Ukraine

Wednesday

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 | 3 April 2014

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ‘a commitment to fight for full employment in Britain’ and for the country ‘to have the highest employment rate of any of the world’s leading economies’. Wolfgang Schäuble, his counterpart in Germany, agreed that any EU treaty changes should ‘guarantee fairness’ to countries outside the eurozone. The government’s approach to selling off Royal Mail was ‘marked by deep caution, the price of which was borne by the taxpayer’ according to a report by the National Audit Office. The Office for National Statistics said that the next census would be conducted online. Dust from the Sahara fell on to England and Wales. An

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Who will rid us of George Galloway?

Nothing George Galloway says or does should surprise anyone any longer. Even so, his latest musings on the situation in Ukraine – delivered on the Iranian propaganda channel Press TV – are quite something. Even by his lofty standards they may represent a new low. Just watch him go: Galloway excels even himself here. It’s the tortuous creativity that really does it. If it weren’t so typical and so typically revolting you’d almost be impressed by it. Is it too much to ask that the other parties agree next year to field but a single candidate against Galloway? As for the people of Bradford West, well, the best that can be said is

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: If Putin can have a referendum, so can Boris

Everyone can see that the West has no idea what to do about Russian power in the Ukraine. Britain, in particular, is at the margins. It is time for the Mayor of London to fulfil his historic role of stealing a march on more conventional politicians. Boris should take a leaf out of President Putin’s book and call a referendum of Londoners. He should ask them whether they would like all Russian housing in London to be seized, and be inhabited, instead, by British families. I predict a Yes vote whose percentage would exceed even that of the recent Crimean plebiscite. Obviously the Mayor, unlike Putin, has no military forces

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

The Spectator

Putin’s aggression is the price of western weakness

One cannot legislate for a quiet world. When a former Princeton University college professor was elected president of the United States, he joked before his inauguration that ‘it would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs’. That was Woodrow Wilson, speaking in March 1913. Similarly, the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama came to office with little interest in what lay over the Atlantic. He wanted to be the Pacific president, more concerned with Asia than the squabbles of the old world. Fate, it turned out, had other plans. This week Obama has found his visit to Europe dominated by talk of Russian militarism —

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Boris should call a referendum

Everyone can see that the West has no idea what to do about Russian power in the Ukraine. Britain, in particular, is at the margins. It is time for the Mayor of London to fulfil his historic role of stealing a march on more conventional politicians. Boris should take a leaf out of President Putin’s book and call a referendum of Londoners. He should ask them whether they would like all Russian housing in London to be seized, and be inhabited, instead, by British families. I predict a Yes vote whose percentage would exceed even that of the recent Crimean plebiscite. Obviously the Mayor, unlike Putin, has no military forces

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,

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

Monday

Lara Prendergast

The University of Cambridge must choose its donors wisely

Just over three years ago, when I was editor of Varsity, Cambridge’s student newspaper, we ran a story documenting how Dmytro Firtash was using his Cambridge connections to bring libel charges to British courts. Here’s an extract: ‘A billionaire donor to the University of Cambridge has filed a libel lawsuit against a Ukrainian paper, the Kyiv Post, citing his donations to the University as one of the reasons he has chosen to pursue the case through the British courts. Dmytro Firtash, a gas-trading oligarch with strong connections to the President of Ukraine, has donated on a number of occasions to the University to help fund Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, based within

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Venetian secessionists deserve to be punished!

How should the western powers react when part of a friendly nation holds an illegal referendum and votes to secede from the country in which hitherto it was located? Sanctions? Military reprisals? We’d better send the gunships to the watery redoubt of Venice, then, which has just voted overwhelmingly to leave Italy. The Venetians, part of Italy for 150 years, are sick of paying taxes to bail out the indolent and mafia-ridden south of the country and wish to go it alone. The rest of Lombardy may soon follow suit. Rome has refused to recognise the plebiscite, fearing that the entire country may cease to exist. No sense of history,

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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Vladimir Putin’s right about one thing: the West doesn’t observe its own rules

Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own creed of liberal evangelism across the world, regardless or not as to whether the people to whose aid we have come actually share our aspirations. It has been a staggeringly unsuccessful policy. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Afghanistan. I wonder too about the way the media reports these crusades. A while back

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

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 March 2014

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the economy was working but the job was far from done. He expected further falls in unemployment and wages rising faster than prices this year. The economy, he suggested, would return this year to its size in 2008. Before the Budget, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that as many as 1.9 million working families could receive a tax-free childcare allowance worth up to £2,000 per child. Mr Osborne had announced that the help-to-buy scheme for new homes would be extended until 2020. He also let it be known that a garden city of 15,000 dwellings would

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

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