Russia

The West doesn’t know best

I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what they were like, back when I was five or six and enjoyed staring at a globe of the world, she described them as ‘drunken and stupid, but very brave’. This was, by Mother’s standards, an extremely kindly benediction. Most of her descriptions of the world’s various people did not contain commendations. There were a few exceptions — Trinidadians were ‘drunken and stupid, but very cheerful’, for example. But by and large, to her the world comprised people who were drunken and stupid, apart from the Muslim world, where people were

Portrait of the week: BBC drops songs, museum drops Sloane, and KFC and John Lewis drop slogans

Home Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, made pupils wear face-coverings in school corridors. It didn’t take long for the UK government to follow suit in England, for secondary pupils in areas of high transmission. The chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales said that the fatality rate for those aged five to 14 infected with coronavirus was 14 per million, lower than for most seasonal flu infections. Sally Collier resigned as chief regulator of Ofqual, which had been caught up in the chaotic assessment of A-level and GCSE candidates. It was ‘vitally important’ for children to go back to school, said Boris Johnson, the Prime

Trump should pardon Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden says that he didn’t mean to end up in Russia when he fled after leaking secrets from his job at the United States National Security Agency (NSA). He writes in his autobiography, Permanent Record, that he agonised about where to go. Europe was impossible because of extradition. Africa was a ‘no-go zone’ because the US ‘had a history of acting there with impunity’. Eventually, he went to Hong Kong and after hiding out there for a short time, he made a dash for Ecuador in hope of getting asylum. But the US cancelled his passport and, in what we’re told was an unfortunate coincidence, he got stuck in Sheremetyevo airport

Portrait of the week: Employment falls, exam failures and a roundabout rigmarole

Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials said that 33 migrants in two boats that got into difficulty had been returned to Calais. In July more than 1,000 migrants crossed the Channel. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, appointed Dan O’Mahoney as Britain’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, tasked with somehow making such voyages ‘unviable’. Employment fell by 220,000 in the three months to June, the biggest quarterly fall since 2009, but unemployment remained at about 3.9 per cent, as millions stayed on the furlough scheme. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 9 August, total deaths from Covid-19

Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes, the Russia report and a knighthood for Captain Tom

Home A coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, tested on 1,077 people, was found to induce antibodies and T-cells that could fight the virus. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he hoped for a ‘significant return to normality from November, at the earliest, possibly in time for Christmas’. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 19 July, total deaths from Covid-19 stood at 45,273, with a seven-day average of 68 deaths a day. But Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University discovered that anyone who had tested positive for coronavirus but died later of another cause was included in the Public Health England figures. The Queen knighted Captain Sir

Putin plans to make the West destroy itself

There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom, unknowable menace, and this will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories far more corrosive and confusing to our politics than any Moscow-generated Twitter-storm or document leak. There’s no smoking gun on Brexit. Yet the government-induced delay in publication allows anyone that way inclined to imagine a cover-up. Even the insistence that the state should do more

Sunday shows round-up: Chinese Ambassador denies Xinjiang concentration camps

Liu Xiaoming – No Muslim concentration camps in Xinjiang Today’s Sunday interviews took a heavier focus on foreign affairs than usual, with Andrew Marr counting not one, but two ambassadors among his guests. He began by speaking to Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador, and confronted him with aerial footage appearing to show restrained Uighur Muslims preparing to be transported to ‘re-education’ camps, alongside testimony that Uighur women were being forced to undergo sterilisation procedures. Liu denied that such human rights abuses were Chinese government policy and tried to brand the claims as fake: LX: The government policy is strongly opposed to this kind of practice, but I cannot rule out

These Russian cyber-attacks are a wake up call for the UK

Days before the release of the becalmed Intelligence & Security Committee (ISC) report on Russian political interference, we suddenly started to hear news of Moscow’s meddling on Thursday. It’s almost as if the government, sensitive about appearing like it wants to bury the report, suddenly wants to steal the thunder and look serious. Surely not. Putting cynicism aside, it is worth taking a proper look at these two new stories of Russian interference and what they tell us about what Moscow is and isn’t doing – and, more to the point, what it can and cannot do. The first story is a leak about a leak. Ahead of the ISC

The ineptitude of despots

Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last week: ‘No. 10 is trying to control the media, and everyone in our democracy should be afraid.’ Sadly, this typically sane and measured observation was later deleted. Was she told to delete it? Or did she think better of it but was not quite up to tweeting: ‘No. 10 isn’t trying to control the media and we should probably all rest easy.’ I wonder how many other tweets she’s deleted before I got around to seeing them? ‘The schools are closed not on account of Covid but because giant Tory

Britain’s Magnitsky sanctions will hit Putin where it hurts

It’s rare for a Government minister to make an announcement that is universally welcomed in the House of Commons. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the foreign secretary Dominic Raab introduced long-awaited sanctions against human-rights abusers. Raab’s announcement appeared on the Commons’ Order Paper under the rather mundane title ‘Introduction of the Global Human Rights sanctions regime’, but what he said will have far-reaching consequences. The measures Raab announced include asset freezes and travel bans against individuals who not only commit human-rights abuses but also those who benefit and profit from them. The names of such individuals will be made public, in a so-called ‘Magnitsky List’. The measures

Imperialism is far from over, but gathering force in disguise

From ancient times, empires have risen and fallen, driven by war, territorial acquisition, trade, plunder, religion, ideology, technology, culture and information. In this ambitious book, Samir Puri — formerly at the Foreign Office, now a lecturer on war and international studies — attempts to analyse how all this has affected the world today. Over eight chapters, he recounts the histories of empires around the globe, omitting only South America and Oceania. He looks at how their very different narratives linger in modern geopolitics. If we are living, as he says, through a ‘great imperial hangover’ it must have been one almighty booze-up. In the United States he considers the paradox

Can Putin survive the coronavirus stress test?

Vladimir Putin knows that a poor state is a weak state. As a middling KGB apparatchik in Dresden in 1989 he saw the USSR’s authority over its empire collapse along with its economy. Two years later, the Soviet state itself imploded, unable to feed its citizens or command the loyalty of its own security forces. Rebuilding Russia’s security apparatus back to Soviet levels and securing it against another systemic collapse has been the touchstone of Putin’s two decades in power. With the coronavirus crisis, the Putin system faces a stress test every bit as radical as that which brought down Mikhail Gorbachev. The proximate cause of the USSR’s collapse was

Covid-19 is testing Putin’s regime

Vladimir Putin is observing the old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. With the world’s attention focused on halting the spread of Covid-19, the Kremlin is grandstanding on the international stage. Russia has sent medical aid to Italy, sold medical aid to the US, and proposed a draft UN General Assembly resolution calling for global solidarity (and an end to economic sanctions) in the effort to combat coronavirus. At home, however, Russia is in crisis. While the Kremlin acted decisively in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, its response since has mostly focused on harassing doctors who dare speak the truth about the

An extraordinary tale: BBC2’s The Countess and the Russian Billionaire reviewed

There can’t be many programmes that bring to mind quotations from both Henry Kissinger and Boney M., but BBC2’s The Countess and the Russian Billionaire was one of them. While Kissinger’s idea that ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’ may be a little out of fashion in the #MeToo age, it was hard not to think it played a part in the eye-popping events that Wednesday’s documentary laid out with some relish. As for Boney M., rarely has ‘Oh, those Russians’ from ‘Rasputin’ felt so penetratingly insightful. The programme began filming in 2015, with the apparent aim of providing a ringside seat at a fight between an excitingly wealthy British-based couple

Corona confusion is being ruthlessly weaponised

Few words have as great a hold on the contemporary imagination as ‘disinformation.’ Few words are as ubiquitous in contemporary discourse or as pervasive in political mud-slinging. Donald Trump castigates the ‘fake news’ media for perceived bias against him; Hillary Clinton blames foreign influence operations for her election loss. Disinformation, propaganda, lies: whatever you wish to call it, it’s the bogeyman of our age, a convenient repository for all our sins. There is a reason for this. The author Shoshana Zuboff has correctly observed that information technology brought with it a revolution that reordered capitalism. Human experience – as found in data, which is how we now harness information –

Crude tactics: Russia and Saudi Arabia are at war over oil prices

It all started at what every-one thought would be a routine meeting between Opec and non-Opec nations in Vienna. There were the usual fake smiles and firm handshakes in front of the cameras from the dignitaries. Bored journalists roused themselves to prepare to write stories they expected never to be read, before they could at last head to the pub. And then, out of nowhere, came a bombshell. Downward pressure on oil prices from the coronavirus panic was posing an obvious risk to Saudi Arabia’s still heavily oil-dependent economy. And this is what a cartel like Opec is for: to agree to release less oil into the market, pushing the

Putin is resurrecting Russia’s Cold War pact with Cuba

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov kicked off his tour of Latin America this week with a visit to Cuba. The choice is not a mere coincidence. Lavrov’s visit comes at a time when Moscow and Havana are enjoying their closest relationship in decades. The Soviet Union was once Cuba’s greatest patron. It lavished the island with economic subsidies and favourable trading arrangements in an attempt to bolster the lone communist outpost on America’s doorstep. Infamously, the United States and the Soviet Union neared the brink of nuclear war in 1962 over Moscow’s attempt to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba. But as the Cold War approached its end, Cuba became less

Tsar quality: the charm of Tbilisi

‘These regions are not under the control of the central government,’ reads a warning on a map of Georgia in the bustling centre of Tbilisi. ‘Travelling to these regions is not advisable.’ One of these regions is Abkhazia, only a few hours’ drive away. The other is South Ossetia, barely an hour from here. Since 2008 both have been occupied by Russian troops, in defiance of the Georgian government, yet here in the Georgian capital tourism is booming, and many of these tourists are Russians. This neat irony encapsulates what makes Tbilisi such a fascinating city, a looking-glass metropolis in which nothing is quite what it seems. EU flags fly

Rod Liddle

I’ve found a lovely new home – in Russia

Staraya Russa. About two thirds of the way from Moscow to St Petersburg, in the historic Novgorod Oblast, once the eastern outpost of that much preferable European union, the Hanseatic League. Beautiful cathedral square, lakes and forests, timber-clad museum where Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov. There’s a rather grand house for sale — about 5,000 sq ft, five beds, nice garden — for £143,416. From where I’m sitting, as terrified Tories insist the polls are narrowing and Magic Grandpa is within inches of winning, you’d be mad not to. From where you’re sitting, too, a little later in this awful week, if the Tories were right to be terrified. Staraya

Exclusive: Dominic Cummings’s secret links to Russia

This week, a malign foreign actor invaded the British media, spreading disinformation and seeking to meddle in the general election. A malevolent force exploiting our democracy to advance its own interests. That’s right, Hillary Clinton has been in London. She has another book to promote, The Book of Gutsy Women, and she’s again talking about male authoritarian-ism, why Britain needs to be ‘forward-looking’ (i.e. not leave the European Union), and the menace of Russia. It doesn’t take an intelligence expert to decode her message: ‘I didn’t win in 2016 and I’m still livid.’ Clinton says she is ‘dumbfounded’ that the British government has decided not to publish a parliamentary report