Russia

Thursday

Rod Liddle

See this Russian hip hop star before they arrest him: Oxxxymiron’s Beauty & Ugliness reviewed

Grade: A+ I was going to review hyperpop chanteuse Charli XCX’s album this week, but it was such boring, meretricious, grandstanding 1980s retread electropop vacuity that I thought, nah, even if it is headed to the top of our ravaged charts. So have this instead. Oxxxymiron is Russia’s No. 1 hip-hop artist. Yes, Russian hip hop is indeed an oxxxymiron, much as would be Serbian reggae or Iranian gospel, but never mind. He’s a youngish Jewish bloke born in Leningrad, with a degree in Middle English from Oxford University, and is hugely popular in his home country. Is it any good, this album released late last year? It’s darker and

Jade McGlynn

What TV is telling Russians – and why they believe it

If you want to understand how Russians see the world, it helps to watch Russian TV. The Kremlin’s control over the airwaves permeates every part of Russia’s television schedules. There are no longer soaps or series during waking hours, just relentless TV shows about Russia’s place in the world. The popular and execrable ‘news’ discussion show 60 Minutes now often lasts two to three hours. It is as if EastEnders and Coronation Street were replaced with 200 minutes of state propaganda. Such shows depict Russia’s horrific assault on Ukrainian towns, cities and people as a special military operation. They are punctuated with clips of Vladimir Putin celebrating a successful and

Douglas Murray

The day I nearly brought RT down

It is interesting to watch Ofcom finally remove the broadcasting licence from the Russian propaganda channel Russia Today (RT). I almost managed to do the job myself about 12 years ago. Back in the 2000s, a number of bad regimes were rushing into the broadcasting space to try to give themselves a better international image. The Chinese Communist party set up a London branch of its state television network called CCTV, apparently unaware of the hilarity this would cause in the English language. Meanwhile, the Iranian government started PressTV to push the ayatollahs’ views of the world. It set up its propaganda channel from a roundabout on the Hanger Lane

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The West needs to spread doubt and fear

Zakhar Prilepin is a well-known novelist in Russia and an ultra-nationalist warrior in Donbas. Once a member of the National Bolshevik party (yes, the left/right implications of its name are as bad as they sound), he is now a strong Putin supporter. He appeared on Russian state TV last Sunday to emphasise that the Russians should not try to appear nice and humane to the West (not a clear and present danger, one would have thought). Prilepin argued that Russia’s approach should be as harsh as possible: ‘If they [the West] are seriously afraid of the conflict with Russia, of WWIII, of nuclear war or the escalation of the conflict,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring statement, weapons for Ukraine and no more free-range eggs

Home Britain had provided Ukraine with more than 4,000 Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, the Ministry of Defence said. Shell reconsidered its decision to pull out of investing in the large Cambo oil field, 75 miles off the west coast of Shetland. The government was expected to put into special administration Gazprom Marketing & Trading Retail Ltd, with which several councils have contracts to buy gas, though it does not come from Russia. Among those seeking to buy Chelsea Football Club, on sale after the sanctioning of its owner Roman Abramovich, a group called the True Blue Consortium was given support by John Terry. On one day, 213 non-Ukrainian migrants

Jay Elwes

Inside Putin’s mind: the lessons of Chechnya

As far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, ‘we are nobody, while he who chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God’. So said Anna Politkovskaya, the eminent Russian journalist, in her book Putin’s Russia. She continued: ‘In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale, to civil wars. I want no more of that.’ She wrote those prophetic words almost two decades ago. A reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya came to prominence during the second Chechen war. Her accounts of that conflict, which officially lasted from 1999 to

Owen Matthews

Turkey’s dilemma: whose side is Erdogan on?

Istanbul Vladimir Putin’s ill-conceived blitzkrieg in Ukraine has failed thanks, first and foremost, to the guts of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. British and US-supplied anti-tank weapons have played a crucial role, too. But it’s Ukraine’s Turkish–made TB2 Bayraktar drones that have been the war’s most unexpectedly effective weapon. Unexpected not just because of their battlefield killing power but because the father-in-law of the TB2’s inventor and manufacturer is Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the only European leader to have once described himself as a friend of Vladimir Putin. Erdogan, with a foot in the East and West, has emerged as the war’s key power-broker – and his loyalty is being actively

Wednesday

Seth J. Frantzman

The drone era has arrived

The Ukrainian airforce has so far held out in the battle for the skies. Russia continues to rely on missiles for deep strikes into Ukrainian territory while the defenders have been able to contest the airspace by employing drones. Ukraine has proven a turning point in the age of drone warfare. The first great drone superpower, the United States, used its unmanned aerial vehicles in places like Afghanistan where few fighters had the technology to shoot them down. But Ukraine isn’t primarily using drones to hunt people, loitering over targets for days; rather, it’s using them to go after Russian armoured vehicles and supply columns. This seems like a strategy

Tuesday

Aaron Gasch Burnett

Is Germany already backsliding on Russia?

Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. ‘We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. ‘If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.’ Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself. In the very same tweet in which he thanked Ukraine’s war-time President Volodymyr Zelensky for his speech to

Monday

Michael Simmons

How much is Europe (still) paying Putin for oil?

When sanctions were imposed on Russia there was a big exception: Europe was still buying and paying for oil – leading to a bizarre situation. The West was doing everything it could to help Ukraine while still sending Putin hundreds of millions of dollars a day. But how much was that revenue worth to the Kremlin? As sanctions began to hit Russia, the price of Brent crude (the oil benchmark) soared to $130 a barrel, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis: an increase of over 90 per cent. It’s fallen since then but today it’s still sitting between $107 and $115 dollars a barrel – well above where it had been weeks

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris’s Brexit-Ukraine comparison was a mistake

After years of post-Brexit rancour, the last few weeks have been a striking display of European (not just EU) unity. Britain was the first to send arms to Ukraine, now the EU is (for the first time) buying weapons so it can follow suit. No one forced Norway’s strategic wealth fund to disinvest all Russian assets, but it chose to. Even Switzerland is marching in lockstep with the sanctions. Putin had counted on European divisions, which had certainly been on display when Germany was still going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, in defiance of protests and pleas from Eastern Europe and the European parliament. The invasion turned this squabbling

Sunday

Julius Strauss

Putin and the Muslim world

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine? The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured. Military experts say that once a battle group has exceeded about a

Christopher Booth

It doesn’t matter if Putin is mad

Mike Tyson put it simply: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’. And Vladimir Putin has just experienced a blistering one-two: fierce resistance on the battlefield, trashing his plans for blitzkrieg, followed by the rabbit punch of international sanctions that will soon rock the whole of Russian society. ‘Putinism’ is not an ideology that can command intellectual or spiritual loyalty if it doesn’t deliver. It is not an ‘ism’ like Marxism. It is simply a Mephistophelean deal with the Russian people: if I can have double-glazing and a half-decent smartphone, you can have yachts and palaces. That deal is now off the table. People may not

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Putin firing a hypersonic missile in Ukraine?

Putin, like many other belligerent autocrats, does like his Wunderwaffen, or ‘wonder weapons.’ Now it appears he’s even used one in an act of wasteful overkill in Ukraine: using the hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (Dagger) missile to apparently destroy an arms depot in western Ukraine. The Kinzhal was one of the six ‘magic weapons’ Putin unveiled in a moderately-deranged section of his 2018 state-of-the-nation address, which was memorably enlivened by a computer animation of what looked like a nuclear attack on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. As well as the Kinzhal, which along with the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile was already in service, the magic weapons included the Avangard

Saturday

Ian Williams

Is China beginning to distance itself from Russia?

The read-outs from Friday’s two-hour call between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were so different, that you have to wonder whether the two leaders were on the same line. The White House version had Biden bluntly warning China of the consequences of providing assistance to Russia, while Beijing’s take presented Xi as a peacemaker ‘The Ukraine crisis is something we don’t want to see,’ Xi reportedly said. ‘Conflict and confrontation are not in the interests of anyone.’ The American read-out focussed narrowly on Ukraine, China’s on the broader relationship between the two countries. Global Times, the usually strident Communist party tabloid, described it as a ‘constructive interaction’. This comes amid

Justin Bronk

The Russian army is running out of momentum

As the Russian invasion enters its fourth week it is clear that its forces are running out of momentum, although they continue to make limited territorial gains in the south and east of Ukraine. Having been denied a quick victory over Ukraine itself, Putin now needs to force the Ukrainian government to accept a ceasefire agreement that largely freezes the frontlines and allows him to claim a victory domestically. His strategy now appears to be to cut off the Ukrainian forces fighting a desperate battle to hold the line in Donbas in the east against combined Russian and separatist Donetsk and Luhansk forces from the rest of Ukraine, and to concentrate

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Russia has never been a part of the West

In 1697 Tsar Peter the Great set out on a great journey across western Europe, seeking the support of European monarchs in his confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Unsuccessful in securing alliances, he returned instead laden with ideas acquired in his travels through Britain and Holland, which he promptly put into action in modernising Russia. The most visible symbol of this new nation was Saint Petersburg, the intended new capital of his empire. By 1858, an English visitor to the city described it as ‘one of the handsomest cities in Europe’, with a street of residences ‘so large that 50 extend over an English mile.’ And so it was that

Thursday

Andrew Tettenborn

Boris is right to ask for Saudi oil

War and virtue don’t mix well, especially when it comes to the dirty business of energy supplies. As soon as the Ukraine situation turned nasty the UK government quietly did a turn on winding down North Sea gas, and may possibly do the same on fracking. And, having sworn off Russian hydrocarbons, Boris is now looking for urgent supplies. In doing so he is talking to some pretty doubtful regimes. Yesterday he visited Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi; he has also put out feelers to Qatar. Opposition parties have made hay. In Scotland, opposition to North Sea gas and ‘extreme fossil fuel ideology’ has come from both Nicola Sturgeon and

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is Putin really losing?

I remember my father telling me about Imre Nagy’s final broadcast before the Hungarian leader was taken by the Russians after they crushed his revolution in November 1956. He recalled listening as Nagy’s voice, often faint, came in and out of reception. He said: ‘This fight is the fight for freedom by the Hungarian people against the Russian intervention, and it is possible that I shall only be able to stay at my post for one or two hours. The whole world will see how the Russian armed forces, contrary to all treaties and conventions, are crushing the resistance of the Hungarian people. They will also see how they are

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Biden is right: the crypto world needs to be controlled

President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one routinely dismissed these days as lacking the vigour or grip needed for presidential leadership. The order does little more than call for cross-government research into all things crypto. But in doing so it pleased bitcoin fanciers, NFT collectors and their ilk by acknowledging that their $3 trillion market is here to stay – while also giving comfort to sceptics who’d prefer to see crypto dealings brought under regulatory control like any other financial activity, rather than abandoned to the libertarian anarchy favoured by ardent cryptonauts. But that latter fantasy can’t