Owen Matthews is an Associate Editor of The Spectator and the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Tofurious Maximus Crane was sitting in a barber’s chair in Moscow when he received the greatest news of his life. It was 19 August, the day Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to immigrate to Russia. Now, the 46-year-old native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, could finally achieve his life’s dream of remaining in Russia
Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month. Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia
Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious
This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line
Whatever happened to the Wagner Group, Evgeny Prigozhin’s shadowy army of prisoners and mercenaries? In the wake of Wagner’s abortive mutiny in June 2023 – and of Prigozhin’s own not-so-mysterious death two months later in a plane crash near Moscow – most of the Russia-based units of the group were rolled into the Kremlin’s official
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Joan Collins reads an extract from her diary (1:15); Owen Matthews argues that Russia and China’s relationship is just a marriage of convenience (3:19); reviewing The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering by Daniel Light, Sara Wheeler examines the epic history of the sport (13:52); Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks
On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 appears to be going from strength to strength. Last week, Chinese Premier Li Qiang spent four days in Moscow and signed off on what Putin described as ‘large-scale joint plans and projects’
Pavel Durov, Russian-born founder of the Telegram messaging and social media app, has been arrested in France for failing to comply with official demands to regulate content posted by users on his app. According to a warrant issued by France’s Ofmin – an office tasked with preventing violence against minors – Durov’s alleged offences include
Could Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko be the key to ending the Ukraine conflict? In a surprising intervention over the weekend, the long-time dictator and close Putin ally said in an interview on Russian state TV that ‘Nazis don’t exist on the territory of Ukraine’ – a key part of Putin’s stated war aims. He also called
When three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany were destroyed by unknown saboteurs in September 2022, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podolyak described the bombing as ‘a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.’ The attack – which knocked out the route through which Germany
A Russian friend speaking from Kursk tells me the latest war joke. Vladimir Putin summons Stalin’s ghost. ‘Comrade Stalin!’ asks Putin. ‘German tanks are in Kursk again. I need your advice.’ Stalin’s ghost ponders before answering. ‘Do what I did. Get hold of as much American military aid as you can, and make sure to
I can well understand that joy and relief experienced by the supporters and families of the hostages released yesterday by Vladimir Putin. For I myself owe my life to a Cold War spy swap. In October 1969, the British government exchanged Peter and Helen Kroger, two senior Soviet career spies nabbed for running a very
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Matt Ridley argues that whoever you vote for, the blob wins (1:02); William Cook reads his Euros notebook from Germany (12:35); Owen Matthews reports on President Zelensky’s peace summit (16:21); and, reviewing Michael Peel’s new book ‘What everyone knows about Britain’, Agnes Poirier ponders if only Britain knew how it
Volodymyr Zelensky’s Global Peace Summit in Switzerland was meant to demonstrate the world’s support for Kyiv and underscore Russia’s isolation. It did the opposite. Russia wasn’t invited. China didn’t send a delegation. Other major countries that might influence the Kremlin – including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE – refused to sign
Has a book ever been more bizarrely mis-titled than this one? The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century. Rather, Barbara Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history
In the past month, Vladimir Putin has had five top generals arrested on corruption charges. More are likely to follow in what looks like a gathering purge by the Federal Security Service (FSB). ‘There is a fierce clean-up under way,’ a source close to the Kremlin told the Moscow Times last week. ‘There is still
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Quentin Letts takes us through his diary for the week (1:12); Owen Matthews details the shadow fleet helping Russia to evade sanctions (7:15); Michael Hann reports on the country music revival (15:05); Laura Gascoigne reviews exhibitions at the Tate Britain and at Studio Voltaire (21:20); and, Michael Simmons provides his
Economic sanctions were meant to be the West’s secret weapon against Russia, a way of crippling Vladimir Putin’s war machine and bringing his invasion of Ukraine to a halt without Nato firing a shot. Instead, Russia’s economy and military remain in rude health. After recent heavy attacks north of Kharkiv, Putin’s troops have seized more
At the last possible moment, after months of prevarication and with Russian troops on the brink of a major breakthrough in Ukraine, the US Congress last night voted to approve more than $61 billion (£50 billion) worth of military assistance for Kyiv. In a vote that a vocal minority of Republicans had desperately attempted to
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This week: will Biden support Ukraine’s attacks on Russia? Owen Matthews writes the cover piece in light of the Zelensky drone offensive. Ukraine’s most successful strategy to date has been its ingenious use of homemade, long-range drones, which it has used to strike military targets as well as oil refineries and petrol storage facilities in
