Russia

To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon hardly makes me Nostradamus — but sure enough, the tension between Russia and Ukraine have caused stock markets to quiver and the price of UK gas for one-month delivery on the ICE Europe futures exchange in London to rise 10 per cent on Monday. But it was more impressively far-sighted that way back in the winter of 2005/6 we commissioned a Spectator cover showing wicked Vladimir Putin sitting astride a knotted gas pipeline: one sixth of all gas consumed in Europe arrives from Russia across the Ukraine, and another sixth

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate how far we should let Russia push” startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]It is always tempting, in the field of foreign affairs, to suppose we are led by dupes and fools while our opponents enjoy – or endure –  leaders of boundless cunning. We are over-matched; they are playing three-dimensional chess. We are weak, they are strong. We are easily distracted, they are single-minded. We compromise, they are implacable. It is easy to over-estimate the opposition while under-estimating our own capabilities. Sometimes this has unfortunate consequences. Saddam Hussein, for instance, had to be hiding something. The Iraqi dictator – notoriously full of dark cunning – would not be

In Ukraine, the West has played—quite disastrously—into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The mistakes go back almost a decade. But the most recent one occurred when protesters took to the streets to oppose the Yanukovych government. The West, by which I mean Nato and the European Union, should have made clear that whatever sympathies they had with the protesters’ aims, the right way to change the government was by the ballot box. The failure to do that has provided Putin with the pretext he needed to have Russian forces seize control of Crimea. Putin’s motivating factor is his desire to avenge, what he sees as, the humiliation of Russia at the end

I’ve seen and read an awful lot of criticism about how weak and pathetic the West has been in responding to the developing crisis in the Ukraine, but scarcely a single word offering advice as to what it SHOULD do. It may well be that making vague threats about the Sochi G8 Summit and a few muttered threats of economic ‘isolation’, whatever that is, may fall a little short of say, Operation Barbarossa as a statement of intent. But none of the pundits I have read come close to suggesting that the West should take any form of military action (or ‘World War Three’, as it used to be known),

What to make of the appearance at two airports in Crimea of armed men wearing uniforms without insignia? The airports are strategically placed – Belbek near Sevastopol, and the main airport outside Simferopol, the regional capital. Obviously, an airport is a vital piece of local infrastructure that provides an entry point for reinforcement and supply; their possible seizure by unidentified troops is a very serious business. Authorities in Crimea insist that the armed personnel belong to the Russian Black Sea fleet, and that this is a ‘military invasion and occupation’. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Russian Black Sea fleet has issued this communiqué: ‘No subdivision of the Black Sea Fleet has been advanced into

Perhaps it’s premature to say this now that the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has sounded off about Russian citizens in Ukraine being in danger, but it strikes me that Russia has behaved in the current crisis with a certain commendable restraint. Judging from most pundits in most British papers, there is no redeeming element to the Putin regime – soup to nuts, gay rights to corruption – and if it hasn’t actually sent the tanks in, well, it probably wants to. Yet, reading the statement from its foreign ministry that ‘a forced change of power is underway’, it’s hard to say that it’s not strictly correct. Mr Medvedev wasn’t actually

After two decades in the economic basket, Russia is decisively back as an ideological force in the world — this time as a champion of conservative values. In his annual state of the nation speech to Russia’s parliament in December, Vladimir Putin assured conservatives around the world that Russia was ready and willing to stand up for ‘family values’ against a tide of liberal, western, pro-gay propaganda ‘that asks us to accept without question the equality of good and evil’. Russia, he promised, will ‘defend traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years’. Crucially, Putin made it clear