Russia

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Ukraine: Number 10 focuses on de-escalation of tensions

David Cameron spoke to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon today before the meeting of the National Security Council. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said the pair ‘agreed it’s important that the Russian government enter into discussion with the Ukrainian government on how to reduce tensions in the region and de-escalate the situation’. The spokesman repeatedly emphasised that ‘de-escalation’ was a key part of the international response to the situation at present, suggesting that it was as important as the threat of costs to Russia. He said: ‘The way I would characterise things is that… the international community is clear that there will be what the Foreign Secretary is talking about

Sunday

Rod Liddle

What exactly should the West do in Ukraine?

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),

Saturday

James Forsyth

Putin asks the Russian parliament to approve sending troops to Ukraine

Vladimir Putin’s decision to ask the Russian parliament to approve the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine makes the situation there even more serious. The request shows that Putin has no intention of heeding Western warning to request the sovereignty of Ukraine. It is also noticeable that the request doesn’t simply cover the Crimea, with its ethnic Russian population, but the whole of Ukraine. It now seems that at the very least this situation will lead towards the de-facto partition of the Ukraine. But the question is whether Putin will be satisfied with this. His ambition has always been to restore Russia’s pride about its place in the world, ‘defeating’

Friday

David Blackburn

Crimea, Russia and the power of ‘provokatsiya’

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

Thursday

Rod Liddle

If Ukraine’s protests were a revolution, why wasn’t the Stop the War march?

It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs. I should get out more, there’s a lot of fun to be had, throwing stuff at the police and shouting things in a self-righteous manner. I think the last one I attended was in the very early 1980s, in Cardiff. Sinn Fein was marching through the centre of the city in support of its right to maim and murder people, and the National Front decided to march against them. As a consequence, the Socialist Workers Party’s most successful front organisation, the Anti-Nazi League, insisted that it had a right to

Jeremy Clarke

Watching car crash compliations with my grandson

My boy was downstairs cooking Sunday roast. Earlier, I had been clambering about on a woodpile, stepped awkwardly, and twisted my knee. So I was upstairs lying on my bed stinking of Deep Heat. Then my grandson appeared in the doorway to report that lunch would be ready in an hour. I held out my arms to him. The lad dutifully removed his shoes and came and lay next to me. I cuddled him passionately until he’d had enough of it, then I reached for the iPad and asked him what he would like to watch on YouTube. ‘Car crashes,’ he said. Apart from making Batman attack vehicles out of

Molly Guinness

The Spectator – on 400 years of unease between Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1991, but Moscow has made sure it’s remained heavily involved in Kiev’s affairs ever since. That has been relatively simple. Soon before independence, Anne Applebaum described how Russia’s ruthless annexation of its neighbour had left Ukraine without much identity of its own. ‘It took 350 years of Czarist domination, several decades of Stalinist purges, two collectivisation-induced mass famines, two world wars, and the refusal to teach Ukrainian children how to speak Ukrainian, along with the systematic elimination of anyone who might be thought a leader, an intellectual, a capitalist, or even a wealthy peasant. But they did it. The Russians have managed to

Ed West Ed West

Vladimir Putin is a reactionary autocrat, not a conservative

Apparently the new Muppets film features Russians as the baddies, a sign of the times as we increasingly draw into a new ideological cold war with the old enemy. Or perhaps a hot, ethnic war, if events in Crimea get any worse, events which raise questions about western foreign policy. Why are we getting involved in this country ‘steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves’, as Peter Hitchens calls it? Another paleocon type, the Telegraph’s semi-deprogrammed former leftist Tim Stanley, says that by provoking Russia into a direct confrontation we look foolish and weak. The ideological cold war was the subject of last week’s cover story, in which Owen

Tuesday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Is Pussy Riot’s music actually any good?

Victims of state persecution, ambassadors for day-glo knitwear and wank fodder for beardy liberals the world over, the members of Pussy Riot have been filling both prison cells and column inches since 2012. In the process, they’ve also become one of the most famous bands on the planet. But let me ask you this – have you ever actually heard any of their music? And crucially, is it any good? Was it purely their politics that led the Cossacks to attack them with horsewhips last week, or is that just the way they do pop criticism in the Caucasus? We took to the internet to get some balanced and entirely

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Russia’s restraint over Ukraine thus far has been remarkable

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

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

William Hague: Ukraine is not about a strategic competition between East and West and we must engage with Russia

Russia has been presented as one of the bad guys in the coverage of the turmoil in Ukraine. But today, Sir Menzies Campbell told the Commons that the one thing that linked the three countries mentioned in William Hague’s urgent statement on Ukraine, Syria and Iran was that ‘progress, however limited, was made as a result of engagement with Russia’. Hague’s reply made clear that bad guy or not, the UK needs to continue engaging with Russia: ‘This is a very important point and again this is why the Prime Minister spoke to President Putin on Friday, why I have spoken to Foreign Minister Lavrov today, and agreed to speak

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tory Europhobia cripples Britain’s attitude to the Ukrainian crisis

Colin Freeman, the Telegraph’s fine chief foreign correspondent, made a remarkable claim the other day that merits wider attention. What, he asked, was Britain’s view on the crisis in Ukraine? The answer was revealing for many reasons, not the least of which being the extent to which eurosceptic myopia has, according to Freeman, caused Britain to misjudge the dramatic events unfolding in Kiev and elsewhere. According to Freeman: The depth of Euro-scepticism in Britain meant it cared little either way when Ukraine was gearing up last year to sign an EU trade agreement that would have brought it out of the Russian orbit. In Downing Street, the view was that Europe’s

Sunday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s turmoil highlights Vladimir Putin’s battle lines

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

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: The friends of Putin taking home gold from the Sochi Olympics

Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.4 billion rail-and-highway link between Olympic sites: keep your eye on Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, who used to be the President’s dacha neighbour…’ And so on through a roll

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Wind and bias, and the Scots at war

Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists. With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February). Replete (as one would expect from an organisation that previously went under the name British Wind Energy Association) with dismissive assertions and bogus statistics, Weber’s letter exemplifies the

Owen Matthews

Vladimir Putin’s new plan for world domination

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris discuss how far we should let Putin go”] Listen [/audioplayer]It’s been a generation or so since Russians were in the business of shaping the destiny of the world, and most of us have forgotten how good they used to be at it. For much of the last century Moscow fuelled — and often won — the West’s ideological and culture wars. In the 1930s, brilliant operatives like Willi Muenzenberg convinced ‘useful idiots’ to join anti-fascist organisations that were in reality fronts for the Soviet-backed Communist International. Even in the twilight years of the Soviet Union the KGB was highly successful at orchestrating nuclear

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger

Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than academic rigour. This has changed, thanks to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras when he is not presiding. This semester, I am teaching a class in literary journalism. I asked my students to write a short essay about their favourite writer of non-fiction. This proved to be difficult for some, since they had no favourite writers of non-fiction; indeed they had never read any literary non-fiction at all for pleasure, certainly not at book length. But several did come up with

Wednesday

John Laughland

Ukraine: It’s not about Europe vs Russia

To discuss the Ukrainian crisis in terms of a choice between Europe and Russia is misleading for several reasons. First, the European issue has been ruthlessly exploited by the Ukrainian opposition and its Western backers as an excuse for overthrowing the government illegally and by force. Opposition leaders have never distanced themselves from the most radical elements on the streets of Kiev, even though these include neo-Nazis. On the contrary, they have done everything to use their violence as a bargaining chip in their battle with the government. Let us never forget that the majority of the 25 deaths on the night of 18 – 19 February were murders committed

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Ukraine reinforces the case for a wider but shallower EU

With Ukip heading for possible victory in the European elections and anti-EU fervour growing across the continent, it is hard to imagine a country where people are so desperate to join the EU that they are prepared to take on water canon in order to make their point. But that country is Ukraine. The violence which has been brewing for weeks and which erupted yesterday has its source in many tensions in the country, but one issue defines the two sides: protesters who are looking westwards towards EU membership and a government which rejects this and looks eastwards towards Russia. Maybe President Viktor Yanukovych and Nigel Farage should make a pact: if

Thursday

Taki

Why doesn’t Stephen Fry boycott the Saudis as well as the Russians? 

Call me sentimental, but I’ve never seen a better opening ceremony than the Sochi one, evoking Russia’s great past in literature and in many other things. The ballet sequence was tops, especially the acrobatics by the black-clad dancer portraying the cruel officer in War and Peace who seduced Natasha. All those hysterics about boycotts and terrorism, they were just hypocritical sensationalism by those PC jerks that seem to be running our lives nowadays. We westerners are averse to any discipline, impervious to duty, and disinclined to belong to a nation. We owe allegiance only to ourselves and love only ourselves. Not so over in Russia, where there’s a mystic connection