Russia

Is Vladimir Putin really willing to invade Ukraine?

Is Putin preparing to invade Ukraine? It certainly looks that way, with western intelligence agencies estimating this week that around 100,000 troops are now massing at the country’s eastern border. To some, this build-up is proof enough that the Kremlin plans to invade. This week the US president Joe Biden even made significant diplomatic concessions to Moscow to prevent a looming conflict. But the US president should keep in mind that capability does not prove intent: and Putin may well decide that the cost of invasion is too hard to justify. His recent Ukrainian mobilisation could still be a piece of ‘heavy-metal diplomacy’ – a show of force intended to

The battle for Ukraine has already been lost

Forget the ‘commitment‘ of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the EU’s ‘firm and decisive’ support, and Liz Truss’s vow to ‘stand firm‘ with Ukraine. The hard truth is that the West has already lost, or rather abandoned, Ukraine. Even if it is not overrun by Russian tanks this winter, the Kremlin has a free hand to destabilise, threaten, and undercut Ukraine – including by intensifying the conflict in Ukraine’s east. After all, that war, initiated by Vladimir Putin, has been ongoing since 2014. And for all the tough rhetoric, countless sanctions, and the two bargains struck in Minsk, Russia continues to occupy Crimea and treat Donbas as its

Britain’s duty to the Black Sea

With Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, the Black Sea is looking choppy. While that may seem to have little significance for us, in an age of globalised supply chains, international security commitments and Britain’s ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific,’ that matters more than we might think. However, there is also an opportunity for the UK. In a report for the Council on Geostrategy that was published this week, I, James Rogers and Alexander Lanoszka, suggest that the Black Sea region is at risk of becoming an anarchic environment where insecurity reigns amid Russian domination. This matters. Rather than being seen as some distant periphery, at best a ‘flank’ of Europe,

Ukrainian annexation is already happening

Nato and the EU are fearing a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. They have reason to be concerned, given that Russia would not blink to escalate while the West is still fumbling around on how best to respond. Brussels and Washington are in firefighting mode, while Russia chooses the when and the where. Annexation in the east, meanwhile, is already happening — not by force but through civil and economic ties. Military mobilisation looks like a sideshow, a distraction from what is really happening already: a slow annexation of the eastern quasi-independent republics. The pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence from Kiev in 2014 but have never been recognised by Ukraine.  Already

The art and science of Fabergé

After all the magnificent presents she’d received from his workshop, Queen Alexandra was eager to meet the most famous jeweller in Russia. ‘If Mr Fabergé ever comes to London,’ she said to Henry Bainbridge, a manager of the design house, ‘you must bring him to see me.’ Peter Carl Fabergé paid a rare visit to the capital to inspect his new shop — the only one located outside the Russian empire — at 48 Dover Street in 1908. ‘The Queen wants to see me! What for?’ he asked an exasperated Bainbridge. ‘Well, you know what an admirer she is of all your things.’ Insisting that she would not wish to

Is Russia preparing to invade Ukraine?

I can still hear the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Just a mile or so from us, thousands of Russian troops were dug in; shells landed nearby. It was so cold my phone kept switching off. Seven years later, Ukraine is heading into another sub-zero winter. And the Russian troops have returned. Moscow has now massed more than 90,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. Washington is briefing that intelligence suggests an invasion. Moscow says this is ‘alarmist’ and — as usual — accuses Nato of inflaming things. How did we get here? In truth the conflict never ended, it just froze. But it’s also true that the relationship between Kiev and Moscow

Putin’s plan for Ukraine

Vladimir Putin’s message was as clear — and familiar — as his method. The Kremlin has begun another major build-up of troops along Ukraine’s border. The reason? Retaliation: last month, president Volodimir Zelenskiy flew to Washington to renew his plea that Ukraine be allowed to join Nato.  The massive show of force — the second this year — prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to warn his European allies that Russia showed dangerous signs of invading its smaller southern neighbour. ‘Our concern is that Russia may make the serious mistake of attempting to rehash what it undertook back in 2014 when it amassed forces along the border, crossed into sovereign Ukrainian territory and

Lukashenko and Putin are exploiting Europe’s migration muddle

At the border of Belarus and Poland, camps of migrants wait for a chance to cross the border into the EU. Groups attempt to break down the razor wire fences standing in their way, Some 15,000 Polish soldiers stand ready to stop them. Belarusian soldiers urge them on and offer assistance. The Belarusian state shuttles more migrants towards the border by the day, hands out wire-cutters, and prevents them from turning back. Some 30,000 migrants have attempted to cross into Poland since August. That number is swelling by the day, with Belarus now running dozens of flights every week ferrying further desperate people to Europe’s eastern border. It is customary

How Turkey is fuelling the Belarus-Poland migrant crisis

In the cold, damp forest lining the border between Poland and Belarus, thousands of refugees flown over from the Middle East have waiting to cross into the EU for days. Belarusian riot police are shoving them away from their gates and towards Poland, where only more forces await. The Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has recently been in conflict with the EU, which has imposed sanctions on his regime after last year’s contested elections which many believe to have been rigged. Lukashenko is pushing refugees towards Poland to be pawns in a fight, with the backing of Putin. The refugees find themselves between a rock and a hard place: in front

Cold War, hot planet

Chelyabinsk is one of the most polluted places in the world. On 29 September 1957, an explosion ripped through the nearby Mayak nuclear plant — which processed plutonium for the Soviet Union’s atomic bombs — casting a cloud of highly radioactive debris across the central Russian region. Despite communist officials keeping the disaster tightly under wraps, tens of thousands of people were, eventually, evacuated from the worst-hit villages, and vast swathes of the surrounding area have been closed to the public. More than half a century on, the nuclear fall-out is now the least of the ecological worries. Home to over a million people, Chelyabinsk has been found to have

There is no Russia-China axis

You should be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it, so the old cliché goes. In diplomacy at the moment, it seems you should be careful of the threats you prepare for, because you may end up producing them. There is a growing trend in the West towards treating Russia and China as some single, threatening ‘Dragonbear’ (a reference to the two countries’ national animals). This underrates the very real tensions between Moscow and Beijing, but risks pushing them even closer together. The most recent case in point was Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg’s interview in the Financial Times, in which he criticised ‘this whole idea that we

Under deep suspicion in Beirut, Kim Philby still carried on regardless

The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed, too predictable, too firmly etched in Cold War monochrome. So it’s a good idea to seek another angle, through the warmer lens of a love affair involving its main protagonist Kim Philby and his wife Eleanor. It humanises the tale, particularly as it draws on a vivid and neglected personal source — The Spy I Loved— Eleanor’s own book centred on their romance in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. That was where Philby was despatched in 1956 to play out the penultimate act in a drama stretching back to the 1930s,

Is Russia ready for life after Putin?

When Russians headed to the polls last week, the Duma election results were never in doubt: Putin’s United Russia party won two-thirds of the seats, while the rest went to the tame ‘systemic opposition’. But even if the outcome wasn’t a surprise, the manner of Putin’s victory should ring alarm bells about what happens in Russia when he eventually departs. The Kremlin ‘won’ the Duma elections insofar as United Russia received the number of seats it wanted. It did this on just 50 per cent of the vote, down on previous elections, with widespread violations, and at the cost of what little credibility the electoral process still enjoyed. In regimes

Putin’s Covid cocoon is a sign of his terror

Although he has been vaccinated, Vladimir Putin is self-isolating for at least a week after ‘dozens’ in his entourage came down with Covid. He is apparently showing no signs of being infected. And perhaps no wonder, as even by the standards of his usual presidential protection, since the start of the pandemic Putin has been shielded within a formidable bio-security regime. Those due to meet him face-to-face are tested, required to isolate beforehand, and – if visiting him either in the Kremlin or his mansion outside Moscow – has to pass through a tunnel fogged with aerosolised disinfectant and bathed in germ-killing ultraviolet light. Back in March last year, he wore

How to have a Russian weekend in London

Benedict Cumberbatch’s turn as Greville Wynne – the British engineer who helped MI6 smuggle secret intel out of Soviet Russia – in The Courier has shone a light on London’s Cold War past. While the USSR and KGB might be gone, our capital still has a few souvenirs from the era – not to mention plenty of modern Russian culture and cuisine to boot. If you’re feeling inspired by The Courier, here’s the guide to throwing the ultimate Russian-themed weekend in London: Where to eat and drink While the old Soviet bloc wasn’t exactly famed for its cuisine, London’s eastern Europe and Slavic food has come on leaps and bounds

Russian spies and the return of the Cold War

Last week’s arrest of a security guard employed at the British embassy in Berlin, on suspicion of spying for Russia, serves as a stark reminder that the UK and its allies are in the thick of a new Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communist regimes, it appeared that the East-West stand-off had come to an end. Nato allies breathed a collective sigh of relief and looked to new horizons, believing their principal objective had been achieved and that Russia’s days as a superpower were consigned to the history books. There can be little doubt that a second Cold War

More diplomacy won’t stop the advance of the Taleban

On 11 August, at Russia’s initiative, an ‘extended troika’ will meet in Doha, Qatar to take stock of the Taleban’s major offensive to take over Afghanistan. The United States, scheduled to withdraw its forces by the end of this month, has been invited to this ‘Moscow format’, as have China and Pakistan. As of yesterday, the violent Islamist group had taken control of six provincial capitals in Afghanistan – though not the most important cities in the country. The US negotiator at Doha, Zalmay Khalilzad has warned that ‘a Taleban government that comes to power through force in Afghanistan will not be recognised.’ But so far the militants have refused

Why Russia’s Olympic punishment backfired

The Tokyo Olympics are over and fifth place in the medals table went to the ‘ROC’, the Russian Olympic Committee. Rather than being punished for its state-run doping programme, Russia has turned it into a perverse triumph, illustrating the weakness of sanctions as a way of trying to shape international behaviour. Of course, Moscow denied systematic cheating, but after the World Anti-Doping agency imposed a four-year ban in 2019, reduced to two years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020, they were forced to accept that if Russian athletes were going to compete, they could not do so under their own flag. They hardly went deep undercover, though.

Springtime for Putin: Grange Park’s The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko reviewed

Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical robe, the electronic monitors, Litvinenko’s accusing gaze and bald, ravaged head. But in case we needed reminding, Grange Park Opera handed out copies of Death of a Dissident, the account of the crime by Litvinenko’s widow Marina, and the principal source for Anthony Bolton and Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s new opera The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko. Minutes later, a hospital bed rolled on stage replicating that exact image. And then Litvinenko — the tenor Adrian Dwyer — opened his mouth and started to sing. Opera plays a high-stakes game with

Ella Pamfilova and the dismantling of Russia’s democracy

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is hardly known for its free and fair elections. But a purge of the field ahead of this September’s parliamentary vote has led to protests even from politicians who benefit from his system. And it has brought the woman on whom the whole democratic façade relies close to a breakdown. Ella Pamfilova, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, had just wrapped up a meeting in which her officials disbarred the popular Communist party candidate Pavel Grudinin when she was approached by Nikolai Bondarenko, Grudinin’s ally and a popular YouTuber. ‘This is a disgrace to the whole country. You’re trampling democracy,’ he told Pamfilova in a video he