Ten years ago, Putin saved Bashar al-Assad from certain defeat. Russia’s intervention raised Putin’s profile in the Middle East, and gave him some ground to claim that Russia was still a ‘great power’. Assad’s fall shows that claim was without foundation. Distracted by the war in Ukraine, Putin has been unable to save his client,
At the very moment most people seem to have forgotten of his existence, President Biden has slowly but purposefully shuffled across Vladimir Putin’s latest red line in Ukraine. After months of President Zelensky’s tireless pleas, the United States has finally given Kyiv a green light to use American missiles (ATACMS) for strikes deep inside Russia.
In just a few months we will mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, and has left millions displaced. Ukraine’s infrastructure – in particular the energy infrastructure – is in shambles. The costs of recovery will likely be in the trillions of dollars.
‘We [the West] provoked this war [in Ukraine],’ Nigel Farage recently declared on BBC Panorama, blaming Putin’s invasion of the neighboring country on the ‘ever eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union’. He later doubled down on his claims, arguing that Putin’s behavior in Ukraine was ‘reprehensible, but…’ Farage of course is not alone in
Thirty-five years ago today, China’s leaders ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to disperse a student encampment. The death toll was never made public; it is likely that several thousand people were killed. June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom The brutal
It was brave. It was foolhardy. It was almost unbelievable. After his near-fatal poisoning by the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexey Navalny returned to Russia. He was taken away as he disembarked from the plane in Moscow, and thrown into prison on a made-up pretext. After three years of torture, Navalny has been done away
They say that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon. But, driven by vanity and unconstrained by any understanding of Russia’s history or politics, Tucker Carlson slurped up the intoxicating broth of Vladimir Putin’s falsifications this week in his interview with the Russian president. Carlson took to Moscow well. His Russian
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This week: The Spectator’s cover story looks at how Britain is sobering up, forgoing alcohol in favour of alcohol free alternatives. In his piece, Henry Jeffreys – author of Empire of Booze – attacks the vice of sobriety and argues that the abstinence of young Britons will have a detrimental impact on the drinks industry and British culture.
On Henry Kissinger’s passing, Xi Jinping published a letter, extolling this ‘old friend of China’ as a man of ‘outstanding strategic vision’, whose exploits not just benefited the relationship between China and the United States, but also ‘changed the world’. Xi’s tribute reads like an indictment of the current lamentable state of Sino-American relations (clearly by
The recent spat between Kyiv and Warsaw over grain – with Ukraine suing Poland at the WTO – has come at bad time. In normal times, a trade dispute (however meaningful for those directly affected) would barely register. At a time of mortal danger, however, rifts between allies are grounds for profound concern. For Poland’s right-leaning
Yevgeny Prigozhin has just exposed the full extent of Vladimir Putin’s weakness. In less than 24 hours, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group made extraordinary progress – taking control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters of the Southern Miliary District, and posing the most serious challenge to Putin’s leadership. The president
Yevgeny Prigozhin, standing in the darkness next to a row of bloodied dead bodies, was shouting obscenities. With his yellowish, unnaturally hairless face contorted in primordial hatred, there was something about his appearance that seemed decidedly horrific. Prigozhin may well be positioning himself for Putin’s likely downfall and the eventual (and probably very nasty) succession
There was a time when Ukraine’s accession to Nato was a fantasy. It wasn’t just that Ukraine was dismally poor, politically unstable, or highly corrupt – though all these factors played a role. Nor was it just that Ukraine’s rusting, unwieldy post-Soviet wreck of an armed force was not exactly Nato material. The bigger reason was
The last time Europe fought a major war, there was no shortage of planning. We knew what peace meant. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt issued their Atlantic Charter in August 1941, before the Allied victory was anywhere close. This was followed by more meetings and conferences, including in Tehran in 1943 and later at Yalta,
If you were Putin, what would you do? Predicting your adversary’s future moves requires putting yourself in his shoes. As Russia’s misadventure in Ukraine nears its first grim anniversary, we should ask ourselves how Putin sees the world, indeed – how we would see the world and what policy we would pursue if faced with
Putin badly miscalculated. The Russian army terribly underperformed. Kyiv has shown unexpected resilience in the face of what experts thought was far superior Russian firepower. This, we’re told, is the story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and all of it is true. Vladimir Putin’s talk of a ‘dirty bomb’ is evidence of how badly the
There was something menacing yet vaguely absurd about the Tuesday memorial service held to commemorate the life and fascist times of the prominent ultra-nationalist Daria Dugina, the daughter of the Kremlin propagandist Aleksandr. The 29 year old Daria Dugina, who died in a car explosion on August 20, was put on display in an open
Every time I hear a politician speak of Munich, I suspect that something is amiss. Last week, President Zelensky accused former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of living in the ‘deep past’, and demanding that ‘a part of Ukraine be given to Russia’. ‘It seems that Mr. Kissinger has 1938 on the calendar instead
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Freddy Gray speaks to Sergey Radchenko a Cold War historian and Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and visiting professor at Cardiff University. They discuss a recent speech by Henry Kissinger who believes that Ukraine should made territorial concessions to
As Putin’s war against Ukraine drags on, Russia now faces the very real prospect of defeat. There are still difficult weeks and months ahead for Ukraine, and you cannot wholly discount the possibility of a dangerous escalation still in the war. But Putin has failed to attain his initial aims (the capture of Kyiv) and
