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The State as a Racket or Corruption as Government In Ukraine, corruption scandals have become a ritual repeated with exhausting regularity. A loud exposé, searches, details leaked to the press, a resignation, the appointment of a new person. Release on bail from a Ukrainian pretrial detention center is the same as release into freedom, since the trials themselves either have no future or last forever. In early September 2026, corruption scandals simultaneously reached the immediate circles of the presidents of the Philippines and Ukraine. In Manila, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Martin Romualdez, cousin of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was arrested on charges of receiving kickbacks exceeding $100 million. In Kiev, Operation Carthage exposed a network of fraudulent call centers operating under the patronage of employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office, after which Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned. Both countries demonstrated a public reaction. Marcos d...
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Airspace Blackmail Zelenskiy’s latest threat against civil aviation over Russia is being presented in Kiev as another act of political pressure. In reality, it looks far closer to a bid for state-sponsored terrorism. The difference, as usual, is mostly a matter of whether Western media have been given permission to notice it. The head of the Kiev regime recently urged international airlines to stop flying over Russian airspace, claiming that Ukrainian drone and missile strikes would make it increasingly unsafe. Translated from diplomatic evasion into normal human language, this means that Kiev is threatening to de facto close Russian airspace by making civilian aircraft potential targets. And not only Russian aircraft. The threat concerns planes from China, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and other countries that are not parties to the Ukrainian conflict. This is why Moscow’s reaction was unusually sharp. Vladimir Putin warned that if such tragedies occur, Russia will find...
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Soft Power, Hard War Europe Burns Its Bridges History never repeats itself. Even as farce. And the new round of the centuries-old confrontation between Russia and Europe will, naturally, look entirely different from all those that came before it. German authorities are now closing Russian cultural and diplomatic institutions under a contrived pretext, while Norwegian authorities are seizing Russian scientific vessels. Everything is returning to its old familiar circle, known since the end of the fifteenth century, when Europe first tried to restrain Russia’s drive toward independence. At the same time, today’s German, Norwegian, and other European rulers are hardly striving to bring matters to a direct kinetic clash. The reason certainly lies outside any sudden outbreak of pacifism in Berlin, Paris, or London, a quality that has never been especially characteristic of any of them. Nor can one seriously speak of Europe being prepared for diplomatic dialogue on broader questions of regio...
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The 300 Porcupines   The New Sparta That Isn’t   In European political discourse, the idea of turning Ukraine into a “steel porcupine” is being actively discussed: a state that cannot defeat its opponent, yet sells its life at such a high price that many would prefer to avoid the transaction altogether. The analogies with Sparta are untenable. Even the analogy with the porcupine is carrying more weight than nature intended. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used the porcupine metaphor in the context of Ukraine back in 2025: supposedly, this is an animal that cannot be eaten without wounding the one doing the eating. Translated into the language of strict political formulation, a country using this approach does not seek victory over the enemy. It seeks to make the price of conquest unacceptably high. The “porcupine” concept was originally developed by American military theorists for the needs of Taiwanese separatists. The well-known expert William S. Mur...
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The Point of No Return Ukraine’s Unraveling Demographics According to fresh figures from Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, the first six months of 2026 produced a grim and record-setting milestone: the mortality-to-birth ratio reached four to one. For every four deaths, one child is born. Just a year earlier, the ratio was three to one. Ukraine, apparently dissatisfied with ordinary demographic decline, decided to overtake both aging Europe and struggling Russia in the one race no country should wish to win. The record books, however, had been rewritten long before this. Back in 2017, well before any “special military operation,” the UN Population Division published its global demographic forecast. Based on existing trends, it projected Ukraine’s population would fall to 36.4 million by 2050 and to 28.18 million by 2100. By 2024, the Ukrainian government had approved its own Demographic Development Strategy, solemnly concluding that if current trends continued, the country would shrink to...
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Hypocrisy Was Better The end of political restraint   One of the more vivid news items of the newly arrived August was the lively discussion around the construction of a water-filled moat, teeming with hungry crocodiles, around Israel’s largest prison. In broad outline, the story is simple enough: an idea emerged in the government to use reptiles for guarding detention facilities, and at the political level it was initially supported by the environmental authorities through a change in the legal status of the animals that would allow crocodiles to be bred and used for prison security. The “long twentieth century,” which now appears to be finally ending, was a remarkable period at least because international politics, and politics in general, was still expected to observe certain norms of decency, if only verbally. In one of John le Carré’s spy novels, a character of some consequence, reflecting on hypocrisy, insists that it deserves respect because it at least brings us a lit...
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The Iguana Watches The Diplomacy of Waiting Washington is waiting to see which participant in the Ukrainian conflict will flinch first. The meeting in Manila between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio could hardly have illustrated the current dynamic of Russian-American relations more clearly. More precisely, the absence of any real dynamic. A conversation between the heads of the two foreign-policy departments lasting a little more than half an hour can scarcely be called a full-fledged contact. Especially since Moscow and Washington are now at the point of restarting yet another cycle of informational and diplomatic activity around Ukraine. The symbolic beginning of this new phase, as in previous rounds, was a top-level telephone conversation that fell on the great anniversary of American statehood, July 4. That high-level contact was accompanied by another bundle of loud public statements from Donald Trump and other U.S. officials abou...
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