Owen Matthews is an Associate Editor of The Spectator and the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
For the Kremlin, the US’s snatching of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is a humiliation with a silver lining. True, little more than a year after the precipitous fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia has been shown to be completely hopeless when it comes to keeping its allies in power. In Caracas, US airborne forces breezed
Russia started the war on Ukraine, so Russia should pay for the damage it has wrought. Such was Volodymyr Zelensky’s forceful message to European leaders last night as he pleaded for a “reparations loan” backed by the €190 billion ($222 billion) of Russian Central Bank capital frozen in a Belgian clearing bank since Putin’s full-scale
What exactly is the “platinum security guarantee” that Donald Trump is pushing Volodymyr Zelensky to accept? While the full details remain confidential, the deal is described as an “Article 5 style” guarantee after the clause in NATO’s charter that states that “an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all
Holding elections in war-torn Ukraine will be no easy task
Rome Will peace in Ukraine also prove to be a great deal for US business? Vladimir Putin would certainly like Donald Trump to think so. Within days of Trump’s election victory last November, the Kremlin ordered major Russian corporations to prepare detailed proposals for economic cooperation with Washington. Coordinating these efforts were Maxim Oreshkin, deputy
Bear hugs and kind words are not enough
Believing that time and destiny are on his side, Putin is sticking to his maximalist war aims
With Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s political authority already under grave assault in the wake of a major corruption scandal, he now faces a new challenge – this time from his erstwhile ally, the United States. A high-level US delegation led by army secretary Daniel Driscoll is meeting Zelensky in Kyiv today to present the latest
Who will pay for Ukraine’s war effort now the Trump administration has turned off the financial taps? European leaders have expressed themselves ready and willing to take up the burden, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen affirming that “if we continue to believe that Ukraine is our first line of defense, we need
He is now willing to stake all on victory in the field
Berlin prosecutors see the operation as an attack on Germany – the Poles see it as an attack on Russia
Restoring Ukraine’s prewar borders sounds, on the face of it, a just solution to an unjust invasion
Fears of an energy-led recession twisted the Biden administration into the mental pretzel that still prevails
We’re back to talk of war scenarios and military hardware. And those questions have changed radically since Putin invaded back in February 2022
Ahmed al-Sharaa is the former al-Qaeda and ISIS firebrand turned interim leader of Syria
Force won’t work on the Russian President
The big occasion is the Papal Jubilee year of 2025, expected to draw a whopping 32 million visitors
The pub has Ireland, and the Irish experience in America, in its DNA
There were no breakthroughs — but at least, by Putin’s account at least, there was ‘no hostility’ between the two sides
A special relationship
