Ukraine

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Burnham heads to Kyiv, energy bills rise and Meghan and Harry return

From our UK edition

Home Andy Burnham made his first foreign trip as Prime Minister, to Kyiv. ‘Despite Russia’s outrageous threats to my country,’ he said, ‘we will continue our support for Ukraine.’ He said he would supply information about British-made components of the Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to help Ukraine build its own version. Ukraine gave Britain a trove of secret battlefield intelligence. Andrey Kelin, the Russian ambassador to Britain, had, it was found, left in July and not been replaced. Iranian hackers shut down a British power station for four days. New 10p coins went into circulation, with the King’s head and a capercaillie as tails.

Owen Matthews

What was the CIA doing in Moscow?

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Moscow yesterday, spending eight hours in the Russian capital before returning to the US. Though he visited the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that they had met – though Ratcliffe certainly spoke to his counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, and other top Russian security officials.  The list of topics urgent enough to prompt the first personal visit of a US cabinet-level official to the Kremlin in six months is short.

Tuesday

Mark Cocker

We must stop treating soil like dirt

From our UK edition

There is a delightful moment at the end of this book when Frank Ashwood is out looking for soil-dwelling invertebrates in his adopted New Zealand home. Suddenly he proclaims: ‘I notice something and my heart skips a beat. A velvet worm.’ He goes on to tell us that the discovery of two of these rare organisms in one day is ‘a thing of dreams’. Far from scoffing at his excitement, the reader has long come to share his enthusiasm for the extraordinariness of velvet worms. They are, after all, lozenges of blue and orange stripes rolled in tiny sequins. That we have also come to see the full beauty, abundance and sheer weirdness of the whole subsoil realm is a measure of Ashwood’s wider achievement.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes simply strengthening Putin’s hand?

From our UK edition

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russia helping Kyiv win the war or strengthening the hand of Kremlin hardliners? Since early summer, an escalating barrage by Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles have devastated oil refineries, sunk or damaged more than 220 ships in the Black Sea and burned at least a dozen large warehouses of Russia’s Wildberries online retail chain. The result has been a nationwide fuel crisis and deepening economic pain. For millions of ordinary Russians, the conflict has finally moved off the television screen and into their daily lives. In public, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that he’s not for turning. The purpose of Ukrainian deep strikes is to ‘undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities’, he told state TV last month.

Peter Hitchens

The great whataboutery delusion

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a ‘war crimes denier’ as well. Or you are charged with ‘whataboutery’, a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist. There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protestors against the Vietnam war, but the expression is far older than that.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Who gets to decide when assassination is justified?

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror? ‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale? Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast).

Tuesday

Andrey Kurkov

The intrepid volunteers who risk all to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage

‘The nonsense was over at last,’ wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of ‘local’ warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.

Friday

Spectator Editorial

There’s no good outcome for this groundhog-day war

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been the world’s supreme power. The idea that the United States could be taken down militarily by any other country is simply implausible. US invincibility, indeed, has spawned the concept of asymmetric warfare: instead of trying to overwhelm an enemy, you prod relentlessly at its weak points. This has changed the world from one in which organized warfare would break out between the major powers from time to time to one where peace has to be maintained against the constant hum of terrorism and guerrilla action. It comes as a shock, then, to learn that the US has apparently all but run out of long-range precision missiles.

missiles

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

A grim turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine

An important turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But unfortunately for Kyiv, it’s not the “tide is turning” in Ukraine’s favor narrative that Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing ever since his long-range drone attacks began smashing oil refineries and logistics warehouses deep inside Russia and sinking dozens of ships in the Sea of Azov. Rather, last night not one of the 27 ballistic missiles fired by Russia at and around Kyiv was shot down. At least 17 people were killed and a series of huge warehouses and major Ukrainian retail outlets were devastated. No grain vessels have docked for almost two weeks as Ukraine's summer harvest season enters full swing By the terrible arithmetic of war, the casualty numbers were not in themselves game-changing.

ukraine

Tuesday

Helen Barrett

What will the successful cities of the future look like?

From our UK edition

Can architecture solve urban crises? Or should architects and planners concentrate on mitigating the consequences of wider events (climate change, war, demographic and economic shifts), then hope for the best? What happens when we have no choice but to build or rebuild cities? In her new book, Gabriella Bennett, a journalist interested in architecture and urban landscapes, spends two years flying around the world looking for answers to these and other questions. Woven through her adventures are two personal quests: to reckon with her unhappy adolescence in the Scottish postwar new town of Glenrothes; and to reset her life after a pandemic-era health crisis that led her to quit her job.

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

Will the wars in Ukraine and Iran merge?

This is a fraught moment, perhaps the most dangerous since the end of the Cold War. Two major wars are being fought, one threatening European security, the other the world’s energy supply. In East Asia, China continues to threaten Taiwan, and North Korea is reportedly upgrading its military technology with Russian help. Put simply, the bad guys are on the march, fighting for their regimes’ survival, their malign domestic projects, and as much regional domination as they can achieve. Although the wars in Ukraine and Iran have remained largely separate, there have been several intersections recently and a gnawing fear they could merge into a global conflict. That grim possibility is still a longshot, but there is real danger because the coalitions fighting the two wars overlap.

DC

Tuesday

Mark Piesing

The West has become its own worst enemy

From our UK edition

On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in the Syria-Iraq borderlands. It hit and killed three American soldiers and injured many other members of the 350-strong garrison. The attack was a pivotal moment. Before it, no US ground troops had been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War. But they had been now, and would be again. Two years later, a similar attack, this time by Iran itself, evaded US air defences, hit a US command centre in Kuwait and killed six personnel. It was the deadliest Iranian strike of the recent conflict. Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on technology, democracy and national security and an award-winning author.

Wednesday

Peter Hitchens

What Ukraine doesn’t want you to know about the Nord Stream pipeline

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: ‘Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home.’ The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors. It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades.

Tuesday

Peter Hitchens

Who believes the latest version of the Nord Stream saga?

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: "Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home." The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors. It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades.

Tuesday

Bartek Staniszewski

How Poland and Ukraine can repair their broken relationship

Poland was once a staunch ally of Ukraine. But President Zelensky's decision to name a unit of the Ukrainian Special Forces after the “Heroes of the UPA” appears to have shattered the relationship forever. Help may be at hand, though: in the form of the humble British historian. Others want Poland to go further: there are calls to close the border with Ukraine While Polish and Ukrainian politicians have their own agendas and aren't trusted by the other side, some British historians have near-mythological status in eastern Europe.

poland

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

What Trump and Erdoğan want from each other

Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s attending this year's NATO summit in Ankara for one reason only: “respect for President Erdoğan.” Trump told NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte last month that if it hadn’t been for the veteran Turkish President’s invitation, “I don't think I would have gone to it.” NATO’s summit will, therefore, be dominated by the alliance’s two most militarily powerful and at the same time most problematic members. Trump seems set on pursuing his long-held goal of making Europe pay for its own defense, while Erdoğan is determined to leverage his strategic relationship with the US, Russia and Ukraine to scrap restrictions on Turkish purchases of US military hardware.

erdoğan

Thursday

Alexander Kolyandr

Can the Kremlin afford to fix Russia’s oil crisis?

For a country that pumps roughly nine million barrels of oil a day – the third highest of any country in the world – Russia has managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable: it cannot keep its own gas stations stocked. More than half of its regions are now reporting shortages, the consequence of a Ukrainian drone campaign that has struck with increasing frequency and precision at the refinery infrastructure on which the country's civilian economy depends. The sometimes hours-long lines that have appeared – even in Moscow, for what may be the first time in the war – carry a symbolic weight that no amount of official reassurance from the Kremlin has managed to dispel. How this has come about is obvious enough.

oil

Wednesday

Charles Moore

‘No. 10 North’ won’t work

From our UK edition

It would be dangerously premature to say that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia, but Russia is undoubtedly doing worse. Ukrainian ingenuity and courage are outsmarting Russian mass. Ukraine has the advantage in technology, especially drone technology, and morale. The Black Sea fleet is held in port and Russian-occupied Crimea is now insecure. This is becoming apparent even on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg. So what, I wonder, will western apologists for Vladimir Putin, led by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, say if his situation worsens further? Will they still back him as the upholder of Christian values against the decadent West and champion of Russia’s historic territorial rights and its need for security?

Owen Matthews

Putin has lost touch with reality

From our UK edition

As dark clouds of burning oil billow like thunderheads on the skyline of Moscow and black rain falls across the capital, why does Vladimir Putin fail to see that something fundamental is changing in the dynamic of his war? Why, when Donald Trump effectively agreed to hand over every inch of the Ukrainian territory Russia has captured and offered the Kremlin an easy off-ramp studded with juicy business deals, did Putin refuse? And why, for that matter, did the Russian President choose to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place? One answer is that Tsar Vladimir is mad, so blinded by his imperialist ambitions that he deliberately chooses to ignore the reality of a crashing economy, half a million dead fellow countrymen and a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

The conspiracy of silence surrounding the Nord Stream bombings

From our UK edition

Six months after undersea explosions ripped through three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany I wrote a 2,500-word story for The Spectator entitled ‘Were Ukrainians behind the Nord Stream bombings?’ Citing senior European security sources, the piece revealed a conspiracy of silence – for fear of an anti-Ukraine backlash – by western intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and government to cover up what they all knew to be the truth. Forensic evidence and a German police investigation had disclosed that pipelines carrying the Russian gas on which the economies of Germany and many other European countries depended had been blown up by a tiny team of Ukrainian saboteurs.