Russia

The diversion of a Ryanair flight bound for Lithuania from Athens and the arrest of passenger Roman Protasevich – an influential Belarusian blogger critical of the country’s dictatorial regime – is the latest tyrannical action to lead to expressions of grave concern and tempered outrage from the West. However, the fact that the passenger aircraft was forced to land by a Belarusian fighter jet on the pretence that the plane was carrying explosives is, arguably, a step up on the ladder of severity. Police brutality and the unlawful detention of opposition activists are quick to cause Western condemnation, but those still solely concern domestic matters – the interception of a

Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. ‘Mmm-hmm, I do,’ answered the President. Once, that would have been fighting talk. Today? Biden can insult Putin with impunity because he believes that Russia is, quite simply, no longer important or dangerous. Once a deadly serious enemy whose rivalry threatened to destroy life on the planet, Russia’s diminished status means that, these days, there’s little left to the grand old conflict except mere mudslinging. ‘We no longer think in Cold War terms, for several reasons. One, no one is our equal. No one is close,’ Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers in Kiev in 2014. ‘Other than

Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24 days of hunger strike. But if anything, the more attenuated his frame, the more his moral certainty shone through it. An appeals hearing for a separate charge of insulting a Second World War veteran gave him a rare opportunity to speak to the outside world. Characteristically, he made a joke of his condition to his wife, Yulia, saying he now looked like ‘a creepy skeleton.’ However, this was a moment’s light-hearted intimacy in a bravura performance primarily directed towards both the Kremlin and the wider Russian population. Just as Vladimir

The discovery by Czech intelligence services that a bombing of an ammunitions and weapons depot in 2014 that killed two people was carried out by the same Russian agents responsible for Sergei Skripal’s poisoning in 2018 is the latest act in the ongoing drama between the Kremlin and the West – one that has been intensified by the Czech President’s inability to blame Russia for the attack, and the lack of allied support for the Czech Republic. The two men who bombed the ammunition site used the same aliases as they used to enter the UK and travel to Salisbury almost four years later – ostensibly to visit the city’s

After weeks building up forces in Crimea and close to the Ukrainian border — over 100,000, all told — Moscow is now saying it plans to pull most of them back to barracks. Is this a climb-down, mission accomplished, or mind games? Of course, we’ll have to see what actually happens. We’ve seen footage of tanks being loaded back onto railway cars and soldiers taking down tents, but until we have independent verification of substantial movements, we need to be cautious. After all, in 2008, Russian troops deployed to the Caucasus for major military exercises were just packing up when they were promptly ordered back to launch their five-day invasion

‘Putin is a murderer,’ read the signs carried by protestors outside the Russian Embassy in Prague on Sunday. On Saturday night, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš stunned the Czech Republic by stating that evidence now links Russian GRU secret agents to a massive explosion which killed two people at an arms depot near the Moravian village of Vrbětice in 2014. Czech Minister of the Interior and acting Foreign Minister Jan Hamáček gave 18 diplomats known to be linked to Russian foreign intelligence 48 hours to leave the country, and compared the situation to the Salisbury poisoning in 2018. The Salisbury parallel was underlined by the announcement of a manhunt for Alexandr

It’s not easy to frame sanctions, these days. They occupy that huge, hazy diplomatic no man’s land between sternly-worded but essentially vacuous expressions of concern – grave concern, if you really want to pretend you’re serious – and sending a gunboat. When it comes to trying to make an impression on Vladimir Putin, who has no qualms about causing the West concerns – and has a good few gunboats of his own – this is a doubly-difficult challenge. The latest US sanctions are a case in point, a mix of the cosmetic and the consequential that are more about political signalling than anything else. This is President Biden reassuring the

In 2001, US President George W. Bush stared into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and said he saw his soul. Joe Biden, on the other hand, famously claimed to have told the Russian leader, ‘I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ Now the new incumbent of the Oval Office might have a second chance to check again in the flesh. On Tuesday, Biden held a rare and, by all accounts cordial, telephone call with his counterpart in Moscow to discuss the increasingly tense situation on the border with Ukraine. For months, Kiev’s forces in the Donbass region have clashed with troops loyal to two Russian-backed breakaway

In the last few weeks, Russia has been flaunting its military build-up in and around Ukraine, sending 20,000 extra troops, artillery convoys, and trains heaving with weaponry to Crimea. To avoid this escalating into full-scale war, a more robust and consistent response is needed from the international community, as well as new fora and strategies to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, France and Germany have assumed leading roles in mediating the conflict. They are part of the ‘Normandy Quartet’ and mediators for the Minsk Protocol. But both of these initiatives have floundered and the Franco-German failure to stand up to Russia is

Munich has had enough of the vaccine chaos in Berlin and Brussels. In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Bavaria’s minister president Markus Söder stated that he would sign a preliminary purchase agreement for the Russian Sputnik vaccine. The leader of the Bavarian Free State explained that he would pre-order two and a half million doses of Sputnik V in the hope of receiving these by July. Söder, who is a potential candidate to replace Merkel, was keen to stress that this was dependent on regulatory approval by the European Medicines Agency. Under pressure to respond to Bavaria’s initiative, Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn has now told his EU counterparts that