Putin has united Europe against him

In the headlines

Russia has been accused of “nuclear terrorism” by President Volodymyr Zelensky, after Vladimir Putin’s troops shelled a Ukrainian nuclear power plant – Europe’s largest – last night. The attack started a fire at the facility, which is now in Russian hands. No “unusual radiation levels” have since been reported, says the FT.?Putin plans to occupy “the whole of Ukraine”, says a French official, after Emmanuel Macron spoke to the Russian leader for 90 minutes yesterday. “The worst is yet to come.”?Zelensky has survived at least three assassination attempts in the past week. Ukrainian officials say the plots were orchestrated by the Moscow-backed Wagner Group and the Chechen special forces, and were foiled with the help of intelligence from Russian spies opposed to the invasion.

Comment

Putin has united Europe against him?

Volodymyr Zelensky receives a standing ovation in the EU parliament

Until a week ago things were going as well as Vladimir Putin could have hoped for, says?Fraser Nelson?in?The Daily Telegraph. Nato seemed a relic; the queue of world leaders waiting to sit at the end of Putin’s long table appeared to show where power lay. “Now things have changed – and changed utterly.” Europe, not just the EU, is uniting. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, is selling its stakes in Russian companies. Not long ago, Britain was the only country sending weapons to Ukraine. Now, 20 nations are doing so, including Sweden, which “hasn’t sent arms to a war zone in 80 years”.?

Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new chancellor, is “barely recognisable” from the vacillating figure of a few weeks ago: he has agreed not just to kick several Russian banks off the Swift banking payments system but to ditch Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. “You want peace?” says Polish president Andrzej Duda. “Get ready for war.” Two years ago, Macron denounced Nato as “brain dead”; now all of a sudden he’s “talking like Reagan”, and the only question is how much bigger the alliance gets. Sweden and Finland, neither of which joined Nato in the Cold War, are seriously debating doing so. Had any of this coherence looked likely two weeks ago, Putin might not have invaded. This could still be a long war. “But it really seems as if Europe will face it together.”?

Sport

Roman Sahradyan has set the Guinness World Record for the most pull-ups performed in one minute from a flying helicopter – 23. The Armenian athlete has form with these kinds of stunts: in 2011, he swung himself all the way around a horizontal gymnastics bar 1,001 times in a row. It took nearly half an hour.

On the money

“When dodgy Russian money evaporates” from London, says Bagehot in The Economist, “dodgy money from other sources will replace it.” Cash from Nigeria and Azerbaijan already “sloshes around the City”, and Britain has had few qualms about Saudi Arabia buying up assets like Newcastle United. Of the now-axed “golden visas” dished out to wealthy foreigners since 2008, Russians made up a fifth. “Chinese citizens accounted for a third.”

Comment

Merkel’s legacy is in ruins?

Merkel with Putin in 2012. Guido Bergmann/Bundesregierung-Pool/Getty

One of the many things destroyed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been Angela Merkel’s reputation, says?Iain Martin?in?The Times. The former German chancellor was feted by her fellow Western leaders when she stood down last year. Barack Obama said the “entire world” owed her a debt of gratitude; Charles Michel, President of the European Council, said EU meetings without her would be like “Paris without the Eiffel Tower”. The consensus was that she was “a geopolitical genius, the grown-up leader of a grown-up country”. Yet it was Merkel’s “epic delusion” about Russia that helped embolden Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.??

Year after year, Merkel insisted it was “fine to become reliant on Russian gas”. She argued that Putin would never do anything “completely crazy”, and that demands to scale up defence spending to deter him were just “excitable talk from unsophisticated Americans”. The Russian leader must hardly have been able to believe his luck as he watched Merkel’s government close nuclear power stations and phase out coal. Today, Germany gets an astonishing “55% of its gas, 45% of its coal and 40% of its oil from Russia”. This short-sighted approach not only “filled the Kremlin’s coffers”, it also helped persuade Putin that “the wider West was decadent, self-satisfied and too weak to care about responding to aggression”. It was, in short, “one of the worst geopolitical miscalculations since the Second World War”. In just one week, “16 years of Merkelism has gone up in smoke”.?

Noted

Ukrainians have been defacing road signs to confuse the Russians, says eastern Europe expert Sergej Sumlenny on Twitter. And they’re “doing it with Ukrainian humour”. One sign (pictured above) now has three destinations: “The Hague”, “The Hague” and “The Hague”.

Noted

Avocados have become such big business in Mexico that crime cartels are fighting a “bloody turf war” for control of production, says Jeffrey Miller in The Conversation. The US – where avocado consumption per head ballooned from 2lbs per year in 2001 to nearly 8lbs in 2018 – gets 80% of its supplies from its southern neighbour. The American government recently banned imports for eight days after one of its food inspectors was threatened for refusing to certify a shipment. There have even been reports of cartels attacking rival avocado operations by “using drones to drop bombs”.

Inside politics

Before she was foreign secretary, Liz Truss once told me she found diplomacy “really boring”, says former cabinet minister Rory Stewart in his podcast?The Rest is Politics. “I can’t understand why you’re obsessed with foreign affairs,” she told him. Truss has at least found one aspect of the job she can enjoy, says Stewart’s co-host, Alastair Campbell – posting pictures on Instagram.

Snapshot

It’s an M&S Monet. The painting,?Autumn at Jeufosse, has turned up in Marks & Spencer’s archive and is now on display at the University of Leeds. If authenticated as a true Monet, the previously unrecorded work will be a “major rediscovery”, says The Art Newspaper. It was bought in 1937 by Simon Marks, who founded M&S in 1894 with Thomas Spencer, then hung in the entrance hall of Marks’s house on London’s Grosvenor Square. After he and his wife died, it was given to the family firm.?

Quoted

“Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless.” – Regency dandy Beau Brummell