Owen Matthews is an Associate Editor of The Spectator and the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of 200 gold ducats for any person who should dare to unload… waste of any kind and cause a stink outside these precincts.’ This threat might have worked when the plaque was erected in 1703, but
There’s an odd thing about 18-year old Luiza Rozova’s instagram feed. You can see photos of her breakfasts (sliced exotic fruit on heart shaped plates); her bikini selfies and her smart Paris apartment; her new shoes and her trips to the Louvre (heavily masked). But you never see her face. Take a look at screen-grabs
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure: an aristocratic expedition commander who carries the pride of a small nation on his shoulders; an eccentric American surgeon who was to become known as one of the greatest frauds in the history of polar
An ‘act of aviation piracy’ was how Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary described the forcible grounding of one of his planes in Minsk by Belarusian authorities in order to arrest a dissident who was on board. ‘A shocking assault on civil aviation and an assault on international law,’ said the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. The
Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. ‘Mmm-hmm, I do,’ answered the President. Once, that would have been fighting talk. Today? Biden can insult Putin with impunity because he believes that Russia is, quite simply, no longer important or dangerous. Once a deadly serious enemy whose rivalry threatened
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Russian troops had been building up on the Ukrainian border for weeks now, only for Putin to announce their pullback this week. Moscow claims it was only ever a military exercise, but the troop presence was enough to fuel speculation of further annexation of parts of Ukraine. Fraser Nelson speaks to James Forsyth and Owen
The secret is out: the Russian government has been lying to its people. Officially, Russia’s coronavirus death toll for last year — as reported on state television and logged at the World Health Organisation — was an impressively low 86,498 for a population of 146 million. In his traditional December press conference Vladimir Putin proudly
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How are China and Russia getting ahead in the great game of vaccine diplomacy? (00:50) Has the US press lost its way? (11:30) Why is Anglo-Saxon history making a comeback? (27:20) With The Spectator‘s broadcast editor Cindy Yu; journalist Owen Matthews; Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur; The Washington Post‘s media critic Erik Wemple; journalist Dan Hitchens;
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim, as usual, was lying. Westminster and Cambridge, the Foreign Office and SIS: for all his attempts to pose as an outsider, Philby was a thorough-paced member of the British Establishment. George Blake — who is
Yesterday Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny achieved his martyrdom, with a panelled courtroom packed with journalists and Western diplomats standing in for Golgotha. A Moscow judge turned an outstanding two year, eight month suspended sentence for fraud into a prison term on the grounds that Navalny had missed probation hearings — dismissing as frivolous his
The protests began in Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, and spread Westwards across 85 cities across the country’s nine time zones. The ritual was familiar enough from the last major wave of protests in the summer of 2019 – several thousand banner-carrying protesters calling for the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, an overwhelming show
‘Arrest me? Why would anyone arrest me?’ said Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny to reporters last week as he boarded a Moscow-bound plane. Four hours later he was in jail — but not before spending an hour circling above the Russian capital as riot police shut down the airport where 2,000 supporters awaited him and
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Owen Matthews on Russia’s plan to unleash chaos in the West (00:50); Lionel Shriver on the peculiar similarities between the open letter and the ransom note (11:00); and Peter Hitchens on why he won’t be wearing a mask when he’s giving blood (19:40).
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As the long-awaited Russia report is released this week, we discuss Russia’s plan to unleash chaos (00:45). Plus, does Boris Johnson have a management problem with his new MPs? (14:30) And last, the pains of dating during lockdown (28:30). With Russia journalists Owen Matthews and Mary Dejevsky; the Spectator’s deputy political editor Katy Balls; Conservative
There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom,
Russia, the old joke goes, has long been a country with an unpredictable past. On September 22, 1939, for instance, Soviet Brigade Commander Semyon Krivoshein stood alongside German Generals Mauritz von Wiktorin and Heinz Guderian in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, to review a joint parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army troops who had recently occupied the town.
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James Forsyth writes in this week’s cover piece that the government ‘is going to go South Korean on the virus’. In other words, test, track, and trace. But as James points out, this raises the obvious question of why we weren’t doing this already. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James and the Economist‘s Adrian
Vladimir Putin knows that a poor state is a weak state. As a middling KGB apparatchik in Dresden in 1989 he saw the USSR’s authority over its empire collapse along with its economy. Two years later, the Soviet state itself imploded, unable to feed its citizens or command the loyalty of its own security forces.
In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of
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This week kicked off with an incredible fall in oil prices globally, so what on earth happened (00:50)? We also talk about the Budget, where Rishi Sunak set out in more detail how the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda will look (10:20). Finally, should we be doing more science research for curiosity’s sake (23:05)?
