Ukraine’s air defences are “dwindling” and Vladimir Putin is “planning to make the most of it”, said international relations expert Rajan Menon in The New York Times. While Russia might be suffering an estimated 30,000 casualties a month and is struggling to replenish its troops, its president appears “adamant he will pay whatever price – human or financial – necessary to win”.

Last week Donald Trump sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow for talks with Putin. Then on Sunday they travelled to Ukraine for the first time to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who announced plans to widen peace discussions. The Ukrainian president agreed that he wanted to resume trilateral negotiations with the US and Russia in September, amid mounting civilian casualties and intensifying Russian strikes.

But afterwards, senior Kremlin officials “doubled down on Putin’s demands for Ukrainian capitulation”, said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, claimed the situation “worsens each day” for Ukraine.

What did the commentators say?

This year has brought “a series of Ukrainian successes that led many to believe Kyiv may have regained the initiative”, said Miro Sedlák on the Atlantic Council. But the “technological gap” between Russia and Ukraine is narrowing, “dramatically reducing” the chances of battlefield breakthroughs. Zelenskyy’s dismissal of his “tech-savvy” former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov sparked “widespread dismay” in Ukraine, while many Russian commentators “cheered the news”.

Ukraine has run out of Patriot missile interceptors, said Menon in The New York Times. Russia is gearing up for “massive strikes” on Ukraine’s energy grid during the winter, aiming to “break morale” and increase pressure on Zelenskyy to “seek a deal”.

Ukraine’s drone strikes are still “inflicting pain on some of the most strategic sectors of the Russian economy”, said Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal, especially on oil refineries, leading to fuel shortages. “The costs are adding up.”

Ukrainian air strikes are “bringing the war home to a misled, disillusioned public”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. But does “out-of-touch” Putin even realise? He doesn’t use a smartphone or the internet, and relies on “inner circle apparatchiks” and loyalists telling him what he wants to hear. He’s likely to “double down” by becoming more aggressive and expanding the war beyond Ukraine, intensifying “hybrid warfare operations across Europe”, than to sue for peace.

Putin’s understanding of the war is “severely distorted by the Russian military’s systematic lying”, which is emboldening him to insist on “his maximalist demands”, said the ISW.

And if Putin cared about the Russian economy, he wouldn’t have launched the invasion in the first place, said Owen Matthews in The Spectator.

He remains “determined” to keep fighting and Trump has “no new plan for peace” other than letting the war end on Putin’s terms. Zelenskyy is “deluded about Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia”, and about stopping Moscow’s “slow but relentless advances” and its “ruthless campaign to render Ukraine’s cities unliveable”.

Western sanctions on Russia have “basically failed” because of the West’s “hunger” for its cheap oil and gas. Russia is “stepping up” its defence capacity, while Ukraine’s allies in Europe are also “prioritising their own defence”. Ukraine is heading into “the hardest and most punishing winter of war”, and it’s about to run out of missiles, men and money.

What next?

There are signs that Europe’s “political taboo” on talking to Putin is cracking, said Matthews in The Spectator. Alice Weidel, co-leader of the pro-Russia AfD in Germany, has called for “an open channel to Russia” to reach “an understanding and achieve a peaceful solution”. Putin’s intention seems to be to give Ukraine “a brutal final kicking” before settling the war “on his terms”.

He may try to freeze the conflict while reorganising and re-arming, said Tisdall in The Guardian, or he could accept Zelenskyy’s ceasefire offer “without sincerely committing to a lasting settlement”. But a ceasefire without “cast-iron, pre-agreed security guarantees” could leave Ukraine more, not less, “vulnerable to renewed aggression”.

After the Russian parliamentary elections from 18-20 September “we’ll see whether Putin is going to throw the kitchen sink at this wall to finish it, in his view, once and for all”, said Sky News military analyst Michael Clarke.

Ukraine has spent years using its drone arsenal to great effect, both in its wartime front with Russian forces and in penetrating deep into Russian territory for daring aerial attacks on fuel and commercial infrastructure. Now, Ukraine has a new target: Russian airports and Moscow’s commercial air travel industry.

“Every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer and everyone who still uses Russia’s key airports” should know “Russian airspace is becoming completely unsafe,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a statement last week. Although Ukrainian drones have filled Russia’s skies before, Zelenskyy’s implied threat to commercial air routes suggests the war for aerial supremacy in the region has taken a new and potentially even more dangerous turn.

Why focus on commercial air travel?

Zelenskyy’s warning comes as part of Ukraine’s “effort to disrupt Russia’s economy” and “pressure Moscow to end the war,” said The Wall Street Journal. Ukraine has “vowed to avoid targeting airliners and civilian deaths.” Instead, it intends to “scale up so-called Operation Carpet,” which circulates drones “near Russian airports, forcing air-traffic control to pause takeoffs and landings.”

The strategy is “no longer simply a repetition of isolated, sporadic emergency alerts” that have shuttered Russian airways in the past, said Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Southern Command, to the Journal. Ukraine intends to “transition to constant pressure aimed at paralyzing civilian air traffic” for eastern Russia.

The problem for Russia is “not that Ukraine has to shoot down an airliner,” said industry news site Live and Let’s Fly. “Quite the opposite.” Ukrainian drones merely need to “create enough uncertainty” for authorities to close airports or until “airlines or insurers decide the risk is no longer worthwhile.” The tactic is a “useful tool of war.”

Trying to shutter an airport permanently “would be difficult,” as a “sustained attack would become predictable and easier for air-defense systems to halt,” said The Guardian. But “periodic closures of Russian airports on a semi-regular basis” are achievable by “relying on an element of surprise,” said Royal United Services Institute aviation analyst Justin Bronk to the outlet.

Ukraine has also “urged the U.N.’s aviation agency” to “ask its members ‌to fully ban operations in Russian airspace,” said Reuters. The International Civil Aviation Organization itself has observed “heightened risks of civil aircraft being targeted or caught in crossfire,” said the group in a statement this week. Though the airline industry can “reroute flights and maintain operations during conflicts,” that type of “operational ​flexibility does not address the ​fundamental security threat.”

What are Russia’s options?

Russian President Vladimir Putin “vowed that Russia would keep pummeling Ukraine” at a press conference last week where he “dismissed” Zelenskyy’s threat to Russian airspace, said The Washington Post. “If this has been voiced, it amounts to nothing less than a call for state terrorism,” said Putin. “And I would point out that they are asking us to resume negotiations and requesting face-to-face meetings. One does not negotiate with terrorists.”

Although Ukraine’s airspace has been closed to commercial travel for several years, Russia has “refused to close the country’s airspace for civil aviation, despite the escalating war,” said the Journal. While American and European operators have pulled back from Russian sorties, their absence “has proven a boon” to operators from Asia and the Middle East, thereby “offsetting the risk of operating in skies regularly penetrated by Ukrainian drones.”

Russia’s military is “focusing on striking manufacturing and storage sites around Kyiv and energy and port operations in Odessa,” said former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Bryen on Substack. While it is “uncertain whether Zelenskyy’s warning will change the current pattern of attacks and retaliations,” it is also “hard to see” how Ukraine can “keep launching hundreds of drones (sometimes as many as a thousand)” nightly into Russia. It could simply be, said Bryen, that Zelenskyy is “saying more than he can do.”

‘Save the children. Ban everyone age 18 and older from social media.’

Joe Mathews at the San Francisco Chronicle

“Ban everyone age 18 and older from social media,” says Joe Mathews. Adults are “having the wrong conversation about digital safety.” Every “week, more grave-faced politicians declare that we must protect kids by banning them from social media, even though most unhinged people online are old enough to vote.” If any “demographic has proved it cannot handle an unmoderated feed, it is fully grown adults.” If “adults ban ourselves from social media tomorrow, what do we really lose?”

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‘The unique horrors of AI food slop’

Brady Brickner-Wood at The New Yorker

The “next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was,” says Brady Brickner-Wood. Restaurants are “plastering menus and promotional materials with AI-generated” food. A “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon.” These “renderings of food — genuinely, slop — offend the materiality of the living in a way that AI’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not.”

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‘The price of Russian paranoia’

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan at Foreign Affairs

As “Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes increasingly costly with no end in sight, the Kremlin has kept tightening its grip over Russian society,” say Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Less “apparent, though, is the dramatic shift in domestic security doctrine that undergirds these efforts.” Rule by “spy hunting and paranoia has also come with significant costs,” as “proliferating social controls and prosecutions for treason have created a pervasive climate of mistrust and fueled a sense of paralysis.”

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‘Trump’s ‘Golden Age’? Well, yes — for dollar stores.’

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect

Americans are “not experiencing the Trump Boom in quite the same way that Trump is,” says Harold Meyerson. The economy has “positive metrics to be found, so long as they don’t concern the experience of the American people as such.” Most “revealingly, because this is a metric that does reflect the experience of the American people, business at dollar stores is up and rising.” These stores are the “canary in the coal mine when the economy is going to hell.”

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What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday told Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at a summit in Kyrgyzstan that Moscow will continue supplying “the assistance you need” and “the necessary goods” during “this difficult period.” Since President Donald Trump “launched his war against Iran” in February, Russia “has backed the Iranians with intelligence, including on U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf,” and “drone components,” said The New York Times. Moscow has also been secretly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles, the Financial Times reported. The U.S. and Iran traded airstrikes last night, in their “first serious combat since July,” Reuters said.

Who said what

Russia’s transfer of the “strategically important military technology” to build supersonic missiles “would require political approval from Russia’s top leadership,” Conflict Armament Research analyst Fabian Hinz told the Financial Times. Such missiles would be a “qualitatively new strategic weapons system capable of threatening U.S. Navy ships,” former CIA military analyst Jim Lamson told the Financial Times. Iran has already done considerable damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East with a new ballistic missile it calls “the Kheibar Shekan, or ‘Castle Breaker,’” USA Today said. The missile, likely developed “with the help of Chinese and Russian technology,” can “evade American air defenses and strike with far greater precision.”

What next?

Tehran vowed to respond to last night’s airstrikes with more “crushing and devastating blows” and claimed its own counterstrikes killed several U.S. personnel in Jordan and Iraq.

Observers have long feared Russia’s war against Ukraine will expand to the rest of Europe. The concerns are rising. Moscow has reportedly backed a rise in so-called hybrid sabotage attacks on European targets, as CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Russia last week to warn the Kremlin against attacks on NATO.

What did the commentators say?

Authorities have linked Russia to a growing number of “drone incursions, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks” and other hostile “gray zone” acts in Europe, said The Wall Street Journal. The incidents include several discoveries of explosive drones at or near a German airport — a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have a “rising appetite for risk” as he seeks to sow divisions among Ukraine’s continental allies.

Hybrid attacks fall short of provoking open conflict. But the frequency has increased to the point that Russia’s hybrid war in Europe is “starting to look a lot less hybrid,” said Politico.

The attacks “require a more concerted response” than Europe has mounted so far, said Bloomberg. It is easy to treat hybrid attacks as a “problem to be managed” because they are “small-scale, deniable and rarely lethal.” Ukraine’s European allies must “demonstrate that attacks come with costs,” with more layered defenses against drone incursions and aggressive action against Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers that transport black-market oil. Russia does not want to “take on NATO outright,” but it is “testing how much the alliance will tolerate.”

Putin now has a choice. The Russian leader can keep the hybrid attacks “below an open assault” that would trigger a NATO response, said David Ignatius at The Washington Post. Or he can “take a harder punch” to see if President Donald Trump will keep the U.S.’s defense commitment to Europe or have the alliance “exposed as a paper tiger.” The war “risks leaping any remaining guardrails” as Ukraine and Russia continue to trade blows. “Where’s the de-escalation button?”

What next?

Analysts suspect Putin has given up hope that Trump “might be able to coerce Ukraine” into surrender, said CBC News. Russia’s leader may turn instead to “expanding the conflict” to conclude the nearly five-year-old war.

Some military think tanks have warned Russia could stage “some kind of provocation in Eastern Europe” to divide the NATO alliance and its support of Ukraine, said CBC News. That could include an attempt to “seize a slice of Russian-speaking territory in a neighboring country” to see how NATO might respond. The latter concern was reportedly behind Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow. The administration decided to “read the Russians the riot act,” said Glen Howard, of the Saratoga Foundation, to the outlet.

Other European officials are skeptical that Putin can expand the war. Russia is “bogged down” in Ukraine and “doesn’t have capabilities to challenge NATO” in a conventional conflict, said Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze on “PBS NewsHour.” But attacks below the level of outright war will likely continue. “We all need to be ready.”

CIA director John Ratcliffe made a surprise, unannounced trip to Moscow on Tuesday, the first time America’s spy chief has visited Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Kremlin said Ratcliffe held talks with Russian intelligence officials but did ‌not meet President Putin. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did tell reporters that Putin had been briefed on ​the outcome of Ratcliffe's talks.

While the visit has yet to be officially confirmed by the CIA, White House or Pentagon, reports of the “semi-secret mission” were “ringing all sorts of alarm bells in Westminster”, said Politico. “Next to nothing is known” about the trip but “analysts fear escalations against Baltic countries, or other Nato members”.

What happened?

CBS News first reported that Ratcliffe had travelled to Moscow on Tuesday “for meetings”.

A US Air Force Boeing C-17A Globemaster III transport plane was spotted at a Moscow airport, along with a US diplomatic motorcade. Flight tracking data confirmed a large US military aircraft travelled from Washington to Russia via Latvia on Tuesday, departing later that day.

The US reportedly told Ukraine that a senior delegation would be travelling to Moscow and asked it to suspend strikes until the delegation’s departure, according to CBS.

What was the point?

In-person talks between high-level American and Russian officials are incredibly rare. And amid such secrecy “it was not immediately clear what the trip’s purpose is and whether any other senior US officials were part of the US delegation”, said The Washington Post.

John Foreman, a former British military attaché to Moscow, told BBC Radio 4’s “PM” news programme that the visit could be focused on “escalation management” given speculation that Russia could have been involved in recent drone activity in Germany. “The Americans don’t normally send such a high ranking official to Moscow unannounced at short notice unless something is up.”

The visit could also have been concerned with the release of US detainees being held in Russia, Foreman said. The CIA was involved in the 2024 prisoner exchange deal that saw Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich released, while Ratcliffe played a role in the release of Russian-American ballet dancer Ksenia Karelina last year after she was jailed in Russia for allegedly supporting Ukraine.

Was it to stop an escalation by Russia?

With US-mediated peace talks between Russia and Ukraine remaining “mostly stalled, with the sides still far apart on core issues”, Ratcliffe’s visit comes as recent US intelligence assessments suggest that Vladimir Putin’s “risk calculus may be shifting”, said CBS News. The Russian leader appears “increasingly willing to authorise provocative actions against Nato members – including hybrid operations and other deniable measures short of conventional military action – in order to test the resolve of the alliance and the Trump administration”.

‘Two weeks. No power. Gary, Indiana, failed Black citizens.’

Kofi Mframa at USA Today

For “two weeks, the people of Gary, Indiana, have been forced to weather the late summer heat without electricity,” says Kofi Mframa. Gary “didn’t just experience a freak weather event.” There were “layers upon layers of systemic failures that left a vulnerable population to fend for themselves.” Marginalized groups “being failed by systems in the wake of a natural disaster is no strange occurrence in America, but as our country’s cracks widen, tragedies like these seem more and more inevitable.”

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‘Stores are selling Halloween stuff in August. Time has lost all meaning.’

Dave Schilling at The Guardian

Even “though I love Halloween, I’m mad because our glorious big-box overlords have declared, via careful inventory selection, that Halloween season has begun,” says Dave Schilling. It “feels like a violation of the natural order, a realignment of one of the few glorious constants left in the world.” At “most, Halloween celebrations should start in late September,” not a “month after Independence Day.” But if the “data says we want Halloween in the heat, then data shall be respected.”

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‘In France, long summer breaks mean not just relaxation — but reinvention’

Elizabeth Svoboda at The Boston Globe

France’s “most chaotic stretch of summer is the one that most reveals the nation’s commitment to quiet and retreat,” as “vacationers luxuriate for long stretches of time uncluttered by appointments or prior commitments,” says Elizabeth Svoboda. “Month-long summer breaks, which the French call ‘congés annuels,’ are as sacrosanct as the Marseillaise national anthem, and their benefits go well beyond relaxation.” Americans “often assume that focus and persistence drive transformation,” but “opening up mental space is just as crucial.”

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‘The myth of Eurasia’

Ayse Zarakol at Foreign Affairs

The “frontlines of the war in Ukraine run not just through floodplains and shattered towns but also through a more nebulous kind of terrain: the realm of civilization,” says Ayse Zarakol. From the “outset, Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast his invasion as part of a cultural struggle, a view shared by some of his adversaries on the Western side.” But it is “misguided to believe that Putin acts as he does because he follows in the footsteps of Eurasian emperors.”

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North Korea has been hailed as “the world’s most surprising economic success story” by the leading US financial daily, The Wall Street Journal.

Despite being tightly controlled, technologically backward, and subject to crippling Western trade embargoes, the country has recorded year-on-year GDP growth of more than 3%, of which many advanced economies could only dream. Their unlikely success story has been “aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia” to fuel the Ukraine war, support from China, and “the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials”.

What has changed?

Five years after making a rare admission that the nation’s economic policies were falling short, in February Kim Jong Un addressed the Workers’ Party Congress to celebrate a turnaround, declaring “everything has fundamentally changed”. But while the supreme leader may have triumphantly taken credit for the boom, in reality “he has Russia and China to thank”, said Forbes.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, North Korea has earned an estimated $14 billion providing military support to the Kremlin, and hundreds of millions in trade and foreign aid from China. North Korea’s “emergence as a modern-day pirate state on the back of its lucrative cryptocurrency theft operations” has also helped, Shreyas Reddy of Korea Risk Group, told the Financial Times.

The effect of this influx on the so-called hermit kingdom has been sudden and startling. The regime has used some of the windfall to modernise Pyongyang with new brightly lit shopping districts filled with luxury and high-tech goods, and high-rise apartments blocks. Cars, once a rarity, are increasingly common and frequently electric, and can even be hailed with ride-sharing apps.

Outside the capital, the regime’s ambitious “20x10” regional development initiative aims to build new factories, housing and public infrastructure in 20 counties each year over a 10-year period.

All of this is an “incredible accomplishment for a country that is this poor”, regional expert Stephan Haggard told the WSJ.

Can it last?

Due to a lack of reliable data and the regime’s complete control of the media, accurately assessing what is happening on the ground in North Korea is notoriously difficult, said WioNews. But “a closer look beneath the headlines reveals a more complicated picture than either Western critics” or the Pyongyang regime acknowledge.

While the growth over the last three years appears genuine, said the Financial Times, North Korea’s “economic resurgence fell short of a genuine transformation” in that it “was mostly being driven by participation in Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

Peter Ward of the Sejong Institute in Seoul said North Korea was in the throes of a “Russian sugar high” fuelling a slew of “shovel-ready, exciting-looking projects that will catch the eye of the leader, but aren’t necessarily sustainable”.

Ultimately, said Asia Business Daily, the racks of luxury goods and the Pyongyang construction boom are “merely an optical illusion”, in that they are enjoyed “almost exclusively by the leadership and a privileged class in Pyongyang”.

North Korea remains incredibly poor. Out of its 27 million citizens, 17 million are still believed to live in extreme poverty, and the UN estimates that more than 40% of the population are undernourished. Analysts are sceptical that Kim can turn the short-term gains brought about by the war in Ukraine into sustainable long-term growth. “Knowing the North Koreans, they probably haven’t fixed the roof while the sun is shining,” said Ward.

The UK will continue to support Ukraine despite the “outrageous threats” made by Russia, said Andy Burnham in Kyiv on the 35th anniversary of the nation’s independence.

On his visit to Ukraine, his first overseas trip as prime minister, Burnham will also be giving his hosts blueprints for building long-range missiles, which can strike “around 150 miles (241km) into Russia”, said the BBC.

Last week, following reports that drones made by British companies were being used to attack targets within Russia, Moscow’s embassy in London said that the UK’s “actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer”.

“Blustering” threats have been directed at the UK before, said Owen Matthews in The Independent. But now, with Russia growing “restless” amid a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape, the UK is antagonising Vladimir Putin more obviously than ever before.

What did the commentators say?

The relationship between the two countries has “already sunk close to rock-bottom”, said Jonathan Singh and Will Hazell in The i Paper. Moscow withdrew its ambassador to the UK last month, reflecting a deepening trend with both nations of “reducing staffing in their respective embassies and expelling each other’s diplomats”.

“Most Britons have little grasp of just how much their country is hated in Moscow,” said former diplomat Andy Pryce on the Centre for European Policy Analysis. In “Kremlin demonology”, it is “Britain that wears the Devil’s face”.

But curiously, Russian media outlets also “mock the UK, at some length”. Britain may be the “organising hand behind Russian failure, especially in Ukraine”, but its “army is too small, its navy overstretched” and its economy is “exhausted”. But this contradiction in propaganda is not a “flaw”: it presents the UK as “large enough to hate and weak enough to be worth threatening”.

But Britain has long been on the receiving end of “regular, blood-curdling warnings” from Russia, said Matthews in The Independent. Supplying Storm Shadow missiles and more recently “BAE-made Nyan drones” to Ukraine is the latest provocation for the “Kremlin’s attack dogs”. Putin believes Britain can be “kicked about with impunity” whereas his “complicated on-again, off-again relationship” with the Trump administration tells of very different priorities.

There were arson attacks in 2024 in Leyton and Birmingham that were both thought to be orchestrated by Moscow. A thwarted attempt by a “gang of dim-bulb Eastern European crooks” to assassinate journalists and activists, and the arson attacks on Keir Starmer’s former home also point the finger at Russia. The success of this “aggravated hooliganism” has been somewhat limited, but one thing is clear: Britain is becoming “extremely vulnerable and unprepared for attack”, whatever form it will now take.

Now is “as good an opportunity as any for the Kremlin to make a political point”, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. Any effort to “undermine public confidence” in the UK, with Parliament in recess and “less domestic political news to crowd out the embassy’s remarks”, is vital for Putin’s agenda. As its economy suffers, and with Moscow being in range of Ukrainian drones, Russia is more vulnerable than ever. What would be concerning is if, now that it feels cornered, Russia’s “brinkmanship” spirals out of control.

What next?

Russia is unlikely to launch direct missile or armed drone strikes on the UK, said David Blair and Roland Oliphant in The Telegraph. Their first port of call would be to “intensify the existing campaign of sabotage, drone incursions and cyberattacks”. Disruptive incidents – like the recent drone attack in Leipzig – cyber attacks and sending drones to “loiter” near airports will all become more regular. Attacking British military targets in Ukraine, whether personnel or equipment, would also be a “straightforward way of retaliating” against the UK.

But, more broadly, Nato has a “deterrence problem”, said Katia Glod in Prospect. The alliance has “formidable mechanisms” to prevent a full-scale armed attack on its member states, but Russia can “operate precisely where those mechanisms become less automatic”, effectively in a “grey zone” where it knows there won’t be a response.

Deterrence will work only if the Kremlin believes there will be proportionate “consequences”. Nato, therefore, needs to “make activity below the Article 5 threshold more costly” to its adversaries, providing stronger protection of military logistics, communication, better counterintelligence and “graduated responses to hostile activity”. The objective should be to deny Moscow the “freedom to operate below the threshold of war”. Nato must “balance between avoiding an unnecessary war with Russia and ensuring that fear of one does not become a weapon Russia can use against us”.

The fractures in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s premiership are beginning to show. Sacked defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for an election, despite a constitutional ban on polls being held in times of war. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” he said in a YouTube video address. Ukraine must “renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war”.

Fedorov stopped short of launching a direct challenge to the president, but even so political and public support for Zelenskyy seems more fragile than ever. The former defence minister is popular among younger Ukrainians and his dismissal in July sparked protests across the country. Anti-corruption agencies have also announced they are investigating an official in Zelenskyy’s office.

What did the commentators say?

Fedorov’s address was unexpected, said investment strategist Timothy Ash in Kyiv Post, and I “struggle with his logic”. Elections will be impossible to hold and there is no “great clamour” for them anyway.

Perhaps he is advancing his own political ambitions, realising a “desire to take advantage of the momentum he gained” after his dismissal. This announcement seems like an “extraordinary political error of judgement, which some would likely use against him if he ever pitches in to run as president in the future”. In short, “it looks a bit like political suicide from Fedorov”.

“Internally”, this video has been the “biggest challenge to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy yet”, said Nick Paton Walsh on CNN. “But it will likely, practically, come to nothing.”

Zelenskyy’s popularity is “sliding” but a vote is “pretty much impossible”. Even if the war were to end, Ukraine would need a minimum of six months to “implement legislative reforms” that would “meet European standards”. And that’s without the complications of reaching soldiers on the front line, or the “millions of Ukrainian pensioners who live off-line”. Fundamentally, a vote would “utterly cripple Kyiv” and could “spell defeat from within”.

The “swelling” corruption cases against several of Zelenskyy’s closest allies have also “contributed to a fall in the president’s approval rating”, said Christopher Miller in the Financial Times. In the latest of a “litany of graft allegations” against his supporters, Zelenskyy was forced to sack one of his top aides, Iryna Mudra, following “Operation Forrest Gump” raids by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

Previous charges brought against former chief-of-staff Andriy Yermak and ex-energy minister Herman Halushchenko (both of whom, as well as Mudra, deny wrongdoing) have also “sparked concern among Western partners who have provided billions to keep the country afloat and support its military”.

Infighting like this just plays into Russia’s hands, said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. The friction that led to Zelenskyy sacking Fedorov and the ensuing “public discontent” have already undermined the nation just as it seemed to be “regaining the initiative on the battlefield”.

And if an election were to take place, “Russia’s record of electoral interference speaks for itself”. Moscow has “yearned” for a Ukrainian leadership challenge so that it can accomplish what it has “failed to do on the battlefield: sow dissension and encourage Ukrainian society to devour itself”. Whatever narratives “prevail”, it is clear the president is “accumulating powerful public rivals who were once deeply loyal to him”.

Zelenskyy “still commands broad support as a war leader”, said Politico. As his allies have pointed out, there is only so much he can reveal about the “inner workings” of the state, when “national survival is at stake”. Fedorov is “certainly popular”. In a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, “63% of people saw him as trustworthy”. But Zelenskyy “scored a robust 56%” so is hardly “out of the picture” in terms of any future election.

What next?

This coming “winter crunch” will be a test for the Zelenskyy premiership, said Paton Walsh on CNN. It will “feed into the lacklustre and purblind peace process that the Trump White House is trying to reignite”. Harsher conditions will increase demands on him to “concede territory” to “get the fighting to stop”, a move he has repeatedly ruled out.

Zelenskyy has made clear that any permanent ceasefire would have to be supported by security guarantees. But he is “clear-eyed that the winter ahead is bad, both in the skies and on the front lines”.

Growth may be slowing, but Russia’s economy is essentially sound. That’s the message Vladimir Putin is keen to purvey; and by way of proof he cites Russia’s incredibly low unemployment rate: just 2.1%. He’s got it back to front, said Alexander Kolyandr in The Spectator.

Far from being a comfort, this figure should cause Putin huge alarm. It underscores the fact that his nation is undergoing its worst labour crisis in decades: it “has run out of workers”. The crisis has its roots in the low birth rates of the 1990s, but the war in Ukraine has “poured fuel on it”.

Woefully inefficient remedies

It certainly has, said the Luxembourg Times. Men are being sent to the front in vast numbers: the target number of contract soldiers to be signed up this year is 409,000. And the high pay they’re being offered as a lure is crippling the economy. In 2022, a contract soldier’s monthly salary was about four times the average Russian wage. It’s now closer to twice the average wage because the defence industry (employment in military production has risen by half a million since 2021), the railways and other big state sectors have all had to hike up wages in an effort to compete. As a result, companies in the civilian sector are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Yet the remedies the Kremlin has pursued to tackle the crisis have been woefully insufficient, said Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya in Foreign Policy. Expanding forced prison labour, a familiar Soviet strategy, is no longer an option as so many convicts have already been sent to the front lines. (The jail population has shrunk from 465,000 in 2021 to 282,000.) So too with the plan to open jobs hitherto deemed too physically taxing or dangerous to women, as their number in Russia’s labour market is remarkably high already.

Economic ‘death zone’

Such measures fail to get to grips with the sheer scale of the problem, said Mathias Brüggmann in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed or badly wounded. The only solution to Russia’s chronic labour shortage is increased migration.

Yet since March 2024, when Tajik terrorists killed 149 people in an attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the Kremlin has gone in the opposite direction, imposing harsh new rules on migrants, especially those from the former Soviet states in Central Asia – Russia’s largest immigrant group. Their number has fallen dramatically. Issuing 70,000 Chinese and 34,000 Indians work permits this year hasn’t been nearly enough to plug the gap.

In fact, Russia’s economy has now entered “the death zone”, said Alexandra Prokopenko in The Economist. The budget deficit is spiralling out of control; export revenues are falling. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, of institutional collapse, “of damage so severe no post-war policy can repair it”.

Ukrainian drones have hit 23 Wildberries warehouses across Russia in just three weeks, said Nataliya Vasilyeva in The New York Times. Known widely as “Russia’s Amazon”, the e-commerce giant has been targeted by Ukrainian long-range drones, with a fire breaking out overnight at a facility in Voronezh.

Ukraine claims that the company, founded in 2004 by now-multi-billionaire Tatyana Kim and has disputed links to the Kremlin, is aiding the Russian war effort. The retailer denies this.

Attacking the distribution network of one of Russia’s principal companies will increase financial pressure on consumers and retailers alike, but the longer-term threats to the Russian economy could pose a significant threat to the Kremlin.

What did the commentators say?

Wildberries, as a “linchpin of Russia’s consumer market”, is an “obvious target”, said Vasilyeva in The New York Times. It can access even the “most remote corners of the country”, making its reach in Russia “unmatched”. It is the most popular marketplace platform in the country, with 79 million people – more than half of the population – using it every month.

The strikes have “disproportionately affected” the “one million Russian sellers” who rely on the site for visibility and distribution. In a fractured country whose vast size poses significant business challenges, Wildberries’ 95,000 pick-up points “represent a sense of economic normalcy” for both retailers and consumers, “which the Kremlin has been eager to preserve” amid sanctions and economic pressure from the war.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Wildberries has been championed as a “symbol of Russian ingenuity and resilience despite Western sanctions”, said The Wall Street Journal.

On the surface, it is a success story of economic growth, employing more than 15,000 people, having tripled its workforce last year alone. But with ties to “Kremlin-linked oligarch” Suleyman Kerimov, it is demonstrative of “Putin’s determination to restrict control over the engines of the economy to a cadre of businesspeople loyal to him”.

Ukraine’s reasons for striking Wildberries “appear to be two-fold”, said The Independent. Ukraine insists the platform is a “legitimate” target due to its involvement in “Russia's wartime logistics and economic infrastructure”. But the overwhelming motivation is a financial one. Alongside its smaller competitor Ozon and other rivals, Wildberries accounts for around 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and supports around four million jobs, “more than 5% of Russia’s workforce”. Signalled by the government purchasing a 5% stake in the company, Wildberries is considered “central to plans for economic growth”.

“Whatever the stated military rationale, the economic consequences extend far beyond the front line of war,” said finance expert Yerzhan Tokbolat on The Conversation. This latest tactic is making the “economic costs of the war harder for ordinary Russians to ignore”. The significance of the Wildberries strikes may not just be the destruction of warehouses, but rather found in the “millions of Russians whose incomes, shopping and sense of normality depend on them”.

The Kremlin’s protestation that Ukraine is attacking Russia’s civilian economy with their attacks on Wildberries “smacks of complete hypocrisy”, said Liam Nolan, Eastern Europe reporter at RTÉ. Russian forces have been destroying businesses and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine for the last four-and-a-half years, “despite the Kremlin’s insistence that it does not target civilian areas”.

Government drives to expand “long-range drone production and greater investment in deep-strike technology” have certainly pressed home the advantage. But Kyiv’s ultimate goal in targeting Wildberries – and Russia’s infrastructure more generally – is to “gain leverage in the negotiating process, whenever it restarts”.

What next?

Support for Putin will “not automatically weaken” because of these attacks, said Tokbolat on The Conversation. As of 28 July, the government announced it had been considering “loans, tax relief and subsidies” to maintain businesses, “but no decision had been made”. In fact, they could “reinforce patriotic sentiment” against Ukraine, and “generate solidarity with affected Russian businesses, rather than anger towards the Kremlin”.

“The greater political risk is cumulative.” The knock-on effects of fuel shortages and subsequent price increases, as well as a decline in small businesses, will make it harder to maintain the impression that “the war can continue without significantly changing everyday life in Russia”. But beyond outward support, Russia’s campaign depends on the “willingness of households and businesses to absorb the costs of war”. By placing a major economic engine, which affects everyday consumption, in its crosshairs, “Ukraine is testing that willingness”.

“The fact that a drone armed with explosives is here on the grounds of an airport represents a new threat scenario,” said Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt in Leipzig. “We’re talking about a professional hybrid threat situation.”

Dobrindt looked “ashen-faced” as he addressed the media, said Newsweek. Flights were halted after the discovery of a quadcopter armed with explosives in a restricted area near Ukrainian Antonov freight planes. Nato has acknowledged it is aware of the incident.

Security experts and officials are asking a question that was “once unthinkable”: is Germany “de facto at war, or at least engaged in a hybrid war – and with whom?”

Germany becoming ‘primary target’

Leipzig/Halle airport is a Nato and German military logistics hub, and since 2022 has been used by Ukraine to transport military equipment. It is also the base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines in Europe, a cargo carrier, and as the drone was found close to a Ukrainian cargo plane, this has “directed suspicion towards Russia”, said The Guardian.

Drone sightings at German airports rose “significantly” in the first half of 2026, said Der Spiegel. According to German Air Navigation Services, 166 drones were spotted at 15 international airports, compared to 101 in the same period last year.

The threat of drone attacks is “becoming increasingly concrete”, said Süddeutsche Zeitung. But bringing them down is notoriously difficult. Drones can be stopped by “jammers, nets, or even by being shot down”, but this is a “delicate task” when they are near residential areas.

Leipzig airport was already equipped with a drone defence system, but a “custom-made” model was seemingly able to bypass it. Germany is becoming the “primary target” in “Russia’s shadow war”, which has the “aim of dissuading it from supporting Ukraine in the short term and weakening it in the long term”.

Germany has “gradually expanded its defensive measures in recent months”, said Euronews. Since October 2025, “under certain conditions”, the federal police have been allowed to shoot down drones. And Dobrindt has called for drones to be “detected, intercepted and, if necessary, shot down more consistently in future”. But the process is complicated, with frequency scanners, cameras and radar systems all required.

Russia trying to ‘sow fear’

“As well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form” with this kind of attack, said the BBC. Though there is no hard evidence to suggest who is behind it, there is “renewed talk” of hybrid war across Europe. “If Russia was behind this”, its aim was likely to “sow fear”.

The incident raises concerns about foreign interference in upcoming German regional elections, where “far-right politicians have campaigned on fears of escalations with Moscow”, said Politico. Former communist and East German states Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania will hold elections in September. “Pro-Russian sentiment remains strong” and the far-right party AfD “could take power for the first time at the state level”.

‘State corrections policy must do better than more of the same’

Brian Koehn at The Hill

Whether candidates “campaign on it or not, corrections is government’s responsibility,” and “governors cannot pretend it belongs to someone else,” says Brian Koehn. Governors “oversee systems that consume major public dollars, employ thousands of correctional professionals and decide whether people return home better prepared for the outside world or more damaged.” As “voters listen to candidates talk about freedom and safety, they should ask what candidates will do about correctional systems already under their authority.”

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‘Sophie Cunningham’s actions speak far louder than her words’

Jason Page at MS NOW

There are “those looking to legitimately protect the safety of girls and women in sports and those looking to use the issue to demonize the transgender community,” and Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham’s “actions, more than her words, appear to put her far closer to the latter,” says Jason Page. Cunningham “claims to love everybody.” But in “choosing to pose for postgame photos on Sunday with outspoken trans critic Riley Gaines,” one “could easily wonder if Cunningham is telling us a different story.”

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‘When you can’t afford to stay cool, the risks are life-and-death’

Sharon Block and Dr. Satchit Balsari at USA Today

Two “trends are dominating this summer — high temperatures and high inflation,” and “these two extremes combine to create a crisis that rarely makes headlines,” say Sharon Block and Dr. Satchit Balsari. Workers “may die in increased numbers because they can’t afford to stay cool,” a “predictable consequence of policy choices that leave working Americans choosing between the cost of the cooling they need to recover from work in extreme heat and the costs of other necessities of life.”

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‘The cure for Russia’s labor shortage is worse than the disease’

Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya at Foreign Policy

Among the “various challenges that Russia has faced since its ill-conceived full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the most acute has been a severe labor shortage,” say Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya. Russia’s “deepening demographic crisis” combined “with mass emigration” has “sharply exacerbated the problem.” The Kremlin’s “response has rested on three pillars: mobilizing underutilized domestic labor, expanding prison labor and increasing labor migration.” But “each proves to be either insufficient or self-defeating.”

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The Ukraine war has entered a “dangerous new phase”, said Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett.

Overnight, 17 Ukrainians were killed in Russian strikes on Kyiv, and just days ago seven people were killed by a Ukrainian drone attack on a crowded Russian Black Sea beach.

“More and more civilians are being killed on both sides” as Russia and Ukraine seem to expand their scope beyond military targets. As the conflict intensifies on multiple fronts, neither side shows signs of withdrawing.

What did the commentators say?

Four years into the war, it seems Ukraine is evolving its approach against Russia, said world affairs editor Sam Kiley in The Independent. Kyiv’s recent drone attack on a Russian Black Sea beach, where seven civilians died, including three children, marked a “shift in the war”. Ukraine may not have a policy of attacking civilian targets, but as it “steps up its war inside the Russian Federation, there have been, and will be, more civilian deaths”. Despite a reshuffle of top commanders, and being “outgunned, outmanned and outsized by the invaders”, Ukraine remains on the front foot. As it presses home the advantage, and “strikes deeper at Moscow, these tragedies will multiply”.

Following successful campaigns against Russian oil refineries, Ukraine’s increasing attacks on Wildberries – Russia’s equivalent of Amazon – are also changing the mood within Russia, said world affairs editor Catherine Philp in The Times. “Far from merely inconveniencing shoppers”, this is an “audacious attempt to bring down Russia’s economy”. The company accounts for around 50% of online retail in Russia, and “barely two days have passed without another warehouse in flames” since mid-July. This campaign shows that the conflict has broken beyond the front lines, and is now regularly “bringing the war into the lives of ordinary Russians”.

Even as these strikes intensify, Vladimir Putin has shown “no sign of backing down”, said Russian expert Professor Stephen Crowley in The Nation. The core response from European leaders has been to engage in the “greatest military build-up since the 1930s”. But all this does is perpetuate a “spiral of action and reaction on both sides” that invites further escalation. Instead, they should “open lines of communication” and bring about “difficult but necessary” negotiations to end the war through temporary lifting of sanctions or thawing diplomatic relations. Some would argue this would be giving “Putin a way out of his war of choice”, but once it is over, he would be forced to “face the Russian people and attempt to justify his historic debacle”.

As Trump focuses on the war in Iran, a “propitious moment to be the peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine war could be slipping away”, said Thomas E. Graham, former White House Russia expert, in The New York Times. The conflict has entered a “dangerous escalatory spiral”, and both Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been clear in their wishes for the US to re-engage in negotiations. “Only Washington has the combination of access, leverage and political weight to lead a comprehensive diplomatic effort.”

Given Russia’s animosity towards Europe, the US should send envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv and Moscow to “lay the groundwork for an intense period of shuttle diplomacy to bridge the yawning gaps between the two sides”. But time is of the essence. They must act imminently, “before escalation closes the diplomatic opening that exhaustion has begun to create”.

What next?

Europe must “seize the moment and demonstrate that they are capable of acting decisively on the international stage”, said Lesia Ogryzko in Atlantic Council. Ukraine’s recent progress provides a “rare window of opportunity to increase the pressure on Putin”. However, this window is “likely to prove temporary”.

The continent should prioritise Ukraine’s manpower constraints, as well as “improving military recruitment, retention and mobilisation”. European leaders should also grant Ukraine access to critical technologies including advanced electronics, cloud-computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools, and communications systems. The goal for many years has been “strategic autonomy and Europe’s emergence as a serious security actor”. “The coming months may provide the clearest test yet of whether those ambitions are realistic.”

Russia’s war against Ukraine would seem to be an entirely separate conflict from the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. But Ukraine last month attacked an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, raising fears the two regional conflicts could merge and spiral into something bigger and more destabilizing to the world.

What did the commentators say?

The Caspian Sea attack “underscored the links between the wars,” said The New York Times. Russia has “launched swarms” of Iran-made drones at Ukraine, the outgrowth of a decades-long “close military relationship” between Moscow and Iran. (Ukraine said the Iranian ship was carrying a new supply of drones. Iran denied the accusation.) Ukraine, meanwhile, has “brought its hard-earned expertise” in drone warfare to the task of defending Gulf states from Iranian attacks after the U.S. launched its war.

The Ukraine-Iran conflicts are “beginning to overlap,” Gideon Rachman said at the Financial Times. The wars “now span two continents” in Europe and Asia and are “influencing conflicts in Africa.” Ukraine has “ample reasons” to want to hit Iranian shipments of drones that “killed a great many Ukrainians,” but leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy may also “see an opportunity to dramatically improve relations with the Trump administration” by assisting in the U.S. war. This is a fraught moment. The 20th century proved that “regional conflicts and great-power miscalculation can be a deadly combination.”

Zelenskyy appears to seek a “merging” of the two wars into a “single strategic theater,” Trita Parsi said at Responsible Statecraft. The Ukrainian leader has spent the war urging NATO to “move beyond supplying weapons and intelligence” and take a more direct role in defending his country. The Iran war now presents Ukraine with the opportunity to offer itself as a “strategic asset capable of helping Washington turn a military debacle into a splendid victory.” It is a “dangerous gambit” and it could “pave the way for a disaster.”

The Ukraine strike comes as the war in the Middle East appears to be expanding into a regional conflict that includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq. It is a “glimpse of just how apocalyptic” the war could become, Spencer Ackerman said at Forever Wars. There is increasingly a risk of the conflict “spiraling” beyond its current limits. “There is no mechanism at present to stop its growth.”

What next?

Iran and Russia may want no part of a larger war. Tehran and Moscow seek a “pragmatic partnership without entangling themselves in each other's regional wars,” Barnard College’s Alexander Cooley said to Newsweek. Ukraine could continue to “strike ships it believes are helping Russia,” said USA Today, but would otherwise “gain little from a full-scale confrontation with Iran.” Ukraine’s top priority “remains Russia,” Chatham House’s Neil Quilliam told the outlet.

Iranian strikes on CIA facilities have led US intelligence officials to believe that unprecedented intelligence cooperation is taking place between Russia and Tehran, with China cooperating closely with Moscow too.

The US is investigating how Iran was able to accurately target covert CIA facilities in Saudi Arabia and other allied countries in March. Reuters cited former CIA officials who said that relatively few countries possess both the intelligence capabilities and strategic motivation to provide Tehran with such highly sensitive data.

If confirmed, “the successful targeting of covert CIA facilities would represent one of the most significant intelligence security breaches affecting US overseas operations in recent decades”, said Military Watch Magazine.

What did the commentators say?

It appears likely that Iran had help from Russia as the attacks “were far more advanced than what they’ve done before”, Nicole Grajewski, from the Center for International Research at Sciences Po university in Paris, told Al Jazeera. Russia “has also allegedly helped Tehran improve the accuracy” of its attack drones by supplying a Russian-designed anti-jamming navigation system, said Al Jazeera.

A secret document seen by The Economist and estimated by the newspaper to have been from the first six weeks of the war showed Russia also offered to provide Iran with “unjammable drones and training on how to use them against American troops in the Gulf”. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, said the proposal was consistent with other evidence that Russia is looking for ways of increasing support for Iran.

For Russia, the benefits of a continued conflict in the Middle East are obvious. More countries are looking to buy Russian oil while the Strait of Hormuz continues to be unstable, said RadioFreeEurope. The Philippines, for example, “has sought to increase Russian crude access and expanded discussions over long-term energy cooperation”. Where Moscow could benefit economically, “China may see diplomatic gains amid the same situation”.

Moscow and Beijing “have coordinated closely throughout the crisis”, said Jasim Al-Azzawi on Middle East Monitor, jointly convening UN sessions and “declining to abandon Tehran diplomatically even as they withheld direct military support”. There is “a seductive myth that China and Iran are allies bound by blood and ideology, that Beijing would ride to Tehran’s rescue the way Nato would for a member under Article 5”. But “nothing could be further from the truth. What binds Beijing and Tehran is colder, more durable, and in some ways more dangerous than sentiment: mutual utility.”

The Iran war has been good for Beijing because it has “accelerated three of China’s long-held goals: a Middle East less dependent on America, a world more dependent on critical Chinese technology and a reputation for Beijing as a serious and steady world power”, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. Accordingly, China “provides technological and military support to Iran”, said Nadia Helmy on Modern Diplomacy. Chinese companies are “supplying vital components and technologies used in Iran’s missile and defence programmes, making Tehran a regional power that is difficult to deter without significant cost”.

What next?

The US is “surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East to give President Trump more muscular military options as he considers expanding the conflict”, said The Wall Street Journal.

But any escalation will be complicated by the continued support of China and Russia for Iran and the changing of the geopolitical pecking order that this war is beginning to cause. “The Iran conflict has shown that governments increasingly judge the major powers by whether they can help manage energy costs, shipping risk and inflation,” Ilango Karuppannan, a veteran Malaysian diplomat, told RadioFreeEurope.

“This creates a risk for Washington. The US may remain militarily important while becoming less economically relevant.”

‘Big money is distorting college sports in too many ways to count’

The Dallas Morning News editorial board

College sports has been “known for its regional affiliation,” but “after the latest major conference realignment,” this has “become a distant memory,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. It has become “difficult for those competing to be both athletes and active students” because “conferences are no longer composed of teams in neighboring states but instead made up of schools that span the country.” Students “find themselves spending more time on the road or in the airport than they spend in class.”

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‘Just say “no” to nepo senators’

Nia-Malika Henderson at Bloomberg

Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) “chose not to use her legal last name,” Nordone, “when she was sworn in as her brother’s replacement last week,” an “obvious clue that she was thinking as a candidate, not just a caretaker,” says Nia-Malika Henderson. Graham “wants the seat because her brother had the seat.” If she “wins it, it will be because of rank nepotism,” as she has “no real experience in politics, other than appearing in ads for her brother’s various campaigns.”

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‘Smoke-filled summers cannot become the norm’

Jill Burcum at The Minnesota Star Tribune

Canadian wildfire smoke is “blanketing Minnesota again and again, turning blue skies to apocalyptic yellow, with ash coating cars and windowsills,” says Jill Burcum. The “gloomy haze has made it challenging to enjoy our world-class natural resources during the season when they’re easiest to appreciate.” Canada has “already stepped up to help in a big way.” Combining U.S. and Canadian “resources, technology and expertise is our best shot at preventing and getting ahead of fires before they become a crisis.”

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‘Chaff can fool Russia’s radar’

Robert Brull at The Wall Street Journal

Ukraine “won’t always have the element of surprise,” and as “long-range drones become increasingly crucial to modern warfare, militaries must develop new ways to protect them,“ says Robert Brull. As “long-range drones get larger and carry heavier payloads, chaff is becoming more attractive as a low-cost way to confuse radar defense systems.” Ukraine’s “powerful long-range drones will meet increasingly sophisticated networks of air defenses.” To “prepare, the offense needs to invest in a new defense: improving chaff.”

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What happened

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday dismissed the country’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, and replaced him with Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi. The switch “comes amid ongoing mass protests” that erupted across Ukraine after Zelenskyy’s ouster last week of “popular reformist” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had clashed with Syrskyi, The Kyiv Independent said.

Demonstrators said Zelenskyy should have sacked Syrskyi instead when he picked sides in the dispute. Drapatyi, the widely respected commander of day-to-day combat operations, had publicly backed Fedorov.

Who said what

Fedorov had “emphasized the strategic importance of new military technology, particularly drones,” CNN said, and his “six-month tenure as defense minister coincided with Ukraine’s recent success on the battlefield” and in damaging Russia. Syrskyi, by contrast, was widely seen as a “Soviet-school commander reluctant to implement radical changes in the army,” the BBC said.

As the protests swelled, “it became clear” that for many Ukrainians, Fedorov “embodied a tech-driven path to victory that might spare lives,” while “Syrskyi had come to represent the darkest, most punishing realities” of the war, The New York Times said. The clash of visions fueled “concerns that the national unity that had helped the country survive nearly five years of war was in danger of fracturing.”

What next?

After meeting with Fedorov on Tuesday, Zelenskyy “offered him what he called a respected position in the government,” The Associated Press said. It “wasn’t clear if Fedorov accepted,” but he congratulated Drapatyi, calling his promotion a “new hope in the fight of free people for freedom and justice.”

The upheaval and unrest at the top of the Ukrainian government has worried its citizens and given succour to Russia at a crucial time in the war.

In his dismissal of popular defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sparked anger and protests across Ukraine, turning what was an internal management issue into the “biggest military leadership crisis” of his presidency, said the Financial Times’ Christopher Miller.

Now Zelenskyy has been left with no choice but to acquiesce to protesters by firing controversial general and close ally Oleksandr Syrskyi and replacing him with Mykhailo Drapatyi, a 43-year-old Fedorov acolyte. But the whole affair has “exposed divisions over Ukraine’s military strategy” and the “willingness of the armed forces to address its shortcomings just as momentum in the war against Russia has swung in its favour”.

What did the commentators say?

Ukraine’s survival against a vastly more powerful Russia “has always rested on an uneasy alliance between a corrupt state, steeped in Soviet-era reflexes, and a more innovative, Westward-looking population, much of it too young to have been shaped by the former USSR”, said Bloomberg’s Marc Champion. The conflict between Fedorov and Syrskyi aptly highlighted that very tension.

Fedorov was appointed defence minister only in January having previously made a name for himself leading Ukraine’s digital transformation department. The 35-year-old won new admirers for adopting an innovative, data-led approach to military procurement and the expansion of battlefield drone technology.

Yet his at-times unorthodox methods put him increasingly into conflict with many of the military old guard, including the 60-year-old Syrskyi who is known among some troops as “the butcher” for his reported indifference to losses of soldiers.

Fedorov’s ousting, just six months into his tenure, “comes at a critical time”, said Radio Free Europe. More than four years on from the full invasion, Ukraine’s forces have battled Russian troops to a “near standstill – in large part due to the wide embrace of drone warfare and lightning innovations in drone technology” that have also been used to target supply lines and hit oil refineries deep inside of Russia. This has “buoyed many Ukrainians’ confidence that the Kremlin will be forced to negotiate a ceasefire”.

Now the “extraordinary rupture at the heart of Ukraine’s top war-fighting team” is one that “can only benefit Russia”, said Sky News security and defence editor Deborah Haynes.

“Perhaps more worryingly for the president and military chief” is the “disquiet within the ranks” that it has prompted, said Haynes. Senior serving officers have spoken out in defence of Fedorov, while some have even resigned in protest. This includes the deputy head of the Ukrainian air force, Colonel Pavlo Yelizarov, who called the decision a “great evil for the country’s defence capabilities”.

What next?

Zelenskyy has offered Fedorov a return to a “prominent position in government”. But it is not clear whether this offer will be accepted, with reports that Fedorov would only return to his previous role as defence minister.

The whole affair has exposed a deeper “troubling flaw in the president’s leadership”, said The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont.

It has prompted “inevitable suggestions that Zelenskyy and his circle – not for the first time – had sidelined someone seen as popular and a potential future political rival”.

The initial decision, an editorial in the Kyiv Independent said, “bears all the hallmarks of Zelenskyy’s tendency to dismiss top officials and commanders who get too popular, ahead of hypothetical elections that will never happen if Russia overwhelms Ukraine”.

But the fact that Zelenskyy has made a volte-face “rather than try to crush dissent is a source of hope for Ukraine”, said Champion in Bloomberg. “Ultimately, the two Ukraines that Syrskyi and Fedorov represent must cooperate if they are to stay one step ahead of Moscow.”

Japan is to open its first centralised intelligence agency since the Second World War in the face of increased security threats posed by China, Russia and North Korea.

With pacifism enshrined in its post-war constitution and culture, Japan has for decades had to rely on co-operation with US military intelligence support. Now Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has described the reforms as a “first step” towards strengthening the country’s independent espionage capabilities.

How will it work?

Legislation that passed the upper house of Japan’s National Diet in May creates two new bodies: a National Intelligence Council, which acts as the government’s command centre for intelligence gathering and analysis, and a National Intelligence Bureau, which is responsible for operations.

Japanese leaders have “privately approached partners such as the US, Australia and Germany in recent months for advice on technology, staffing and priorities,” said The New York Times.

The idea is that the two new bodies will improve Japan’s intelligence abilities “by strengthening coordination, reducing interagency barriers and ensuring that intelligence products better meet policymakers’ requirements”, defence expert Sanshiro Hosaka told Al Jazeera.

To allay public concern that intelligence gathering could be used for political advantage, supplementary resolutions have been passed “to ensure personal information and privacy are not unnecessarily infringed”, said Japan’s national broadcaster NHK. The amendments also specify that the government “should not gather information in a way that undermines political neutrality”.

Why now?

Japan’s intelligence system has “long been fragmented, with defence officials, diplomats, the police and others collecting and analysing information without sharing intelligence across departments”, said the NYT. “That has left the country especially vulnerable to espionage and foreign interference.”

To make matters worse, Japan also lacks an anti-espionage law, which has made it relatively easy for foreign intelligence activities to go unpunished. “Japan has had enough of being a ‘spy paradise’,” said Philip Shetler-Jones and Masashi Umehara from the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

The Trump administration’s repudiation of long-standing allies has revealed the dangers of over-reliance on US intelligence sharing. With the reform of its intelligence system, Japan’s approach to security is “becoming more self-reliant and autonomous”.

How are Russia and China operating in Japan?

Russian and Chinese operations within Japan have increased in recent years. In 2024, cybersecurity research group Citizen Lab exposed a so-called “paperwall” of Beijing-run websites disguised as Japanese-language news sources to spread pro-China disinformation.

The Russian military, meanwhile, has taken advantage of lax espionage laws to establish a secretive intelligence unit in Tokyo known as the 20th Directorate. “Posing as diplomats or businesspeople, its officers work to buy or steal battlefield technology and smuggle it into Russia”, said The New York Times. The NYT cited Ukrainian government estimates that 90% of Russian missiles and drones used in Ukraine contain Japanese components.

President Donald Trump may continue his rhetoric against Greenland, but a different Arctic land 1,200 miles away, Svalbard, faces similar pressure from other countries. With increasing influence from China and Russia, the Norwegian territory could end up playing an outsize role in global affairs.

What’s happening in Svalbard?

The island is subject to a 1920 treaty that allows people from 49 nations to live and work there without a visa, largely for scientific research. Svalbard has since become the “planet’s leading hub of Arctic science and a rare site of international cooperation,” but this also collides with “increasingly fractured international relations and countries’ quest for influence in the fast-warming Arctic,” said CNN.

China and Russia have been working in Svalbard and established research stations that “provide a gateway to Arctic influence,” said CNN. Due to its abundant natural resources, Svalbard has become a “pawn on Russia’s chessboard,” said France24. And Russia hopes that controlling more of Svalbard will allow it to dominate the nearby Bear Gap, one of the “key maritime routes through which Russian naval vessels and submarines can move from their Arctic bases into the North Atlantic,” said Al Jazeera.

China’s hold on Svalbard is not as strong as Russia’s, but it still maintains a presence. In the nation’s 2018 strategy outline for the Arctic, China “called itself a ‘near-Arctic state’ and repeatedly referred to Svalbard,” said CNN. The country also has “plans for a ‘polar silk road,’ an infrastructure and shipping corridor across the top of the world.” China also has several research stations in Svalbard, including a major testing station on Spitsbergen, Svalbard’s only permanently populated area.

What’s next for Svalbard?

Some are worried that Svalbard’s use by other countries will embolden authoritarianism, as Russia and China will “likely work toward common ends in the development of future Arctic governance,” said The Arctic Institute. Norway’s response “may determine if Svalbard maintains its status as an international research hub or becomes defined by its importance in global trade and military security.” Norway also has its own plan to “mine a huge stretch of Arctic seabed around Svalbard and beyond for critical minerals.”

When it comes to war, the 1920 treaty “prohibits the construction of military bases and fortifications” on Svalbard. However, the article in the treaty that prohibits this is only one sentence and states Svalbard cannot be “used for ‘warlike purposes,’ leaving much room for interpretation,” said The Arctic Institute. Russia has recently been using Svalbard as a “gray zone” for military testing, and the “utilization of these methods is becoming more concentrated on Svalbard as the Arctic Circle captures evermore geopolitical attention.”

Norway seems to be pushing back against Chinese and Russian provocation. In 2022, the government “changed voting rules to prevent non-Norwegians from voting” in Longyearbyen, the capital of Svalbard, said CNN.

And some of the pushback has also been symbolic. This year, two granite Chinese lions were removed from the research station on Spitsbergen. There’s “no Chinese research station on Svalbard,” said Eivind Vad Petersson, the state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to CNN. There’s a “Norwegian research station with Chinese tenants. That’s a distinction with a difference.”

When the 2028 Summer Olympics kick off in Los Angeles, a Russian team could be among the competitors for the first time in more than a decade. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has lifted its suspension of Russia’s Olympic organization, which had been in place since 2016. Many are angry at the prospect of Russia rejoining the international competition, especially amid its ongoing war with Ukraine.

What was the IOC’s decision?

The IOC “provisionally lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee that had been in effect” since October 2023, the group said in a statement, because it wanted to “ensure a fair opportunity for participation” by Russian athletes. The suspension is also being lifted because Russia is “no longer trying to claim regional sports organizations on Ukrainian soil” as part of the Russian Olympic Committee, said The Athletic. Russia must also abide by anti-doping measures since the country “systemically organized a doping program to pump up their athletes” during the 2014 Winter Games.

But there is also a “lack of confidence in the global sporting community relating to the return of Russian athletes to international competition,” the IOC acknowledged. As a result, the “decision in relation to the display of the Russian flag, anthem, colors or any identifications for the Olympic Games at the appropriate time” will be made in the future, said the IOC, as will any decisions on potentially hosting international events in Russia. Russian officials will also still not be invited to Olympic events.

Olympic officials have stated that they no longer want to punish Russian athletes for their country’s decision to invade Ukraine. “We wanted to ensure all athletes have the possibility to compete at the Olympic Games and not be held responsible for their government’s actions,” IOC President Kirsty Coventry said during a press conference. “But we’ve also been very clear that we do not condone any violence and war around the world.”

What does this mean for the 2028 Olympics?

The IOC’s decision represents a “significant step for bringing Russian athletes, who have struggled with their country’s pariah status on the world stage, back into the international fold after several years,” said The New York Times. The choice to potentially reintroduce Russia to the Olympics will be a “highly controversial decision by the IOC and one likely to be condemned by European countries in particular,” said the BBC.

But “many within the IOC were also mindful of the current geopolitical landscape, and accusations of double standards if the sanction against Russia was maintained, while other countries that have launched military action against other nations escape punishment,” said the BBC. Others say that Russia’s ban should only have ended when the country pulls out of Ukraine, and that allowing it in the 2028 Olympics “risks emboldening President Vladimir Putin and handing him a propaganda win.”

So while the IOC’s decision does mean Russia “could compete at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics,” said Politico, Russian participation in the games will not come without backlash, including from Ukraine. The IOC’s choice “sends a deeply concerning signal to the international community,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on X. “We also call on international sports federations to maintain the existing restrictions on representatives of the aggressor state, in line with their commitment to protecting the integrity and values of international sport.”

President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy have never had what could feasibly be called a “warm” relationship, stretching back well into Trump’s first term. Given their frosty history, Trump’s enthusiasm during this week’s NATO summit for Ukraine’s recent wartime successes came as a shock to many. By announcing plans to loosen restrictions on American arms for Ukraine’s defense and hailing Kyiv’s wartime strides against Russia, has Trump come around to Zelenskyy as a peer among the world’s heads of state? Or will the infamously mercurial MAGA president revert to his previous hostility?

What did the commentators say?

Trump “heaped praise” on Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the NATO summit in Ankara, where he spoke in “unusually positive terms” about Kyiv’s strikes in deep Russian territory, said The Washington Post. By speaking in “admiring terms” and offering “dramatic new assistance” for Ukraine’s wartime efforts, Trump’s stance was a “dramatic departure from his tone during his first year in office.” Zelenskyy, meanwhile, spent his recent time with Trump showing “swagger and a hint of his prepresidential vocation as a popular Ukrainian comedian.” Trump and Zelenskyy “kindled a significant thaw in relations,” with the pair’s “bonhomie” signaling the “latest shift in a historically fraught relationship,” said The Hill.

Given that Trump has “zigged and zagged when it comes to Ukraine,” the president’s offer to grant Kyiv a Patriot missile manufacturing license is being “cheered” in Ukraine with a “heavy dose of caution,” said The New York Times. Similarly, Trump’s endorsement of Ukrainian deep drone strikes as an “escalation that could help end the war” marked his “strongest praise yet” for Zelenskyy’s wartime gains, and dealt a “significant blow to Russia’s efforts to keep Trump on its side in talks to end the war,” said The Wall Street Journal. Trump “always wants to be on the winning side,” said Viktor Shlinchak, the head of the Institute of World Policy, to the Times. “Right now, it does not look like Ukraine is losing.”

Following Trump’s push to grant Kyiv a manufacturing license for Patriot missiles, Zelenskyy at “times looked like he almost couldn’t believe his luck,” said CNN. Not only have the pair shared a “rocky relationship,” but the “flare-up in the war in Iran appeared to have put Trump into a foul mood” ahead of the meeting. But in a “break from earlier encounters” that “ended in acrimony,” Trump praised Zelenskyy’s “willingness to reach a deal” to end the ongoing violence, said NPR. “We’ve developed a good relationship — it’s even hard to believe — from the Oval Office until now,” said Trump at the summit meeting. “This will be the beginning, maybe, just the beginning.”

What next?

European leaders have “embraced the new messaging,” said the Post. “It’s so important” that Trump is “now taking very seriously that Ukraine has a chance” while Russia is “doing weaker,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna, according to the outlet.

The unexpectedly friendly meeting between the two leaders “appeared to demonstrate the best-case scenario for Ukraine and its supporters among NATO members,” said The Hill. Many had worried that Trump’s “animosity toward the alliance” and “routine deference” to Russian President Vladimir Putin would “undermine support” for Kyiv and NATO.

Still, the language Trump used to promise Patriot manufacturing rights for Ukraine was “rather vague,” CNN said. The president “admitted that he had not yet discussed the issue” with arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which manufacture the missile batteries domestically. “We have Patriots, but we don’t have that many,” said Trump during his conversation with Zelenskyy. “We need them for ourselves, too.”

Even so, Zelenskyy was “emboldened by the good meeting” enough to joke that he couldn’t visit Moscow anytime soon because there are “too many Ukrainian drones there. It’s not safe,” said The Hill. Trump also appeared open to visiting Ukraine, but said he would rather the “war be over” before committing.

Documents have emerged from “clandestine” meetings in 2023 between Russian and Chinese leaders over neutralising the threat of Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine, while also revealing a growing military cooperation between the two allies.

The joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel and Le Monde exposes China’s “professed neutrality” in Ukraine “as a fiction”, and poses questions about the nature and targets of their alliance.

What did the commentators say?

The China-Russia “no limits” alliance is “one of the world’s most consequential relationships”, said Brookings. The “biggest misconception”, said policy expert Patricia Kim, is that Russia and China are either “inseparable partners” or “inevitable rivals that are on the brink of a split”. Neither may be true, but the relationship is “stronger than it ever has been in decades, certainly since the post-Cold War period”.

The personal connection between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is at the heart of the relationship, said Ankur Shah, editor of the Global China Unit on the BBC. The “strongmen” have described each other as “best friends”, and have met more than 40 times. Economically, the alliance is highly uneven, with China being “Russia’s largest trading partner, while Russia makes up just 4% of China’s international trade”. But as leaders, Xi and Putin “do not pass judgement on the actions of the other”, and despite their “asymmetries and differences”, they “share vital interests”.

China is by far the dominant party of the pair, and intent on satisfying Xi's desire for a “Sino-centric world”, said The Economist. In the past three months, China has received visits from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both seeking economic stability while engaged in wars of their own making. Crucially, Putin left without assurances for the proposed gas pipeline “Power of Siberia 2” that would allow Russia to sell “50 billion cubic metres of gas annually” to China, which it can no longer supply to Europe. In the space of a matter of days, both at home and abroad, China appeared the singular “fulcrum of global geopolitics, dealing with America as an equal” and relegated Russia to a “junior partner”.

Current relations between Russia and China have been strengthened by the influence of Donald Trump, said Leonid Ragozin in Al Jazeera. The war in Iran has given a “powerful impetus to strengthening Russo-Chinese ties”, meaning China has become “reliant” on Russian oil, and in turn funded the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Let’s also not forget that Trump had pledged to “un-unite” Russia and China before his second presidential term in 2024. However, his recent “ambivalent” stance in effect echoes the “counterproductive policies of his predecessors”. Trump is famous for his “short span of attention”, and “may not even remember” what he promised to achieve in Russia and China. “But of course, the latter two do remember it well.”

It is true policymakers “suffered from a failure of imagination over the past decade” towards the potential of a Russia-China alliance, said Christopher Walker in the Centre for European Policy Analysis. Yet there is also a “risk of overcorrecting”. There are limits, “important imbalances and points of friction in the Sino-Russian relationship”, highlighted by China’s inactivity following American intervention in Venezuela and Iran: they appear unwilling to “close ranks against external threats”.

On a fundamental level, the two nations lack the “dense institutional connective tissue” that could match Nato, acting in “parallel play” rather than with lasting cohesion.

What next?

Nato has already reacted, said Seong Hyeon Choi in the South China Morning Post. Following the summit in Ankara, the organisation unveiled defence initiatives in response to “security challenges posed by Russia and China”. These included a motion on raw materials and a new Drone Edge programme, investing “US$40 billion in the next five years” into expanding modern warfare.

“China continues to modernise its armed forces and expand its nuclear capabilities without transparency”, and “North Korea continues to expand its nuclear programme and supply Russia”, said Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO. These countries working together “should concern us all”, because they “do not have our best interests in mind”, he continued: “to meet the challenge, we need a transatlantic defence industrial revolution”.

What’s behind China’s latest missile tests? How do anchovies in Peru affect the global food chain? And do Brits really trust the weather forecast?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

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After more than four years of war between Russia and Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a rare admission that the conflict has caused his country a problem. In this case, it is a significant fuel shortage driven by Ukrainian drone strikes that is exacerbating economic strain across Russia, and the issue may not be abated any time soon.

‘Certain deficit’

Putin has very rarely acknowledged that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to challenges. But his country is now facing a “certain deficit” of fuel, the Russian president said in an interview with state television. Russians are “well aware that problems for ⁠drivers and for businesses persist,” Putin also told his senior officials of the petroleum industry, according to Al Jazeera. “Unfortunately, there are still queues at petrol stations too.”

The shortage largely stems from Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. Russia must “reduce to a minimum the impact of terrorist attacks on our civilian targets and infrastructure,” Putin told his senior officials. Ukraine has “stepped up attacks on Russian energy facilities in recent months, hitting Russia’s crude oil,” said Al Jazeera. The attacks have led to significant fuel deficits. The “amount of crude oil Russia processed into fuel in June was down 25% from a year ago, to 3.95 million barrels per day — the lowest level in over two decades,” said Gary Peach, an oil markets analyst at Energy Intelligence, to The Associated Press.

While Ukraine has been utilizing drones for a while, what makes the current onslaught different is that Ukraine has “clearly scaled up the quantity of their drones and the quality of their drones,” Christina Harward, an expert at the Institute for the Study of War, said to Deutsche Welle. Ukraine has “improved the range of their drones and, for the past couple of months, they’ve also been undertaking an effort to identify and destroy Russian air defense systems.”

‘The situation is not very good’

The fuel shortages have led to social and financial unrest in many parts of Russia. The “lines are growing at Russian gas stations — and so is the frustration and uncertainty” as the deficits drag on and oil prices go up, said the AP. “I think the situation is not very good,” one motorist waiting in line told the outlet. Numerous cities have rationed fuel, with “hourslong queues of cars snaking beside roads.”

These struggles have been highlighted across social media, with one post reportedly showing farmers “struggling to afford fuel for harvest, while another describes a farmer having to drive his combine harvester to a regular gas station after he was not allowed to fill a can,” said Reuters. Some Russian drivers have also started to “crowdsource maps and trade tips about which stations have fuel and shorter lines,” and “online searches for ‘how to siphon fuel’ rose to more than ⁠9,300” in June from just 697 a month earlier.

And it doesn’t appear the crisis is going anywhere, as “half of Russia’s 83 regions are now reporting shortages,” said the Center for European Policy Analysis. For now, Russia has “enough fuel for the army, key industries, and agriculture — but everywhere else the choice is between paying more and waiting longer.” A Gallup survey found that “60% of Russians interviewed between March and May said their local economic conditions are getting worse.”

Vladimir Putin took the rare step of acknowledging fuel shortages in Crimea, following Ukrainian bombardments targeting the Russia-annexed peninsula. As Ukraine’s drones and missiles struck roads, railways and bridges, Putin admitted that there was only “a few days’ supply” left in Crimea, though he insisted that he was “confident” more fuel would be brought in soon.

The offensive has “upended life in Crimea and undercut its image as a showcase of Putin’s imperial ambitions” in Ukraine, said The Wall Street Journal. Although he “poured money into the peninsula”, locals say “basic services” like kindergartens, trash collection and ATMs have “stopped functioning”.

What did the commentators say?

Ukraine’s offensive coincides with the approach of September’s Russian parliamentary elections, forcing the Kremlin to “maintain a strict sense of composure”, said The Wall Street Journal. Putin wants to prevent political tensions “from rising” over the situation in Crimea, framing Ukrainian strikes to his electorate as part of an information campaign to break Russia’s morale.

“The unspoken assumption within the Ukrainian government is that it will have to accept Russia’s de facto control of Crimea as part of the price of peace,” said The Times. But the “outcome” may be “rather less predictable” than Volodymyr Zelenskyy “seems to think”.

Some “pragmatists” in Moscow feel that the war has “reached a point of diminishing returns” for the Kremlin, who should now “freeze the conflict” along current lines and “declare victory”. However, the “maximalist camp” calls for “escalation”, with the “mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists”, the “deployment of conscripts” and “more aggressive covert operations” against the factories in Europe that are supplying Kyiv’s weapons.

It “may be a mistake” to conclude that these problems will “force the Kremlin to yield”, said Matthew Chance, CNN’s chief global affairs correspondent. Putin has “built a relatively brittle image as an uncompromising leader”, which makes “capitulation, retreat or even compromise in Ukraine incredibly unlikely and difficult for him to pull off”.

What next?

“Despite his macho public persona”, Putin is “generally quite risk averse”, but when he’s “panicked, he tends to make decisions hastily and badly”, said The Times.

In a worst-case scenario, “egged on” by hard-liners, a pressured Putin “does something particularly stupid, such as escalating attacks on Kyiv or even using tactical nuclear weapons”, said The Telegraph in a leader. The Russian foreign ministry has already alluded to the possibility of unspecified “systematic strikes”. When Nato leaders meet in Ankara next month, they “need to be ready for a potential showdown with Moscow”.

What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged publicly on Sunday that his country was experiencing a “certain deficit” of gas and other fuels after Ukrainian drone strikes, but he insisted the “problems” aren’t “critical.” Ukraine “kept up its heavy drone assault on Russia,” setting fire to two more oil refineries over the weekend, The Associated Press said. Kyiv’s drone campaign has “choked Russian fuel supplies,” forcing rationing, “long lines at gas stations across the country,” and export halts.

Who said what

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week he had approved a “40-day influence operation” to compel Moscow “to end the war.” Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions,” he said Sunday, reduce the “resources that fuel the Russian war machine,” moving the conflict “another step toward peace.” The “strikes against critical infrastructure in general, and energy infrastructure in particular,” do “create problems, that’s obvious,” Putin said in an interview, but the Kremlin would fix them by ramping up the production of air defenses and importing fuel to ease the shortages.

“Behind the scenes,” there’s “growing panic” in Moscow, The Washington Post said. Over the past week, “swarms of Ukrainian drones hit” semiconductor plants, munitions factories, a satellite communications center and “oil facilities across Russia,” including a “dramatic onslaught on Moscow” that “spread plumes of black smoke over the capital as its main oil refinery went up in flames, halting production possibly until next year.”

What next?

Putin said Ukraine’s drone strikes were meant to “cause a split in Russian society and force Russia to halt” its invasion and enter negotiations, but “we will not give them that chance.”

‘Russia was a cautionary tale. Now US risks becoming it.’

Tim Richardson and Anna Nemzer at USA Today

In the U.S., Russia’s “descent into autocracy has long been cited as a cautionary tale by those warning of democratic backsliding,” say Tim Richardson and Anna Nemzer. Now “we risk parts of that history becoming our own.” Russia “hollowed out the country’s once-diverse media landscape, leaving behind only state media.” Similar “dynamics are taking hold here in the United States: the exclusion and punishment of those who scrutinize power, the rewarding of compliant media and the consolidation of influence over government narratives.”

Read more

‘California’s rape kit audit deadline is fast approaching. There’s reason to worry.’

Ilse Knecht and Kate Karpilow at the San Francisco Chronicle

When a “sexual assault survivor undergoes an invasive and time-consuming forensic examination to compile a rape kit, there’s an implicit promise that law enforcement will test any discovered DNA to identify a perpetrator,” say Ilse Knecht and Kate Karpilow. But “too often, those rape kits don’t get tested and languish in storage.” Getting a “thorough and accurate count of untested rape kits isn’t an exercise in bean counting or a bothersome bureaucratic demand.” It’s an “important crime-fighting tool.”

Read more

‘Platner, Fetterman and the myth of the working-class politician’

Jonathan Zimmerman at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner are “pretending to be rough-hewn, working-class guys,” says Jonathan Zimmerman. But both “were born into significant family wealth. And so were almost all of America’s political leaders, past and present.” Americans “just don’t want to admit it.” People “want to believe that every American can become anything they wish — a senator, or even a president.” That’s “why we’re attracted to figures like Fetterman and Platner, who enact this dream for us.”

Read more

‘My parents’ homeland might have a bright future — if its neighbors allow it’

Jordan Bitove at the Toronto Star

“My brothers, sister and I are proud of our Macedonian roots,” says Jordan Bitove. But North Macedonia “continues to be targeted by neighboring states, keen to frustrate its ambitions to take its rightful place on the global stage.” The country “has already changed its name, its flag and its Constitution under pressure from neighboring states.” North Macedonia “can’t stand still. While progress has been made, its living standard still significantly lags other European countries” and “brain drain is a threat.”

Read more

Two Ukrainian men have been found guilty of plotting arson attacks last year on property relating to Keir Starmer.

The trial of Roman Lavrynovych, 22, Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, and a third man was “strange”, said the BBC, “mainly because the true author of the drama was never revealed”.

But as more details of the case come to light it has revealed a shadowy network of online provocation and misinformation allegedly orchestrated from Russia that constitutes what the PM called “an attack on democracy” itself.

El Money

During the six-week trial at the Old Bailey, jurors heard that the fires at Starmer’s former family home and other related targets were ordered by a Russian-speaking handler on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Going by the pseudonym “El Money”, he directed Lavrynovych to carry out the attacks in exchange for promises of payment in cryptocurrency.

A Financial Times investigation “based on Telegram archives, cryptocurrency wallets, court evidence and interviews with Western officials” established that El Money was “located in Russia and was closely aligned with NoName057(16), a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group that the US has called a Russian ‘state-sanctioned project’”.

But the Russian embassy told the BBC: “We reject any attempt to associate Russia or its foreign ministry with unlawful activities.” It said that Russia poses “no threat to the United Kingdom or its people and harbours no aggressive intentions towards Britain”.

Now the BBC has identified evidence suggesting that El Money, or EL as he was known on Telegram, “is a young Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow”. The broadcaster named him as 23-year-old Evgeny Lyukshin, the son of a senior official.

It concluded that the arson attack was “just one part of an extensive campaign of sabotage, provocation and lies leading all the way to the Russian state”.

Part of this misinformation campaign included a “conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the arsonists were male prostitutes seeking revenge” on the PM, said The i Paper. Research by The i Paper and the Center for Countering Digital Hate charted the false “rent boy” rumour, which first emerged online less than 15 minutes after Lavrynovych was arrested and before it was made public by the police. The rumour spread from a “handful of small X accounts, through a network of far right activists and conspiracy theorists, into Russian media outlets and widespread online circulation”.

The accounts where the claim originated did not appear to be directly part of Russian disinformation networks. But Melanie Smith, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said Russian propagandists continually “monitor the online ecosystem” – particularly the far right in Europe – “trying to figure out which narratives are circulating and which ones of those work to their advantage”.

Russia’s war against the West

While not proven in court, the alleged involvement of Russia “points to a series of incidents in recent years, which, though piecemeal and hard to prove, lay bare how Russia’s intelligence services have moved towards a new kind of attack on the West”, said The Guardian.

“Dozens of people” have been detained across Europe – in Britain, Lithuania, France and Estonia – “accused of being foot soldiers in a new front of Russia’s war against the West”. This “war” includes Moscow-backed campaigns of “sabotage, arson and disinformation against the continent”.

Russian nationalist cyber groups like NoName, linked by the FT to last year’s London arson attacks, “have sought to recruit proxies online to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests, as well as foment disorder across Europe by amplifying far-right and anti-migrant messages”.

Britain, in particular, has become a “soft target” for Russian and other state propaganda because of a failure to educate people on how to deal with information warfare. This leaves it “extraordinarily vulnerable”, security expert Fiona Hill told a recent parliamentary committee.

“As it becomes harder to convince Russians that their own country is on the up, Vladimir Putin is instead presenting the West as not just hostile but in crisis”, said historian Mark Galeotti in The i Paper. The Kremlin “eagerly mines the news for stories it can spin, shade and downright misrepresent to advance these lines”, and Starmer’s misfiring government is “offering ample opportunities”.

As one staffer at the state-controlled Channel One news operation in Moscow said of the UK government: “There’s a combination of belligerence and incompetence there, a self-righteousness and lack of self-awareness that is just too good to pass up.”

What happened

The House on Thursday voted 226 to 195 to provide Ukraine with $1.3 billion in security aid and $8 billion in direct loans while imposing stiff new sanctions on Russia. It was the “most robust aid package to advance in Congress in more than a year,” The Washington Post said, and 18 Republicans joined all but one Democrat to pass the bill “over the objections of the chamber’s GOP leadership” and the White House.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday issued an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing a face-to-face meeting outside of the stalled peace process involving President Donald Trump’s envoys. But “woven into the offer for peace talks were needling remarks” in which he “taunted the Russian leader over wartime setbacks, inflation” and “Putin’s advancing age,” The New York Times said.

Who said what

The House’s “strong show of support for Kyiv” was also a “fresh bipartisan blow” to Trump’s foreign policy, Politico said. Republican leaders had “warned the bill would undermine negotiations” on a peace deal, The Associated Press said. But combined with the House’s Iran war rebuke earlier this week, the Ukraine vote signaled bipartisan “impatience” with Trump’s approach to war and peace.

What next?

Trump told reporters he was “glad” Zelenskyy had suggested direct talks with Putin and it “would be great” if they met. But it wasn’t clear if Zelenskyy’s letter was “meant to jump-start talks or to denigrate” Putin, the Times said. It “appeared to be at least in part a publicity move” to highlight Kyiv's drone strike outside St. Petersburg and “recent shifts in Ukraine’s favor on the battlefield.”

With Russian and Ukrainian forces seemingly locked in stalemate on the ground, the war has increasingly become an aerial one with both sides turning to drones and “smart” missiles to try to gain an advantage.

What does that look like?

Over the past four years Ukraine has pioneered the use of both offensive and defensive drones. They have changed the face of war and helped narrow the advantage enjoyed by Russia when it comes to weapons and personnel.

These unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, “hit Russian targets every day” and have played “a huge role in Ukraine’s recent improvement in fortunes, together with other innovations in the country’s drone war”, said the Financial Times.

At the same time, Ukraine has built an “increasingly sophisticated, layered air defence system”, said the BBC’s defence correspondent Jonathan Beale. Kyiv is now able to successfully intercept the vast majority of Russian long-range drones and missiles before they can hit their targets. “Embracing innovation and technology is giving Ukraine an advantage”, with “software that tracks every glide bomb, missile and drone launched by Russia” being “at the heart” of its air defences.

While the “intensity” of air attacks “continues to increase”, Russian military expert Nikolai Mitrokhine told Le Monde, both sides are using different tactics. Russia carries out occasional but massive strikes to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences. It “sometimes fires nearly 1,000 drones a day – as was the case on 24 March – while Ukraine launches almost nightly attacks, between 250 and 400 drones”.

What weapons do they have?

Ukraine has been producing long- and medium-range FP-1 and FP-2 drones – known as “Drakosha” or “little dragons” – at scale and at speed at a cost of about €50,000 each. It has been “pouring resources” into “middle strikes” that target Russian air defences and military logistics as far as 180km (112 miles) behind the front line, said Reuters. These strikes cannot “turn the tide against Russia” alone, but are “having an additional impact by facilitating longer-range drone strikes that are damaging Russian oil infrastructure”.

And while Ukraine still relies on expensive US-made Patriot missiles to take down Russian ballistic missiles, cheap interceptor drones, such as the P1-SUN, are proving most effective in defending Ukraine’s cities from aerial attack. They are 3D-printed and cost just $1,000 (£750); more than 1,000 are produced every day by Ukraine.

They can, however, do little to stop Russian glide bombs. These are Soviet-era munitions fitted with cheap guidance kits that turn so-called “dumb” bombs into precision weapons. They can be launched from well inside Russian airspace and there is no reliable way to stop them. “For three years, they have been one of the most destructive weapons” used by Kremlin forces to level entire city blocks from Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia to Kherson, said The Telegraph.

Ukraine hit back last week, unveiling its first domestically produced glide bomb, named the Vyrivniuvach, or “Equaliser”.

How might this change the war?

The Equaliser is “one of the most significant additions to Ukraine’s home-grown arsenal since the war began”. It “could potentially accelerate the pace at which Russian forces are pushed back”, said Keir Giles, from the Chatham House think tank.

More generally, Ukraine’s long-range capabilities are “significantly changing the situation and, more broadly, the world’s perception of Russia’s war,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month.

“Fast-improving” Ukrainian drone capabilities are “hurting the invaders’ logistics behind the battlefield, and pounding oil infrastructure and military targets deeper inside Russia,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Having gained a tactical and technological edge” in the air, this summer will test whether Ukraine “can turn that slender advantage into a strategic turning point”.

The war in Ukraine is unwinnable and could bring down the Russian economy. That’s the emerging assessment among Russia’s power brokers, as Vladimir Putin faces mounting challenges on the battlefield and at home.

Kremlin propagandists may still be “projecting confidence about the outcome of the war”, said Igor Gretskiy, of the Estonian-based International Centre for Defence and Security, but there’s been “a marked shift in mood” among Russia’s political and business elites. It’s no longer their “default assumption” that Russia will achieve its objectives.

What did the commentators say?

Setbacks have been mounting on several fronts, said Gretskiy. “First, the cracks in the Russian economy became impossible to ignore”, with the federal budget “deeply out of balance” and the deficit at the end of April nearly double what was planned for the whole of 2026.

“In the most serious sign of internal division” since Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, senior Russian government officials have warned Putin that spending on the war “is on an unaffordable path”, said Bloomberg.

Then there is the military situation itself. Ukrainian drone attacks are causing severe disruption to Russia’s logistical networks and supply lines to the front, and long-range strikes have hit Russian oil-production infrastructure and even threatened Moscow. The Russian army is no longer able to grind out incremental capture of Ukrainian territory, and one million of its soldiers are thought to have been killed or wounded since hostilities began.

We’re in a situation where “the capabilities of both sides are comparable”, said Russian political scientist Vasily Kashin on Russia in Global Affairs. “Historically, such wars have only extremely rarely resulted in the complete destruction of one side.” Russia can have no hope “of annexing new large Ukrainian territories” when “it lacks the capacity to sustainably control and manage” them, and its goal of eliminating the Kyiv regime is “fundamentally unattainable at this stage”. The publication of such a damning analysis is “a further sign of growing dissent at the top of Russia’s political establishment”, said Catherine Belton, Russia reporter for The Washington Post.

“Sustaining the war machine” is also “eroding” the president’s “social base”, said anti-Putin activist Alexey Sakhnin in Jacobin. A recent poll by Moscow’s independent Levada Center suggests that 62% of Russians favour peace talks with Ukraine, with only 27% expressing support for continuing the war.

What next?

There are parliamentary elections in September, so the Kremlin will want to ensure that “increasingly evident war fatigue” doesn’t “affect the cohesion” of Putin’s system”, said exiled Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza in The Washington Post last week.

But if events continue to turn against him, Putin may feel he has not choice but to roll the dice and go for broke, Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Foundation told The Post’s Belton: “To a great degree, escalation is the only way to respond to a situation which you can’t control.”

“Suddenly, say those who live there, the mood in Moscow feels very different,” said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. Ever since Ukraine’s counteroffensive stalled in 2023, Russia’s capital had “exuded confidence. Its residents could either bathe in the patriotic glory of war or ignore it altogether”. But lately, “bombast” has given way to fear, and to a longing for the conflict to end; and this feeling became more acute this month, when Moscow and its wider region came under fire from a barrage of Ukrainian drones.

It was “one of the most sustained aerial attacks of the conflict” so far. Three people were killed; all four of Moscow’s airports had to close; an oil refinery and residential buildings were hit. “Muscovites listening to drones buzz overhead and air defences firing into the night” were given a “glimpse of life in Kyiv – and they did not like it”.

‘Completely unravelling’

Events have not been in the Kremlin’s favour lately, said the Financial Times. Ukraine has upped its use of long-range drones to target energy and military facilities deep in Russia. On the front line, Russia is “scratching out meagre territorial gains at a devastating human cost”: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently asserted that it is “losing 15,000-20,000 soldiers a month. Not injured. Dead.”

The Russian economy, meanwhile, is ailing: some analysts reckon that inflation is running well above the official 5.6%; and interest rates are at a punishing 14.5%. Vladimir Putin has tried to bury bad news by tightening state control over the internet, said Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic. Even so, videos have increasingly been circulating in which Russians express “shock at their capital’s vulnerability”. His long-standing narrative, that the conflict in Ukraine is a “special military operation” that needn’t trouble Russia’s elites or middle classes, is “completely unravelling”.

‘Most challenging period’

Putin’s calculus on the war in Ukraine has not changed, said Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker in The Guardian. He remains determined to “press on” in the (surely misguided) belief that Moscow can capture the whole of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region by the end of the year. Such “bravado”, however, is doing little to ease the disquiet inside Russia; and speculation is growing that Putin’s regime could be toppled from within.

There have been reports that Sergei Shoigu, the former defence minister, could emerge as a threat to his former boss’s grip on power. The likelihood of an imminent Kremlin coup may be remote; but there’s no doubt that, at 73, Putin is entering “the most challenging period of his long rule”.

After decades of maintaining steady numbers of American service members at sites across Eastern Europe, the United States has begun quietly shifting where and how it deploys troops along Russia’s doorstep. This month, the Pentagon “abruptly” halted an already underway deployment of some 4,000 soldiers to Poland as “part of a larger troop reduction,” fueled in part by President Donald Trump’s “anger over Europe’s refusal to aid in the war with Iran,” said The Washington Post. Similar reductions and withdrawals have been ordered for other American military assets in the region, and White House figures are defending the moves as part of Trump’s America First ethos.

‘Growing rift’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “last-minute decision” to pause the planned Poland deployment took Pentagon officials and European allies “by surprise,” said Politico. It is the latest instance of an “abrupt personnel move” that has “blindsided both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Pentagon has largely employed the easier process of canceling deployments “as opposed to yanking forces already stationed there,” The Associated Press said. In addition to nixing the planned Polish deployment, Hegseth’s orders also “led to the cancellation of an upcoming deployment to Germany of a battalion trained in firing long-range rockets and missiles.” Hegseth “scrapping plans” for a “long-range fires battalion to be stationed in Europe,” marks a “significant loss for the continent,” said the Post.

The change in troop levels comes as Trump has “repeatedly criticized NATO countries for not participating in the Iran war,” said CNN. Trump has also lashed out at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has said the U.S. is “being ‘humiliated’ by Iran.” The move “reflects a growing rift between the administration and traditional European allies” that has been exacerbated by a “lack of support for the Iran conflict,” the AP said.

‘Overreacting’

Changing the Poland deployment was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision,” said the Pentagon to the Post. However, the military declined to “provide clarification on when the process started and when the order to depart was given,” the outlet said. Pressed on the changes, Vice President JD Vance also downplayed their significance. “We're not talking about pulling every single American troop out ⁠of Europe,” said Vance on ABC News Tuesday. The move merely shifts “some resources around in a way that maximizes ​American security,” and “frankly, a lot of the European media is overreacting to this.”

Polish lawmakers visiting Washington this week “welcomed U.S. statements clarifying” that the troop drawdown was a “temporary measure,” said the Post. Warsaw has also “lobbied to host some of the U.S. troops set to be withdrawn from Germany,” using the argument that “Poland already has the infrastructure needed to accommodate additional American forces,” said Polish broadcaster TVP World.

For now, the White House’s “broader strategy remains unclear,” said Politico. The upcoming German withdrawal is “still in the planning stages.” While it would be a “relatively minor drawdown of the 38,000 U.S. troops in the country,” it also signals to European allies that “they could pay a price for publicly disagreeing with the White House. “

Russian forces last month lost more territory to Ukraine than they were able to capture. The first of such occurrences in nearly two years, this marks an ignominious milestone and potential turning point in Moscow’s years-long invasion effort. At the same time, Russia is losing soldiers faster than it can recruit and deploy them. While the Ukraine front remains an active war zone that has left deep scars on both nations, there is a growing sense among observers that momentum has shifted in Kyiv’s favor.

What did the commentators say?

Russia’s conspicuously “diminished” Victory Day parade this month “signaled its vulnerability,” said The Economist. That sentiment was an “accurate reflection of Russia’s battlefield setbacks,” as well as the country’s “fear of the growing effectiveness of Ukraine’s long-range strikes.”

Russia’s weakened position can be traced to a confluence of three factors, said The Economist, citing research from the Institute for the Study of War: Ukrainian “ground counter-attacks and mid-range strikes,” the end of Russia’s “illicit use of Starlink terminals in Ukraine” and the Kremlin’s “paranoid throttling of the Telegram messaging app at home.” At the same time, Russia’s “exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands” have run “completely counter to battlefield reality,” said the Institute.

May marks the fifth consecutive month in which Russia has lost “more soldiers than it can replace,” said National Security Journal. Ahead of an expected fifth summer of violence, Russia’s invasion “continues to falter” as the “fortunes of the war” seem to be “trending less and less in Russia’s favor.” Ukraine’s military technological advances have “not been the only key element” in Kyiv’s “recent battlefield gains.” Rather, they come amid Russia’s “growing command-and-control problems within its own military.”

Communications failures “contributed significantly to Russia’s problems” on the battlefield, said the Atlantic Council. After SpaceX “cut the Russian army’s illicit access to the satellite-based Starlink system” this spring, some Russian commanders were “forced to rely on inaccurate maps” showing “exaggerated gains.” In other cases, clusters of Russian troops were deployed “without adequate communication tools or coordination,” leaving them “highly vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks.”

All this comes as the public mood within Russia is “souring,” said Alexander Baunov at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. The Putin government has “unceremoniously violated” the terms of its social trade-off offered to the public — that “you can live outside of the war, but you cannot be against it” — and now “society is angry.” Russian authorities have also banned the use of “popular foreign messaging apps” because they are “nontransparent” and boosted the “homegrown” Max app as an alternative. But the “implication” of Max’s transparency “has not gone unnoticed, and people feel their privacy has been rudely invaded.”

Russians “increasingly chafe” at the “restrictions on their liberties” imposed “in pursuit of a battlefield victory that now appears to be unattainable,” said Noah Rothman at the National Review. Moscow lacks “freedom of action” in the theater of battle and has “lost the ability to dictate the tempo of events,” while its economy contracts “following several years of war-driven growth.”

What next?

The Russian military’s “recent communications problems” are “unlikely to persist in their current form indefinitely,” said the Atlantic Council. Moscow has already explored a “range of alternatives, including relay drones and satellite links.” But it will probably take a “number of years for the Russian military to replicate the same level of efficiency previously provided by Starlink.”

Russia’s flagging battlefield progress is a problem for Putin, who has “insisted that Russia’s victory in the war is inevitable,” said CNN. That promise has “always been flawed,” given how “slow and incredibly costly the Russian advances have been.” Still, the momentum shift of late “feels like an inflection point in the war,” said Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, to The Economist. “If the Russians have nothing to show for their efforts, I would not be surprised if in some places things start crumbling.”

Just days after he waved goodbye to Donald Trump, Xi Jinping is hosting another world leader, a man the famously opaque Chinese leader has described as his “best friend”.

Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing today for the two-day summit, their second in less than a year and their 40th, at least, overall. Their “carefully cultivated friendship” is defined by “highly personal rituals” involving vodka, lakeside tea, sports events and even making pancakes, said the South China Morning Post.

It’s obvious what a war-fatigued and internationally isolated Russia seeks from China, on whom it relies for drones and economic support. But it’s less obvious what the now far more powerful China wants from its unstable neighbour.

What did the commentators say?

The timing of Putin’s visit, days after Trump’s, “sends an unmistakable signal”, said The Economist. Xi is emphasising that even if he can “stabilise relations” with the US, it won’t “come at the expense of his ‘no limits’ partnership” with Putin. Those ties could “grow deeper yet” because of the US war in the Middle East. Xi and Putin could share intelligence about Trump’s military action against Venezuela and Iran, whom both count as allies.

Xi could “exploit his newfound leverage” – the balance of power has “shifted dramatically” since Russia’s full-scale invasion – to “secure more sensitive military technology and know-how”. China now produces most of its own weapons, many based on Russian designs; it could now seek “more high-end assistance” in nuclear and ballistic missile areas. Russia is “thought to have been sharing” drone data and expertise garnered from its experience in Ukraine.

A “key aim” for China is “more reliable and sustainable energy supplies”, said Deutsche Welle. China is concerned about dependence on seaborne imports, which account for about 90% of its oil. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the global disruption to supplies make Russian oil a “more attractive” prospect, and Western sanctions on Russian exports mean China can “secure Russian energy at a discount”.

“China and Russia are like a couple in the same bed with different dreams,” said Claus Soong of the Mercator Institute for China Studies. A weakened Russia, or even the collapse of Putin’s regime, would “pose immediate strategic risks for Beijing”. There are signs of cooling since the unlimited friendship they proclaimed in 2022, before Russia invaded Ukraine, but “Russia still has more to offer” than Europe.

Any deals will likely be on Chinese terms, Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center think tank, told the BBC. “Russia is fully in China’s pocket, and China can dictate the terms.”

But despite the asymmetry of power, the pair share vital interests – security along their 2,670-mile (4,300km) border, and China’s market for Russia’s oil, gas and other materials, said Ankur Shah, BBC Global China Unit editor. Russia’s war in Ukraine is also an “asset to Beijing as it considers its options for a potential invasion of Taiwan”. Russia still has some niche military technologies it can sell. But Moscow’s “big advantage” is “its ability to stand its ground”. Russia “may be the junior partner, but it’s also a proud one”.

What next?

Xi’s meeting with Trump, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and cooperation across energy, trade and security are all expected to be part of the discussions tomorrow, said CNN’s senior China reporter, Simone McCarthy.

Both Beijing and Moscow are “weighing up whether to play any role in helping to end a US-Iran conflict”. This could “potentially win each goodwill” with the US, but both also want to use Trump’s actions to “advance their own vision of a world that’s not dominated by American power”.

Any concrete agreements, however, are “unlikely to be made public”, said The Economist. “As during previous visits, announcements are likely to be broad in scope but thin on detail.”

Ukraine in recent months has slowed Russia’s invasion to a near-halt and forced Moscow to ramp up its own security measures. Kyiv’s homegrown drone technology and techniques are now in demand around the world. These accomplishments have come despite diminished U.S. support for Ukraine’s warfighting efforts.

What did the commentators say?

The fight against Russia is “going better than you think,” said Vox. Kyiv still relies on the “fickle U.S. government” for Patriot missiles and battlefield intelligence, but Ukrainian leaders have “more confidence” in their ability to withstand the invasion than they did a few months ago. The “Ukraine line is not really in danger of breaking” even though Russia has “sustained enormous casualties” in attempts to advance, military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady said to the outlet. Ukraine might not be winning the war at this point, said Vox, but it “doesn’t appear to be losing.” Its leaders now believe Ukraine “no longer needs the United States as much” as it did early in the war, said The New York Times.

Ukraine “has finally given up” on President Donald Trump, Phillips Payson O’Brien said at The Atlantic. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “aggressively seeking new diplomatic and military partners” and has sent drones to strike Russian oil facilities despite U.S. warnings against doing so. American leaders have “reduced what little weaponry” they were sending to Ukraine and pressured Zelenskyy to cede territory in exchange for peace. But Ukraine’s ability to adapt with reduced American support “has been startling.”

It is “significant” that Ukraine is “reversing the trend” of Russia’s progress in the war, The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. One sign: Russian leader Vladimir Putin scaled back his country’s usual Victory Day parade in early May out of apparent fears of a Ukrainian drone strike. It is clear the “tide may be turning against Russia” after four years of war. That is an opportunity for the U.S. to “increase support for Ukraine so it can keep the pressure on Russia” and bring the struggle to an end.

The war will not end unless Ukraine inflicts a “decisive defeat” on Russia that poses a “direct threat to Putin’s regime,” Andrew A. Michta said at 19FortyFive. Putin’s military is “well positioned to continue” thanks to the backing of China’s industrial might and money flowing in from oil sales. Trump’s pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate is a “signal to Moscow that its strategy is working.”

What next?

The U.S. is now looking to Ukraine for help in the war against Iran. The two sides this month signed an agreement to potentially “export military technology to the U.S.” and manufacture Ukranian-designed drones in the United States, said CBS News. Kyiv has “sent drone interceptors and pilots to the Middle East” to defend Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates against Iranian attacks. Ukraine is a “hub for drone innovation,” said the Financial Times. That is expertise the U.S. now needs.

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines in the country are becoming increasingly scarce, said The Australian. The costs of some medicines “have risen by 400%”, and antidepressants and sleeping pills are reportedly being “dispensed without prescriptions”.

This is not unique to the Middle East, as other countries around the world face the threat of conflict, or suffer under pressures of economic and political repression. As mental health crises and resources continue to stretch, many fear the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid pandemic.

A ‘kind of coma’

Some pharmacists in Iran have called the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation”, said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues”.

Access to the country’s black market has also been damaged since the start of the war. Built on sanctions, import shortages and “hoarding” by middlemen, the black market is “not new”. But with the joint threat of war and internet shutdown, the “shadow supply chain” has been significantly “disrupted”. As the war continues, Iran is stuck in a “kind of coma, caught between economic collapse and the dream of a better future”.

The rise in antidepressant use is part of a broader system to “doctrinise control of Iranians’ minds and bodies”, said Atlantic Council. Observers from abroad have “overlooked the concerted regime strategy to deliberately engineer this state of depression as a suppression mechanism”. By outlawing cultural events such as Valentine’s Day, “Chaharshanbe Suri (the festival of fire)” and “Shabeh Yalda (winter solstice)”, the regime has arguably “promoted gloom and hopelessness to the extent that citizens become paralysed and incapable of challenging the political status quo”.

Like Iran, Lebanon has been struck by the ongoing conflict, and has appeared to follow a similar pattern of “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills”, said Y Net News. Though no official data has been released, news outlet Al-Akhbar, which has ties to Hezbollah, claimed that the “demand for sedatives had jumped by 300% since the fighting began”, said Y Net. This figure, though unverified, “points to a population under mounting psychological strain”.

Global impact

And in Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union”, said The Guardian. As a growing mental health crisis “envelops the island”, many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the US-imposed oil blockade, and still reeling from years of economic decline.

Cuba is stuck in a vicious cycle, as the economy shrinks – GDP has “contracted by 17% since 2019” – it means state pharmacies lie “empty”, while demand for their services increases. People are “leaving in large numbers”, which exacerbates the cycle further. In the last five years, “up to 20% of the population” has emigrated, which has in turn added to the “psychological load on those who chose (or were forced) to remain”.

In its ongoing campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The country has registered “record sales” of the medications every year since 2020. Last year’s total “nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption” from 2019. In the same year, figures from Russian consultancy DSM show that after peace negotiations were “unsuccessfully reinitiated” in 2024, sales of antidepressants grew 36%. It appears the war, with its subsequent health crises, has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

The seemingly limitless budgets and bottomless demand for content of the streaming television era have allowed studios to dramatize both long-ago and recent disasters. These might never have gotten the Hollywood treatment a generation ago, ushering in a little-noticed golden age of disaster television headlined by the following eight series.

‘Tsunami: The Aftermath’ (2006)

The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was by far the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century, and one of the worst in recorded history, killing more than 227,000 people. Much less well-known than the 2012 film “The Impossible,” HBO Max’s “Tsunami: The Aftermath” is gripping viewing.

Ian Carter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a tourist in Thailand who searches for his missing wife and daughter after the wave strikes, while Tim Roth plays Nick Fraser, a journalist reporting on the almost unfathomable human loss who begins to wonder why his bosses want information about Westerners but not about the much more widespread local casualties and devastation. The “first-rate cast” also includes Toni Collette and a pre-Downton Abbey Hugh Bonneville. The series depicts the aftermath of the disaster, showing that “in death, human lives develop very different values to different communities,” said Virginian Heffernan at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Chernobyl’ (2019)

HBO’s riveting, five-part dramatization of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster richly deserved its 10 Emmy Awards. Jared Harris is superb as Soviet nuclear scientist Valery Legasov, who helps convince apparatchik Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) that the situation is sufficiently grave that it can’t be covered up.

The series recreates ordinary Soviet life from the period with painstaking detail and spares no one and nothing in its criticisms of what led to the disaster and how it was handled. The superb ensemble includes Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley) as the wife of a firefighter mortally wounded in the initial hours of the disaster and the fictional Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) as a scientist who warns political leaders about the consequences of inaction. Chernobyl remains, thankfully, history’s worst nuclear disaster. Though the series takes many creative liberties with history, it “gets a basic truth right — that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering or abysmal management and training,” said Henry Fountain at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Five Days at Memorial’ (2022)

Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,833 people in August 2005, remains one of the most under-dramatized disasters in memory. Perhaps audiences aren’t ready to confront it yet, much like the Covid-19 pandemic that remains without a significant dramatization.

One exception is the Apple TV+ drama “Five Days at Memorial,” which recreates the events at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga), Karen Wynn (Adepero Oduye), and Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones) give viewers the perspective of a doctor, a nurse and an administrator at the hospital, which quickly loses power and access to clean water as the disaster gathers momentum. Framed by a post-hurricane investigation into the deaths of 45 patients at the hospital, the eight-part series is a “gripping affair, an engrossing medical thriller that doubles as a powerful indictment of government and corporate inaction and outright neglect,” said Manuel Betancourt at A.V. Club. (Apple TV+)

‘High Water’ (2023)

Disasters: They happen everywhere! In July 1997, parts of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic were struck by catastrophic river flooding that left more than 100 people dead. “High Water” tells the story of the Polish city of Wrocław, the country’s third largest city, which was completely inundated by floodwaters.

Fictional hydrologist Jasmina Tremer (Agnieszka Zulewska) is stuck with the unenviable task of convincing the provincial bureaucrat Jakub (Tomasz Schuchardt) and other officials that disaster is imminent, especially given that they all seem more focused on ensuring a successful visit from the Pope than on preventing tragedy. The series takes its time getting to the main event, building tension and sympathy for its characters before plunging them into ruin. A “character-driven ensemble” carries the show that despite the heavy subject matter, “doesn’t slip into the realm of soapy drama,” said Greg Wheeler at The Review Geek. (Netflix)

‘The Days’ (2023)

No less harrowing than “Chernobyl” is “The Days,” an eight-part dramatization of the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear disaster following the catastrophic 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Unlike its better-known counterpart, “The Days” is a much more faithful rendition of events, beginning with the earthquake-driven tsunami that inundated the plant and knocked its power offline.

The series is told from three perspectives, including the fictional Prime Minister Shinji Azuma (Fumiyo Kohinata), the power plant’s courageous manager, Yoshida (Koji Yakusho), and several workers who risked their lives to prevent the worst-case scenario from taking shape. The series takes “great pains to include every relevant number, fluctuating dial and horrifying factoid,” said Jonathon Wilson at Ready Steady Cut, and its “ability to ratchet up tension through its rapidly worsening disasters and complexifying circumstances is often profound.” (Netflix)

‘La Palma’ (2024)

The only show on our list that isn’t based on a true story is the Norwegian series “La Palma,” which depicts a mega-tsunami triggered by the eruption and collapse of a volcano in the Canary Islands. Loosely based on a controversial hypothesis, the show is built on familiar but very well-executed beats.

Fredrik (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), his wife, Jennifer (Ingrid Bolso Berdal), and their children, Tobias (Bernard Storm Lager) and Sara (Alma Gunther), are tourists caught up in the disaster, while Marie (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) and Haukur (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) are scientists who try and fail to warn the authorities that disaster is about to strike. Norway has quietly produced some of the best disaster films of the century, including 2015’s “The Wave,” and “La Palma” fits squarely in that tradition. The “relatively small main cast and a lack of melodrama make the show worth a watch,” said Joel Keller at Decider. (Netflix)

‘Every Minute Counts’ (2024-2025)

On the morning of September 19, 1985, a massive earthquake struck the megalopolis of Mexico City, killing about 10,000 people and leveling large swathes of the city. We see the tragedy through the eyes of several ordinary people, including Ángel Zambrano (Osvaldo Benavides), an obstetrician who helped evacuate dozens of newborn babies from a collapsing hospital, a TV reporter, Camila (Maya Zapata), and Chuy (Olaff Herrera) her cameraman.

A show that “can be exhausting to watch,” it is also an indictment of the authoritarian regime that governed Mexico at the time, depicting the consequences of “decades of government corruption that led to unenforced building codes,” said Melissa Camacho at Common Sense Media. “Every Minute Counts” is also the only listed series that was granted a second season, which was released in September 2025 and follows the surviving protagonists as the post-earthquake hours take shape. (Prime Video)

Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Vladimir Putin has led the Russian Federation as one of the most successful authoritarians on Earth. But more than four years after launching an all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president synonymous with Moscow’s kleptocratic rule finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Russia is now roiled by rumors of organized unrest with months to go before parliamentary elections, while Putin himself faces allegations of extreme isolation and a weakening grip on power.

What did the commentators say?

There is a sense of “mounting unease within the Kremlin” as it grapples with domestic and economic problems plus “increasing signs of dissent and setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine,” said CNN, citing a report from a European intelligence agency. The Kremlin has “dramatically increased” Putin’s security, even installing surveillance systems “in the homes of close staffers” in measures “prompted by a wave of assassinations of top Russian military figures and fears of a coup.” Putin is “increasingly concerned” about an alleged “plot by members of the Russian political elite to topple him, or even assassinate him with drones,” said The Times. The president and his family have “stopped visiting their luxury residences” and Putin is spending “weeks at a time in bunkers.”

The report focuses on “growing internal tensions” between Putin and former Defense Minister and current Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, said the Kyiv Post. Considered a “potential coup risk” for his “continued influence within the military leadership,” Shoigu has not “personally” been linked with hard evidence to “any wrongdoing.” The arrest this past March of one of Shoigu’s deputies was “presented in the report” as a “sign of weakening informal protections among the elite” that has contributed to the tensions.

Putin’s slipping power is “not only about falling approval ratings,” said The Economist. Russia’s future is “no longer discussed” in terms of what Putin “will decide” but as “something that will unfold independently of him — and possibly already without him.” This waning authority comes from a “confluence” of factors, including rising wartime costs and a “growing demand for rules among elites who have been forced back into Russia, along with their capital.” Shifting geopolitical winds and the collapse of Russia’s previous “social contract,” in which the state “stayed out of people’s private lives while citizens stayed out of politics,” have created a “situation which in chess is known as a Zugzwang: when every move worsens the position.”

This isn’t to say that “revolution is imminent” or that the 73-year-old Putin “will be sidelined soon,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, the “change in mood is remarkable” compared to “just last December,” when Russia was “buoyed by hopes” of a Moscow-friendly, Trump-negotiated ceasefire with Ukraine.

Changes in national mood notwithstanding, the “sudden spate” of coup-oriented reporting stemming from the “conveniently anonymous ‘European intelligence agency’” looks “suspiciously more like a psyop meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite than a serious assessment,” said The Spectator. Europe has a “desperate appetite” for a “deus ex machina, for some miraculous end to the Ukraine war,” and a coup to oust Putin “certainly fits the bill.” Still, this would “hardly be the first time” intelligence services “succumbed to the temptation to provide their masters with what they want, not need, to hear.”

What next?

For the time being, Moscow “understands that there could be serious discontent ahead” and has accordingly “decided to allow low-level discontent to manifest itself,” said former Putin adviser Marat Gelman at the Journal. As things stand, Putin has “enough resources to crush any civil revolt.”

“In Russia, they say that things don’t happen fast, but when they happen, they happen fast,” former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said to the Journal. While he “wouldn’t have said it a year or two ago,” civic revolt is “possible now.”

What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday presided over the “most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years,” Reuters said. Afterward, he told reporters he thought the Ukraine war was “coming to an end.” President Donald Trump last week said Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed to exchange 1,000 war prisoners and pause the fighting through Monday to mark the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Who said what

Russia’s “markedly pared down” Victory Day parade “went forward amid veiled threats from Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe said. Zelenskyy “issued a mocking statement” beforehand “saying he was authorizing the Kremlin parade to be held” free from attacks. If Putin’s parade was “subdued” because he “feared a long-range Ukrainian drone strike” in Red Square. This is “one more sign that the tide may be turning against Russia after four long years of death,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial.

What next?

Russia’s Ukraine offensive “has slowed to a crawl” and its “challenges on the battlefield complicate the narrative of imminent victory” Putin is “selling” Trump to convince him Kyiv needs to cede land in U.S. peace talks, The New York Times said. At its current rate, Moscow would need “more than three decades to seize full control of the Donbas.”

One of the world’s biggest and most prestigious art events has opened mired in political controversy, resignations and boycotts over the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, which takes place every two years, began on Tuesday “under grey clouds and rain showers”, reflecting an atmosphere dominated by “political tension, parties and protest”, said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian.

What’s the cause?

The festival had been thrown into turmoil even before it formally opened. Last week, the entire five-person biennale jury resigned over the decision to allow Russia to participate – they previously stated they would not give awards to artists from countries whose leaders were facing charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Russia did not show in the past two editions because of the outcry over its war in Ukraine, but was allowed to reopen its pavilion this year in what The New York Times called a “soft-power opportunity” for the Kremlin.

The Biennale argued it is “an open institution” that “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of art”, but its decision sparked outrage from the Italian government – with Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli boycotting the opening – and the European Commission, which has threatened to terminate or suspend its €2 million (£1.73 million) grant for the exhibition.

Why the change in stance?

In letters seen by the Financial Times, the commission warned Russia’s participation would violate a ban on “providing services” to the Kremlin, as the pavilion is owned by Vladimir Putin’s government.

“By not respecting EU sanctions, Biennale has called into question its obligation to ensure respect of EU values,” the Commission’s agency for culture wrote.

With the threat of further protests and boycotts ahead of the public opening on Saturday, organisers finally bowed to pressure and agreed to close the Russian pavilion to the public.

Tetyana Berezhna, a Ukrainian culture minister, told The Guardian that not opening Russia's pavilion to the public was a “meaningful step” but that the country’s “symbolic presence” was still powerful.

“Cultural platforms shape global perception,” she said. “They define what is considered acceptable and whose voices are amplified. In this context, every form of representation matters.”

What about Israel?

There have also been protests aimed at Israel’s entry. It shuttered its pavilion in 2024 amid growing condemnation of its occupation of Gaza, with the building guarded by military personnel.

This year it is back, but “if anything, Israel’s presence has proved even more divisive” than Russia’s, said The Telegraph’s chief art critic Alastair Sooke.

Last autumn, an activist collective, Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), organised a letter demanding the exclusion of Israel that was signed by almost 220 artists, curators and “art workers” involved in this year’s show. It has invited people to stand “in solidarity” against what it calls a “genocidal state” perpetrating “Zionist atrocities” in Palestine and plans to protest the participation of Israel this Friday.

Although it did not name specific names, the jury’s decision not to award artists from countries whose leaders are facing charges by the ICC includes Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Vladimir Putin.

The Israeli foreign ministry responded to the statement, saying: “The political jury has transformed the Biennale from an open artistic space of free, boundless ideas into a spectacle of false, anti-Israeli political indoctrination.”

“For some, the jury’s resignation was predictable”, said Sooke, yet “for those on the other side of the debate, excluding any country from the Biennale smacks of censorship”.

“Their decision discriminated against me on a racial basis,” said the Romanian-born Israeli sculptor Belu-Simion Fainaru, who’s representing Israel. “I’m an artist and have equal rights, and I can’t be judged by belonging to a country or a race. I should just be judged on the quality and message of my art.”

Sooke said arguments over whether or not artists should be accountable for the actions of their state or country have highlighted “the creakiness of the Biennale’s national pavilion system”, one that seems outdated and “stymied by geopolitics, given the cosmopolitan nature of contemporary art”.

Russia’s Africa Corps is reeling after an alliance of separatist and jihadist groups in Mali launched a series of attacks on the country’s Putin-backed junta government in late April. Is this merely an instance of renewed violence in a country that has seen multiple coups this century? Or does the bruising rebuke to a feared Russian expeditionary force mark a potential crisis for one of West Africa’s most powerful and demanding benefactors?

‘Limits of Moscow’s reach and military might’

The “series of reversals” experienced by Mali’s “Moscow-backed military government” has “dented Russia’s image as a self-styled security guarantor in Africa,” said Reuters. The recent violence also “threatens” Moscow’s “strategic and economic interests ​on the continent.”

The attacks across Mali by “al Qaeda-linked rebels and mostly-Muslim Tuareg tribesmen” mark a “turning point in Moscow’s influence in West Africa,” said Fox News. Russia has been “grabbing Mali’s precious minerals, including gold,” while promising to “protect the country against the rebels.” The “wave of coordinated, surprise attacks” by Malian rebels has “exposed the limits of Moscow’s reach and military might in the impoverished West African state,” said The Guardian.

In recent years, Mali had “drastically pivoted toward Russia” as the junta pushed out Western governmental support, said The New York Times. Russia has dispatched “thousands” of fighters from its Africa Corps, the military intelligence-run force born from the infamous mercenary Wagner Group that “provides security support to several African governments” in exchange for payment or “lucrative contracts for access to resources.” Mali is part of a chain of African nations, including Burkina Faso and Niger, that Moscow has “worked hard to cultivate” for both “geopolitical clout and access to mineral wealth,” said Irina Filatova, an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, to Reuters.

Withdrawing from Malian sites during the recent attacks “punctures the claim that Moscow could deliver where France and other Western allies could not,” particularly in the town of Kidal, which had “come to symbolize Russia’s promise” of stability, said Bloomberg. By “negotiating themselves out of Kidal” and “leaving their Malian counterparts behind,” Russia “doesn’t give a good impression of them as security partners,” Nina Wilén, the director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, said to the outlet.

Insurgents participating in the past week’s attacks were not expecting to “seize and control cities,” said a “security source” to La Agence France-Presse, per France 24. The goal instead was to “carry out coordinated actions in order to at least capture Kidal, which is a rather powerful symbol.”

‘Reputational damage’

The Africa Corps has “really lost credibility” in the region, said Ulf Laessing, the West Africa program lead at the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung think tank, to Al Jazeera. Putin’s forces will “struggle to attract new clients” because they “just didn’t do their job — it’s reputational damage, what has happened.”

Russia’s potential “collapse” in Mali “threatens the region” but it also presents Washington an “opportunity to reassert the control it had foolishly relinquished,” said Hudson Institute Fellow Zineb Riboua at The Washington Post. African nations once tight with Moscow “have seen what Russian reliability looks like.” As those bonds are increasingly called into question, the U.S. should “seek to make that reversal permanent.”

‘Turn on, tune in, cash out … the US right used to fear psychedelics. Now it wants to sell them.’

Kojo Koram at The Guardian

Trump “signed a new presidential executive order to accelerate mainstream access to medical treatment based on psychedelic drugs,” but “this executive order has not come out of the blue,” says Kojo Koram. Long “caricatured as a marker of countercultural decadence, psychedelics have been rebranded by recent clinical research as potentially transformative mental-health treatments.” It’s a “worldview that has found a comfortable new home” in an “administration that is, against all odds, transforming America’s relationship with drugs.”

Read more

‘How Putin and Zelenskyy view the war in Iran’

Sudarsan Raghavan at The New Yorker

Nearly “two months into Iran’s war, its ripple effects are being felt around the world,” says Sudarsan Raghavan. The “war is also having a less visible, yet potentially more consequential, impact on some of the world’s other conflicts and crises.” The war in Ukraine is “increasingly connected to the Middle East conflict.” It is “in Russia’s favor to prolong the war in Iran” because the “longer it lasts, the longer Washington’s attention is not on Ukraine.”

Read more

‘Could Ozempic save families from addiction and foster care?’

Naomi Schaefer Riley at The Boston Globe

GLP-1 drugs “like Ozempic and Wegovy are often called miraculous for their ability to promote weight loss, reduce the risk of diabetes and even lower the likelihood of dementia,” says Naomi Schaefer Riley. But “what if they can help combat drug and alcohol addiction by tempering cravings and ultimately prevent parents from losing their children to foster care?” This “class of drugs has wide-ranging health benefits and few side effects compared to other medically assisted treatments.”

Read more

‘Religions all over the world are being blasphemed and perverted’

Janice Kennedy at the Toronto Star

Religion is “having a moment. And not in a good way,” says Janice Kennedy. No “matter its name, religion usually embraces three elements: faith in a divinity, rites and rituals honoring that faith and an inviolable moral code.” But this is “abased and abused by con artists twisting religion to fit insufferable egos and despicable political ends.” Committing “terrible deeds in the name of an almighty god is abhorrent to all people of good will.”

Read more

What happened

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Russia on Monday morning after a weekend of diplomatic trips to Pakistan and Oman, but no direct talks with the United States. President Donald Trump on Saturday called off an announced trip to Islamabad by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, saying it would be a waste of time given Iran’s lack of commitment to meet with them.

Who said what

“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. With U.S.-Iran talks “derailed, at least for now,” The New York Times said, “Tehran and Washington are sinking into an awkward limbo of neither peace, nor war,” with each projecting confidence they can “outlast the other in a standoff with drastic stakes for the global economy.” Pakistani officials said “indirect talks” were ongoing even as they “scrambled to reignite” direct negotiations, The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump was “expected to hold a Situation Room meeting” on Monday after receiving an Iranian proposal to “reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war,” Axios said, “with nuclear negotiations postponed for a later stage.”

The Chernobyl disaster occurred when technicians at the power station, near Pripyat in the north of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, ran a test on reactor number four to simulate shutting it down during an electricity blackout. A combination of reactor design flaws and technician errors meant that it overheated, leading to a power surge, triggering an explosion.

The reactor's 192 tonnes of uranium fuel partially melted, destroying the reactor core. Graphite blocks inside caught fire, and the resulting explosion blew the reactor's 1,000-tonne concrete and steel lid into the air, then destroyed much of the turbine hall. Radioactive material spewed into the environment: iodine, strontium, caesium and some plutonium.

The World Nuclear Association says the disaster was caused by a “flawed” reactor design and lax safety – both consequences of “Cold War isolation”.

How did the authorities respond?

About 1,000 emergency workers and power station staff, largely untrained and poorly protected, were brought in during the first days of the accident to put out the fire. Soviet officials initially remained in denial; unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation and desperate to contain the bad publicity. But in early May, with the reactor fire still burning, and high radiation levels detected across Europe, the authorities moved to drastic action. A 30km exclusion zone was imposed. Bags of sand were dropped onto the reactor from the open doors of helicopters (analysts now think this did more harm than good).

When the fire finally stopped, men climbed onto the roof to clear radioactive debris. Many suffered from acute radiation sickness as a result. In total, at least 600,000 clear-up personnel (“liquidators”) from all over the Soviet Union were involved in the clean-up. During 1986, a huge concrete “sarcophagus” structure was built to confine the radioactive materials at the explosion site. This was largely successful; estimates suggest that at least 80% of the original radioactive material remains inside the reactor. (In 2017 a new structure was completed at a cost of £1.3 billion.)

What were the immediate effects?

The official death toll is just 31; two workers at the plant were killed that day. But in 2005, a UN report suggested a total of 4,000 people would eventually die because of radiation exposure. According to UN reports, 134 people, mostly plant workers and emergency workers, received a confirmed diagnosis of Acute Radiation Sickness.

Radiation destroys cell walls and other key molecular structures within the body. Symptoms can begin within one or two hours and may last for several months; they include vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, fever, dizziness, hair loss, and blood in vomit and stools.

The human cost of the disaster was documented by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist, who interviewed some 500 eyewitnesses for her 1997 book “Chernobyl Prayer”. One of the most harrowing stories concerns a woman who stayed at the bedside of her dying husband, a firefighter. She described watching his body decay, his skin crack, boils develop. When she touched him – against doctors' orders – his skin came away in her hands.

And the wider effects?

Chernobyl is one of only two nuclear accidents rated at the maximum severity on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan. The longer-term effects have been mind-boggling in scale. Some 350,000 people had to be evacuated; about 500 hectares of forest turned red and died; roughly 15 million hectares of land were contaminated.

At least 5% of the reactor's radioactive fuel is estimated to have been carried into the air over Ukraine, Belarus and Russia – and the rest of Europe. Over 20% of Belarus's land was affected. Radioactive clouds spread, causing panic as far away as Germany and Britain; millions of litres of milk were dumped; livestock was destroyed or banned from sale. Around 5,000 thyroid cancers have been linked to iodine contamination of milk supplies by the accident, 15 of them fatal.

Chernobyl is often described as the most expensive disaster in history, with an estimated cost of $180 billion (£133 billion) for Ukraine alone. By 2003, about 3.3 million Ukrainians were receiving benefits as Chernobyl “victims”.

What is in Chernobyl now?

The Chernobyl exclusion zone encompasses the 2,600 sq km area within the 30km radius. It is under military control, and public access is restricted to prevent contamination. Today, the zone is one of the most radioactively contaminated areas on Earth; the reactor is still smouldering. It draws significant scientific interest for the high levels of radiation exposure in the environment – and, until the war, was popular with disaster tourists. Due to the lack of human activity, it has become a thriving nature sanctuary, with some of the highest biodiversity and thickest forests in all Ukraine. European bison, golden eagles, lynx and elk inhabit the area.

How did the disaster affect nuclear policy?

It kickstarted a global push for stricter nuclear regulation. Governments were nervous because similar reactors were in use around the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN-affiliated agency, was tasked with improving international safety standards for reactor designs, and with coordinating long-term radiation monitoring. The agency does not have the power to enforce these rules, but the disaster motivated many countries to comply with regulations.

Politically, the effects were also very significant. Chernobyl destroyed public trust and exposed systemic failures within the USSR, particularly in Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev maintained the accident was a more important factor in the fall of the Soviet Union than his programmes of liberal reform. Oddly enough, at least one of Chernobyl's other reactors remained in use until 2000.

The EU has finally signed off a €90 billion (£78 billion) loan to Ukraine after Hungary dropped its veto. The loan – agreed in December but blocked for months by Hungary in a row over an oil pipeline – is “a question of our life, of surviving”, said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Without the money, his country was struggling to manufacture the number of weapons it was capable of producing, he told CNN.

“Ukraine really needs this,” said EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas. “It’s also a sign that Russia cannot outlast Ukraine.”

What did the commentators say?

“European officials had found ways” to get some funds to Ukraine during the delay but this no-interest loan provides “far more substantial financial support”, as Moscow’s full-scale invasion extends into a fifth year, said The New York Times. Ukraine will only need to repay the loan if a future peace deal includes Russia paying reparations.

Having finally secured the loan, Zelenskyy has renewed calls to restart peace talks with Vladimir Putin, said The Independent – although US mediators are currently “preoccupied with the conflict in Iran”.

A resumption of talks seems unlikely any time soon. Only a few weeks ago, the Russian president gathered key oligarchs behind closed doors and asked them to contribute financially to the war, said independent Russian news outlet The Bell. “We will keep fighting,” its sources reported Putin as saying. “We will push to the borders of Donbas.”

And it’s the question of Donbas that led to the most recent peace talks being “placed on hold”, said political scientist Samuel Charap and military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh in Foreign Affairs. Donald Trump’s administration had “centred the talks on a core bargain”: that Ukraine cede the roughly 20% of the Donbas region it still holds to Russia “in exchange for security commitments from the US and Europe”. This approach exaggerated “the significance of territory for Russia and the importance of Western assurances for Ukraine”. It also neglected to “address the key challenge in ending any war”: convincing each side that “its enemy will really commit to peace”.

What next?

A Kremlin spokesperson has been reported as saying Putin would only meet Zelenskyy “for the purpose of finalising agreements”, said The Guardian. Instead, Russia wants the US to send Trump’s delegates Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – who “have repeatedly listened to Putin’s maximalist demands” – to Moscow.

While the EU loan is “sorted”, there is now “another issue altogether”: Ukraine gaining membership of the EU, said Henry Foy in the Financial Times. Zelenskyy has long seen this as key to securing Ukraine’s long-term security and prosperity. “Belligerent public opposition” to the idea from outgoing Hungarian president Viktor Orbán had long “provided a useful shield for many other EU leaders to huddle behind” but, with his departure, “they will be forced to clarify their positions”.