Putin

One of the bonuses of a Trump presidency – of which there will be many negatives – is the prospect of a distinct lowering of temperature in relations between Russia and the West. Now, it seems that Vladimir Putin is destined to have a friend in Western Europe, too. The new favourite for next year’s French presidential election, Francois Fillon, is just as keen on forging relations with the Russian president. Asked recently whether he worried about Trump’s closeness to Putin he replied: ‘I don’t only not worry about it, I wish for it.’ He went on to demand that Russia be treated as ‘a great nation’ and not made a

 Moscow To the Union Jack pub on Potapovsky Lane for a US election night party. The jolly Muscovite Trump supporters who organised the event had gone to the effort of providing girls with tight–fitting Trump-Pence T-shirts and Make America Great Again baseball caps. In pride of place beside the bar hung a specially commissioned triptych of oil paintings — heroic Soviet-style portraits of Russia’s new heroes: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Among the guests were a group of young men from Tsargrad TV, Russia’s popular new Orthodox nationalist channel. Sporting neatly trimmed beards and sharp suits, they were a Russian version of Republican evangelicals. In one corner

As the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov finally nears the eastern Mediterranean, with a trail of ugly black smoke belching from its funnels, it’s a fitting moment to acknowledge some credit where it’s due. For the waves created by President Putin’s flagship as it passed our shores – before steaming into further controversy in Spain – more than endorse the Cameron government’s brave decision to press on with Britain’s new £3 billion aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  For it was the Cameron government’s decision – in that otherwise largely unloved strategic defence review (the one that saw the abrupt consignment of the HMS Ark Royal to the scrapyard

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an

I have just returned from one of the world’s most secretive states. I had to apply for a visa a month beforehand and send in a copy of my passport. There is no way into this place by road; you have to arrive on an authorised boat and a policeman checks your visa against your passport before you board. Private boats must keep well offshore and may not land. The visa is valid for only three nights; you have to book each night in advance and may not spend more than one night in the same place. Only ten visas are granted a day. Women have always been forbidden here

Julian Assange still has not found the courage to face the women who accuse him of sexual abuse. Rather than try to clear his name, he has sat in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge for four years – a confinement long enough to drive most of us out of our minds. If Assange has lost his wits, however, there is a method to his madness, as there was long before he received what paltry hospitality the Ecuadorian diplomatic corps could offer him. Nothing he leaks has ever hurt Russia. He will denounce and expose human rights abusers, as we all should. But he will never allow his

The Baltic states do not feel like a front line. I did not see a police officer in more than a week in Latvia, let alone a soldier. Somewhere out there were three NATO battalions, deployed to deter Putin from crossing the border. But if it wasn’t for the seediness that lingers like a bad smell – the occasional Brezhnev brutalist building and the memorials to the murdered Jews – I could think myself in a European country that had never experienced the twin curses of Nazism and communism. The art nouveau architecture is as fine as any you will see in Paris or Barcelona, and covers many more streets.

At a luncheon to mark a thawing of relations between Turkey and Russia this week, the diners were given a particular treat. I’m not talking about Beluga caviar, though it may have been on the menu, but rather the special crockery bearing the image of each country’s presidents set out at each placing. The idea of having Putin and Erdogan beaming at me from ceremonial plates doesn’t appeal hugely, but it seems to have set some of my Turkish colleagues off in raptures. For them the ‘bromance’ is back on. I’m not so sure. The plates were commissioned to mark a meeting between the two men in June 2015. Since

For the frontline in a Cold War which has been rapidly heating up in recent years, Narva certainly does not look it. The small Estonian town on the border with Russia has a mainly ethnic Russian population, settled after the Soviet Union annexed Estonia at the end of the Second World War. However the closest (and potentially most lethal) thing to a Russian machine gun nest I could find is the 24 hour burger van next to the border post, complete with a suitably surly staff. But is Narva’s ethnic Russian population a potential fifth column as tensions across the border with Nato increase? ‘The old babushkas in Narva are getting