Russia

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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Over Ukraine, we have lost our moral compass

A week’s holiday in the perfect seaside town of Staithes was intended to be recuperative and restful, a time to clear the mind, even if the kids were with me. But I return no less confused about the events in Ukraine and, in particular, our reaction to them. I left for the north already in a state of confusion over our support for a mob which overthrew a democratically elected government, even if it was a crap government. This was ‘people power’, though, apparently – and that makes it all right. But now there are insurrections in the east of the country – and yet these are apparently the work

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Don’t call him an oligarch – meeting Dmitry Firtash

Who is Dmitry Firtash? Can he solve Ukraine’s troubles? And why is he currently under effective house arrest in Vienna, awaiting extradition on corruption charges to the US, with his bail set at a whopping €125 million? None of these questions has a simple answer — and when I fly to Austria to meet him it’s not even clear if I’m going to ask him. Firtash appears to be up for it, as far as can be ascertained via his barrage of minders, advisers, security and hangers-on. But his expensive American lawyers most definitely aren’t. It might jeopardise his case, they’re saying. Firtash mustn’t say a word about anything. ‘Who

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 | 27 March 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved and who bought a family house’ and that this would be addressed in the Conservative manifesto. Two opinion polls after the Budget, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday and by YouGov for the Sunday Times, had put Labour one percentage point ahead of the Conservatives. Nineteen Labour movement figures wrote to the Guardian warning the party not to hope to win the election on the basis of Tory unpopularity. The rate of inflation fell from 1.9 to 1.7 per cent, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, or from

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,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron faces down critics on Ukraine

There are few fiercer critics of the way the international community has reacted to the crisis in Crimea than Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Today when the Prime Minister gave his statement on the latest decisions made by world leaders to sanction Russia, Rifkind had another opportunity to scold the Prime Minister and his international colleagues. He did so in typically forceful language: ‘Does the Prime Minister agree that when the history of the Crimea crisis comes to be written, there will be found to be no winners. President Putin has of course control of Crimea but he has lost Ukraine and done much to unite the Ukrainian people. But will my

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

Molly Guinness

Remembering the decimation of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia. Denounced before the

Thursday

Liam Halligan

Putin is making the West’s Cold Warriors look like fools

William Hague was on rather shaky ground when he argued this week that Moscow has chosen ‘the route to isolation’ by recognising Crimea’s referendum. On the contrary, it is the European Union and the United States who look as if they have seriously overplayed their respective hands in Ukraine. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the cry of ‘western hypocrisy’ has been heard much louder than complaints about Vladimir Putin. Even in the UK, mainstream opinion is steadily becoming more critical of western interventionism and our ‘New Cold War’ posturing, despite some pretty one-sided media coverage and much establishment tut-tutting. Independent thought is still viewed with suspicion, and even disgust,

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

The ghost of Tony Benn stalked PMQs

Tony Benn, the most divisive left-wing figure since the war, united the house today. David Cameron paid tribute to him as an orator, diarist and campaigner. Ed Miliband praised his determination to ‘champion the powerless’ and hold the executive to account. Miliband moved to Crimea. He called Sunday’s plebiscite ‘illegal and illegitimate’. Cameron trumped him with a curious phrase that bolted a bit of punchy modern sloganising onto a fragment of olde Englishe slang. The referendum, he said, had been ‘spatch-cocked together in ten days at the point of a Russian Kalashnikov’. The leaders, both keen to denounce Russia in the most savage terms, swapped promises about travel bans, asset

Charles Walker

Russia is not a credible superpower in the 21st century

The West has really got to get its act together in its dealings with Russia. It is simply not credible for us to pretend that we are confronting a threat on the scale posed by the USSR throughout the cold war. Of course, President Putin is dangerous – any charismatic, nationalist strongman with expansionist ambitions and a nuclear arsenal is worth worrying about. But Russia is also Europe’s largest failing state, a country riven by corruption that permeates every aspect of its civil and public life. Its oligarchs have not built their fortunes through honest endeavour. They have plundered their nation’s natural resources aided and abetted by a governing class

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The west has a choice: abandon Ukraine or punish Russia? It should choose the latter.

An astonishing number of useless twits appear to think Russia’s annexation of the Crimea is somehow not Vladimir Putin’s fault. The poor Russia despot – no longer much too strong a term, by the way – is not responsible for his actions. He was provoked! Not simply by the Ukrainians, who should, it is implied, have known better, but by the west. It’s our fault and Putin is simply acting logically and rationally. He has every right to reassert Russia’s ancient prerogatives and if we hadn’t penned him into a corner he wouldn’t have needed to at all. Twaddle of course but the kind of stuff that’s not hard to

Thursday

Peter Jones

Cicero would have agreed with Putin

Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world and the prevailing of international law over the rule of brute force. How very Roman of him. Cicero pointed out that if one wanted violence to end, the law must prevail; if it did not, violence would reign supreme. To no avail. Every five years, the Roman censors asked the gods ‘to improve and strengthen the position of the Roman people’. There was nothing unique about this. Many states prayed for a similar outcome for themselves, while the historian Polybius

David Blackburn

Our own folly may yet lead us to a second dishonourable Yalta

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

Ian Birrell

Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’

Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little as possible as they invade this holiday region in their unmarked uniforms and vehicles. It is remarkable how soon you get used to shouting questions at these heavily armed special forces soldiers while they pretend not to be Russians. They tend not to take the bait: the most you’ll get out of them is a curt ‘Nyet’. I wandered up to an officer who seemed to be in charge of seizing a Ukrainian naval base in the old Tartar capital of Bakhchisaray. He wore all black, his face hidden by

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Ukraine: Cameron and Merkel continue to focus on ‘de-escalation’

David Cameron and Angela Merkel held a working dinner last night in Hanover ahead of their visit to a digital trade fair today. Naturally, they discussed Ukraine, and Number 10’s readout of the call this morning says ‘they both agreed that the priority is to de-escalate the situation and to get Russia to engage in a contact group as swiftly as possible’. Cameron also spoke to Vladimir Putin yesterday, with the Russian President telling the Prime Minister that ‘Russia did want to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis’ – although presumably in Putin’s mind that doesn’t involve quite the same level of compromise as those words might initially suggest.