Putin

Sunday

Digby Warde-Aldam

We watched Eurovision – so you didn’t have to

I like Europe, even if this may not be the place to admit it, and I like this moment, when our brothers are forced to make fools of themselves in a language none bar the Irish can speak convincingly. Sauf les Français, obviously. ‘Ukraine will win. Europe has solidarity. You’ll see,’ says my European flatmate. But after the first batch of votes, it becomes clear that either Ukraine’s entry wasn’t very good, or Putin actually takes the competition seriously. Having missed both Maria Yaremchuk’s Tick-Tock and the inner machinations of the Kremlin’s ministry of culture, my guess is one or both of those things. Many horrors were committed in the

Thursday

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s diary: Boris would make a great PM – but he must strike now

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not. But I am painfully aware that he would not matter if there was a strong man in Washington. As it is, President Obama is a feeble and cowardly man who

Owen Matthews

No, Putin didn’t plot to invade Ukraine. But now he might have to

So what, exactly, does Vladimir Putin want? ‘To start World War Three,’ according to the embattled Ukrainian prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk. ‘To rule as president for life with powers on par with the tsars,’ according to Alexei Navalny, leader of Russia’s tiny opposition. To ‘force a major change of boundaries on Europe… and break the post-Cold War consensus,’ according to Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister. Actually, Putin himself has always been rather clear about his ambitions. ‘Russia has been a great power for centuries, and remains so,’ Putin told the State Duma in his first speech as prime minister, back in August 1999. ‘It has always had and still has

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Alex Salmond receives a lesson from the school of foreign policy hard knocks

Look: Alex Salmond’s indulgent appraisal of Vladimir Putin’s record was foolish and naive and all too revealing but let’s not lose the heid. Scotland, even an independent Scotland, is not going to be run by  McKGB and Mr Salmond’s fondness for wealthy businessmen is not really comparable to the kleptocracy that’s run Russia this century. Still, it is a news story and a legitimate one. Tinfoil Nationalists were very upset yesterday. Salmond was being “smeared” by, er, being quoted. GQ, clearly part of the pan-Unionist BritNat propaganda media machine, had “leaked” excerpts of their interview with the First Minister to undermine, eclipse or otherwise divert attention from a speech Mr Salmond was giving

Monday

Alex Massie

Alex Salmond’s strange – but revealing – admiration for Vladimir Putin

What to make of Alex Salmond’s qualified admiration for Vladimir Putin? The First Minister, interviewed for the forthcoming issue of GQ, declared he admires “certain aspects” of the Russian President’s record. Asked for his views on Putin, Salmond told Alastair Campbell that: “Well, obviously, I don’t approve of a range of Russian actions, but I think Putin’s more effective than the press he gets I would have thought, and you can see why he carries support in Russia. “[…] He’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride and that must be a good thing. There are aspects of Russian constitutionality and the inter-mesh with business and politics that are obviously

Thursday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: a war for ‘human rights’

What a splendidly liberal leader Mr Putin has turned out to be, desiring nothing other for his fellow Russians than their human right to decide their own fate. How the Romans would have applauded! In 215 bc, while Rome was desperately trying to keep Hannibal at bay in Italy, Philip the fifth, king of the powerful northern Greek state of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s territory), decided to ally himself to Carthage. He had in mind putting himself about on the big stage, among the Greek leagues to the south, and north into the Balkans (where Rome was beginning to have interests); and after some success, in 205 bc his gaze

Thursday

David Blackburn

Would the word ‘NATO’ make Vladimir Putin think twice?

Russia, Ukraine, the European Union and the United States will meet in Geneva later today in order to find a solution to the confrontation in eastern Ukraine. There is not much hope of success. The Obama administration has been lowering expectations, so too the Foreign Office. Kiev’s heavy-handedness in eastern Ukraine has embarrassed the western allies; not least because the military deployment yesterday exposed Ukraine’s inherent weakness: government forces were either incapable or reluctant to enforce Kiev’s writ in the east of the country. There were further violent clashes overnight. Kiev says that 3 ‘Russian separatists’ were killed and 13 wounded when trying to seize a military installation on the

Wednesday

The Spectator

Vladimir Putin knows what he stands for. Do we?

Possibly because his oratory is no match for his much-displayed pectoral muscles, the speeches of Vladimir Putin are seldom reported at length in the West. But as a means of understanding the manoeuvres in eastern Ukraine this week, there is no better starting point than the speech he made to the Duma when the Russian parliament annexed Crimea. Lest anyone thinks his words have been enriched by an over-imaginative reporter, the translation is provided by the Kremlin itself. Speaking of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, he asserted, ‘Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered… Millions of people went to bed in one country

Monday

David Blackburn

Ukraine increases mistrust and misinformation between Russia and the West

The tense situation in Ukraine has escalated overnight. A deadline has passed for pro-Russian agitators to vacate government buildings in eastern Ukraine or face military action. There is no indication that the agitators have retreated. Meanwhile, reports from Kiev suggest that the government is trying to raise volunteer militias – perhaps in an attempt to avoid deploying the country’s armed forces, which would antagonise Russia. Last night a special session of the UN Security Council, called by Russia, was the scene of disagreement between Russia and the western powers. Ukraine and the western powers say that Russia is behind this unrest; as Vladimir Putin tries his hand at provatskiya (as

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 April 2014

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ‘a commitment to fight for full employment in Britain’ and for the country ‘to have the highest employment rate of any of the world’s leading economies’. Wolfgang Schäuble, his counterpart in Germany, agreed that any EU treaty changes should ‘guarantee fairness’ to countries outside the eurozone. The government’s approach to selling off Royal Mail was ‘marked by deep caution, the price of which was borne by the taxpayer’ according to a report by the National Audit Office. The Office for National Statistics said that the next census would be conducted online. Dust from the Sahara fell on to England and Wales. An

Monday

Thursday

The Spectator

Putin’s aggression is the price of western weakness

One cannot legislate for a quiet world. When a former Princeton University college professor was elected president of the United States, he joked before his inauguration that ‘it would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs’. That was Woodrow Wilson, speaking in March 1913. Similarly, the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama came to office with little interest in what lay over the Atlantic. He wanted to be the Pacific president, more concerned with Asia than the squabbles of the old world. Fate, it turned out, had other plans. This week Obama has found his visit to Europe dominated by talk of Russian militarism —

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Boris should call a referendum

Everyone can see that the West has no idea what to do about Russian power in the Ukraine. Britain, in particular, is at the margins. It is time for the Mayor of London to fulfil his historic role of stealing a march on more conventional politicians. Boris should take a leaf out of President Putin’s book and call a referendum of Londoners. He should ask them whether they would like all Russian housing in London to be seized, and be inhabited, instead, by British families. I predict a Yes vote whose percentage would exceed even that of the recent Crimean plebiscite. Obviously the Mayor, unlike Putin, has no military forces

Owen Matthews

Let Putin have Crimea – and it will destroy him

David Cameron says that Russia’s annexation of Crimea ‘will not be recognised’. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises that ‘we will take our territory back’. They are both misguided. Let Crimea go: it will be the making of Ukraine and the end of Vladimir Putin. Without Crimea, there will never again be a pro-Moscow government in Kiev. Ukraine will have a chance to become a governable country — a strongly pro-European one with a Russian minority of around 15 per cent. Putin will have gained Crimea but lost Ukraine for ever. And without Ukraine, as former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, ‘Russia can no longer be an

James Delingpole James Delingpole

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb

Just as every child now thinks he’s going to die of global warming, so those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties all thought we were going to die of nuclear war. We knew this because trusted authorities told us so: not just the government and our teachers but even the author of Fungus the Bogeyman. When the Wind Blows (1982) was the downer of a graphic novel which Raymond Briggs wrote as our punishment for having enjoyed Fungus. It was about a nice, retired couple called Jim and Hilda Bloggs who somehow survive the first Soviet nuclear strike, unwittingly smell the burned corpses of their neighbours,

Tuesday

Mary Dejevsky

Ten fateful forks in the road to Crimea

Regret suffuses the post mortem on many a conflict, with hindsight recommending alternatives that were far less obvious at the time. Crimea is different. Rarely can the fateful choices — those critical forks in the road — have been so evident as those that have led Russia, Ukraine and the West into this conflict. A different choice at any one of these 10 junctures could have averted immediate danger and indicated a route back to safety: 1. Last summer it became apparent that Russia and the EU were increasingly at loggerheads over Ukraine It was Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union vs the association agreement on offer from Brussels. As November drew

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

What if the Crimea poll had been legitimate?

Just wondering: what would we be doing now about Crimea if the referendum a week ago had been done nicely? I know it’s not a good time to ask what with protestors storming bases in the east occupied by Ukrainian forces, but it seems pretty fundamental to me. The PM yesterday opined that the poll had been conducted ‘at the barrel of a Kalashnikov’ and was a twentieth century way of doing things (interesting put-down, that). And indeed, there’s no gainsaying that it was done in an inordinate hurry, that the entire exercise was conducted in the presence of about 20,000 troops – Russian supporting, or just Russian, take your

Friday

Ed West

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is jingoistic, angry and oppressive. But it’s nothing like Nazi Germany

I’m conservative, so it’s hard for me not to love Vladimir Putin. His ripped torso, the way the sweat glistens on his pecs, the steely gaze, the cheeky smile. How much does he bench press, I wonder? And of course the main reason why conservatives like me aren’t desperately keen to get stuck into the Ruskis over their occupation of Crimea is because, deep down, we really love Putin’s authoritarian style of nationalist chauvinism. Especially the beating up the gays part, because deep down we’re all secretly gay; or have micropenises. Whichever one would be more embarrassing. ——————————————- A lot of people actually believe this, and that those of us

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Vladimir Putin’s right about one thing: the West doesn’t observe its own rules

Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own creed of liberal evangelism across the world, regardless or not as to whether the people to whose aid we have come actually share our aspirations. It has been a staggeringly unsuccessful policy. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Afghanistan. I wonder too about the way the media reports these crusades. A while back

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 March 2014

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the economy was working but the job was far from done. He expected further falls in unemployment and wages rising faster than prices this year. The economy, he suggested, would return this year to its size in 2008. Before the Budget, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that as many as 1.9 million working families could receive a tax-free childcare allowance worth up to £2,000 per child. Mr Osborne had announced that the help-to-buy scheme for new homes would be extended until 2020. He also let it be known that a garden city of 15,000 dwellings would