Putin
Can Putin survive the coronavirus stress test?
Coronavirus is a double whammy for his regime
Covid-19 is testing Putin's regime
Vladimir Putin is observing the old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. With the…
Putin's plan to exploit coronavirus
Vladimir Putin knows a thing or two about a crisis, having caused a number of them over recent years. And…
Exclusive: Dominic Cummings’s secret links to Russia
This week, a malign foreign actor invaded the British media, spreading disinformation and seeking to meddle in the general election.…
‘The only place I can’t get my plays on is Britain’: Sir Peter Brook interviewed
‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café.…
Who poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
At the height of the Cold War, as the West faced off against Red China and the Soviet Union, people…
Trumpworld is spinning out of control
Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer…
Putin says he’s making Russia great again. In reality, it’s crumbling
This is Putin’s time. Next week, the Fifa World Cup kicks off in Moscow, and the Kremlin has spared no…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
What the Windrush scandal reveals about Theresa May
Everyone speaks about the Windrush. The boat was actually called the Empire Windrush. The full name reveals what the story…
Putin follows the example of Octavian
Barely a day passes without yet another Russian explanation for the Salisbury nerve agent attack. What’s new? Such disinformation has…
For Putin, the World Cup is not about football but global respect
Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of…
The problem with Hungary
The name of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is on the lips of most left-wing, liberal politicians and intellectuals…
Lost in the metropolis
Richard Rogers is to architecture what Jamie Oliver is to cookery. It is not enough for either of them just…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
Beyond the pale
You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of…
The hopeless wasteland of modern Russia
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
Might Eurovision determine the outcome of the EU referendum?
You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…
The time when Putin seduced Corbyn in an East Berlin nightclub
Corbyn the Musical feels like it comes from the heart. Did the writers live through the 1970s when the hard-left…
The Litvinenko case: Mayfair murder most foul
On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB officer and by then a British citizen, met two of his former colleagues,…
Portrait of the week
Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept talking of the ‘next generation’. He outlined cuts…
Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
Who is more undemocratic, Putin or Brussel? I say Brussels — by far
The rich are under attack nowadays, never more so than in America, where The Donald continues to trump his critics,…
Portrait of the week
Home Two groups were launched, one in favour of remaining in the European Union and the other in favour of…
Bizarrely, Putin is talking more sense on Syria than anyone else
The West’s strategy on Syria is a complete shambles
