Lisa Haseldine is The Spectator's online commissioning editor - foreign affairs.
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Stepping out onto Red Square for today’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, it was clear to see that Vladimir Putin was in a good mood. Arms swinging with almost comic vigour as he walked, he sat down in the stands above Lenin’s mausoleum with a smug smile on his face. The pathetic fallacy of the
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Amidst the golden splendour of the Kremlin’s Hall of the Order of St Andrew, Vladimir Putin was once again inaugurated as president of Russia this morning. But while today’s event was in many ways a carbon copy of the ceremony that has taken place five times now since 2000, it marks a significant watershed in the history
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As the German AfD’s European election campaign kicks off tomorrow, the far-right party’s leadership could be forgiven for counting down to polling day in June with dread. This campaign launch marks the end of a torrid fortnight for the party that is threatening to jeopardise the AfD’s future in Brussels. Two of the party’s top
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Rishi Sunak arrived in Poland today to announce a £500 million boost in aid to Ukraine, using the trip to Warsaw to also finally put a timeline on increasing Britain’s defence spending. By 2030, the Prime Minister pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP. His announcements come ahead of a much
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On Wednesday, Georgia’s government came one step closer to realising its desire to embed the country deeper within Russia’s sphere of influence. A year after mass protests forced them to pull the plug on a controversial ‘foreign agents’ law, the Kremlin-sympathetic ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party is once again trying to force this ‘Russian-style’ legislation
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A year ago today, the Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza was jailed for 25 years – the longest sentence handed down to a political prisoner in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. For the last year, Kara-Murza has been held in a prison in Siberia, often in solitary confinement, with
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Could compulsory military service soon be reintroduced in Germany? Since becoming defence minister at the beginning of last year, Boris Pistorius has grappled with the challenge of how to rejuvenate Germany’s dwindling armed forces. He increasingly appears convinced that conscription is the answer to his problems. Last week, Pistorius dropped the latest hint that a
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In the fortnight since four Isis gunmen stormed Crocus City Hall in the Moscow suburbs, Vladimir Putin has done his best to dodge as much of the blame as possible. Speaking at a trade convention in Moscow on Thursday, Russia’s president once again reiterated the implication that Ukraine, and not the Islamist terror group, was
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A branch of the Islamic State terror group, Isis-K, has claimed responsibility for last night’s stadium terror attack in Moscow. US officials, who had warned of such an attack two weeks ago have said this sounded credible. But the Kremlin has not accepted the Isis-K claim and says it’s looking at all explanations – even
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As Russia comes to terms with what seems to be the largest terrorist attack on its soil in recent times, Vladimir Putin has something difficult to explain. For some time, Western intelligence agencies have been picking up chat about potential strikes in Moscow – and the US took the unusual step of making a public
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As expected, following a three day ‘vote’, Vladimir Putin has once again crowned himself president of Russia. As of 9 a.m. Moscow time, according to the central electoral commission, 99.7 per cent of ballot papers had been counted with Putin claiming 87 per cent of the vote – higher than he’s managed in any other
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For the next three days, Russians are heading to the polls supposedly to choose the country’s next president. Except we already know, as do most Russians, who the winner will be. It is a foregone conclusion that after this weekend Vladimir Putin will win another six years in power. But just because the Russian elections are a
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Yet again the question of whether to send arms to Ukraine is plaguing Olaf Scholz’s chancellorship. The issue was once more thrown into sharp focus when Russian intelligence leaked a discussion by Bundeswehr officials on the probability of sending long-range Taurus missiles to Kyiv. A recording of the conversation was splashed across the world by
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Today is a sad day for Russia. Two weeks after his death in an Arctic penal colony, Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most vociferous opponent, has been buried in Moscow. Thousands of mourners lined the streets in southern Moscow to pay their respects, their sorrow compounded with a sense of anger and defiance that grew as the funeral wore
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Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of
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43 min listen
This week: Max Jeffery writes from Blackpool where he says you can see the welfare crisis at its worst (01:29); Lisa Haseldine reads her interview with the wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose husband is languishing in a Siberian jail (06:26); Christopher Howse tells us about the ancient synagogue under threat from developers (13:02); Philip Hensher
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Her party may be less than two months old, but already Sahra Wagenknecht has put a cat amongst the pigeons in Germany. She launched her eponymous party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) on 8 January this year, a few months after sensationally quitting the left-wing Die Linke party in October over disagreements on the party’s Ukraine
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Opposing Vladimir Putin is a lethal business. The world was reminded of this last week after the sudden death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The Russian authorities are blaming Navalny’s demise on ‘sudden death syndrome’, but whether it was outright murder or simply the result of three years spent in Russia’s penal system, the
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Three days on from his death, the widow of Alexei Navalny today vowed to continue the work of her husband to bring democracy to Russia and free it from Putin’s grip. Speaking on her husband’s YouTube channel for the first time, Yulia acknowledged that she ‘shouldn’t be sitting here, shouldn’t have had to record this video’
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How did Alexei Navalny die? The official version is that he collapsed after a walk in his Siberian prison. But his family are, like much of the world, sceptical – and have shared what they have been told so far. His mother and lawyer were originally told his body had been taken to the morgue at
