened in Paris at the end of last month that demonstrated the steeliness of the youngest French president since Napoleon. As is customary for the head of state, Macron attended the final of the French Cup at the national stadium in Paris. There once was a time when the president of France was introduced to the two teams on

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: The Islamist worldview

On this week’s episode, we reflect on the tragic events in Manchester and what can be done to prevent similar attacks in the future. We also look at the emergence of political courts in America, Russia, France and beyond, and tip which constituencies to have a flutter on in next month’s election. First, we took a moment to consider the terrorist attack that struck Manchester on Monday evening. With scores dead and injured, including children as young as 8, what can be done to stop another atrocity like this taking place? Douglas Murray says, in this week’s Spectator cover piece, that we have long understood the Islamist worldview, but failed to tackle its ideology.

Philip Mansel

Holding court

A hundred years after the Russian revolution, Russia has a tsar and a court. Proximity to Putin is the key to wealth, office and survival. The outward signs of a court society have returned: double-headed eagles, the imperial coat of arms, the cult of Nicholas II (one of whose recently erected statues has ‘wept tears’), an increasingly wealthy and subservient Orthodox Church. In 2013, ‘to strengthen the historical continuity of the Russian armed forces’, the main honour guard regiment in Moscow was renamed Preobrazhensky, after the oldest regiment of the Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great in 1683. A statue of St Vladimir, founder and Christianiser of the Russian

Thursday

Peter Jones

Friends, Romans and Russians

President Vladimir Putin, who still supports Bashar al-Assad in Syria, needs help if he wishes to be seen as a member of the civilised world. Rome might provide it. From 509 bc Rome had been a republic, controlled by a senate, consuls and people’s assemblies, all (it was argued) balancing each other out. During that period Rome mastered all Italy, defeated the powerful state of Carthage, and brought much of North Africa, France (Gaul), Spain, Greece and the Levant under its control. It did so not primarily because it was an aggressive, warlike state: so was every other state it faced in that dog-eats-dog ancient Mediterranean world. For all its

Monday

Owen Matthews

Syria used to be Putin’s great asset. Now, it’s a huge liability

For Vladimir Putin, Syria has been the gift that kept on giving. His 2015 military intervention propelled Russia back to the top diplomatic tables of the world — a startling comeback for a country that had spent two decades languishing in poverty and contempt on the margins of the world’s councils. At home, the war took over as a booster of Putin’s prestige just as the euphoria over the annexation of Crimea was being eroded by economic bad news caused by low oil prices and sanctions. In the Middle East, Russia was able to show both friends and enemies that it was once again able to project power every bit as

Saturday

James Forsyth

Boris was right on sanctions

Boris Johnson has received a bit of a kicking this week. There have been no shortage of people wanting to say he has been humiliated by the G7’s refusal to back his call for further sanctions on Russia and Syria after the chemical weapons attack. But I argue in The Sun today, that the real story is the weakness of the EU members of the G7. To be sure, Boris got too far forward on his skis on sanctions. But the bigger issue, by far, is the weakness of those members of the G7 who wouldn’t back them: principally, Italy and Germany. Lenin used to say “Probe with a bayonet;

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 April 2017

Home Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, having cancelled a trip to Moscow over the Syrian poison gas incident, consulted other foreign ministers at the G7 summit at Lucca in Italy about how to get President Vladimir Putin of Russia to abandon his support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The Scottish Medicines Consortium accepted for routine use by NHS Scotland a drug called Prep which, at a cost of more than £400 a month, can protect people at risk of contracting the HIV virus through unprotected sexual activity. In England, 57 general practitioners’ surgeries closed in 2016, Pulse magazine found, with another 34 shutting because of mergers, forcing 265,000 patients to

Owen Matthews

Putin’s Syria problem

For Vladimir Putin, Syria has been the gift that kept on giving. His 2015 military intervention propelled Russia back to the top diplomatic tables of the world — a startling comeback for a country that had spent two decades languishing in poverty and contempt on the margins of the world’s councils. At home, the war took over as a booster of Putin’s prestige just as the euphoria over the annexation of Crimea was being eroded by economic bad news caused by low oil prices and sanctions. In the Middle East, Russia was able to show both friends and enemies that it was once again able to project power every bit as