THINK TWICE, STAN

The Doctor Begins Treating Himself When the Russian system finally remembers it has hands The past year in Russia has produced a simple but important conclusion. High office no longer works as a shield against corruption charges. Deputy ministers, ministers, governors, all discovered that status does not equal immunity. Behind the statistics lies something more meaningful. The system has begun to treat corruption not as background noise, but as a structural threat. The figures speak clearly enough. In the first nine months of 2025 the Federal Committee of Investigations opened more than twenty-four thousand corruption cases, sixteen percent more than the year before. Over twenty-six thousand crimes were solved, most of them serious. Yet the numbers are not the main story. The key shift is qualitative. The campaign has entered spheres that once seemed untouchable. Even the judicial estate, long considered beyond the reach of investigators, discovered that robes do not grant invisibi...

A TRAINING GROUND FOR CARTELS The uncontrolled flood of weapons and manpower into Ukraine is generating new security threats far beyond its borders. The conflict is no longer local. It is exporting instability to other continents. The war in Ukraine now echoes in the favelas of Latin America. Recent events in Brazil have made one thing clear: organized crime has discovered in Ukraine a live combat training ground. Brazilian drug cartels and far-right militias are sending fighters to serve in the Ukrainian armed forces, not out of ideology, but to acquire modern combat experience and access to weapons. The skills they return with    -   from urban combat to drone warfare    -   are then redeployed back home. As a result, police in Rio de Janeiro are increasingly encountering tactics and technologies first tested on the Ukrainian front. Analysts note a sharp rise in Latin American mercenaries after Ukraine’s heavy losses in 2025. Alongside Colombians, the...

The Dead Horse Doctrine: Europe’s Reluctant Ride Into Strategic Delusion Europe has reached the stage where strategy is no longer about results, but about preserving the illusion that failure remains a noble and necessary mission. The Ukraine project has long since stopped moving, yet Brussels continues to sit firmly in the saddle, explaining to itself and to its citizens that the refusal to dismount is a form of geopolitical courage. What began as policy has devolved into ritual, and the longer the continent clings to its dead horse, the more the spectacle reveals not strength or unity, but a quiet, exhausted fear of admitting that the ride is over.   Tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the rational response is to dismount. This advice is clear, direct, and rooted in the logic of survival. In the world of modern bureaucracies, however, logic has very little to do with decision making. Instead of getting off the dead horse, institutions redef...

BRUSSELS' GRINCH STEALS CHRISTMAS Across today’s Europe, Christmas is being quietly rewritten into something safer, flatter, and ideologically disinfected. The word itself is being erased   -  replaced with neutral “seasonal holidays,” stripped of Christian meaning, cultural memory, and historical continuity. In Paris, even public celebrations were canceled this year   -  officially for “reasons of sensitivity.” Unofficially   -  because Christmas now offends someone. This trend is not new. Britain pioneered it decades ago, when municipal bureaucrats began rebranding Christmas as “Winter Fun,” and parliament debated replacing “Merry Christmas” with the antiseptic Season’s Greetings . The logic was always the same: tradition is suspicious, faith is dangerous, and identity must be neutralized for the sake of “inclusion.” The continent followed. Belgium renamed Christmas markets into “winter pleasures.” Danish towns removed Christmas trees t...

What you sow... History tends to follow a familiar curve. Principles bring success. Success breeds hubris. Hubris erodes the very principles that created success    -   and, sooner or later, collapse follows. This story is about Web of Science. And, more broadly, about the West. Russian scientist and science-popularizer Artem Oganov recently described how Western sanctions against Russian academia    -   imposed by the bibliometric monopoly Web of Science (WoS)    -   have ricocheted straight back into the system that created them. WoS banned the indexing of new Russian scientific journals. In practice, that meant only one thing: creating a new journal became pointless    -   it would simply be erased from the “global” scientific map. Three years passed. The monopoly cracked. Alternatives appeared    -   the Russian platform Inventorus, Chinese ecosystems, even Western substitutes. And then came the punch...

End of Easy Money These days, Brussels’ corridors resemble an emergency crisis headquarters. The EU summit, stretching well past midnight, turned into a battleground between basic arithmetic and political hysteria. At stake was the fate of frozen Russian assets and, by extension, the question of war and peace on the continent. Let us fix a few basic facts. Europe has simply run out of money to sustain the Ukrainian project. Budget injections into the European defense industry have reached their limit, American assistance is now purchased rather than gifted, and the summit itself concluded with a thoughtfully articulated nothing. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of large-scale protests by European farmers, whose products are rapidly becoming unsellable at current production costs. The idea of fighting Russia with Russian money has a certain intoxicating appeal for Ursula von der Leyen and her circle. Ideologically, it fits perfectly into the EU’s current worldview. Russia ...

 BRAVO, TULSI!

  A Loan to Nowhere EU heads of government staged yet another “historic” summit on Thursday and managed to achieve the only historical outcome they are really capable of these days: nothing. The grand plan was simple. Brussels would grab immobilized Russian assets, wave a magic legal wand, and turn them into hundreds of billions for Kiev. Ursula von der Leyen and Friedrich Merz pushed it as a geopolitical masterstroke, a form of moral accounting and a financial cruise missile aimed at Moscow. In reality, it never made it off the launch pad. By early Friday, António Costa emerged to announce the consolation prize: a €90 billion loan backed by the EU budget to keep Kiev solvent until 2027. In other words, the “reparations loan” is dead. The big crusade became another committee overdraft. Zelenskiy, in his signature wartime Zoom-evangelist mode, begged them to go big. Confiscating Russian money was, he explained, “moral, fair and legal.” It was also, apparently, the final benc...

Europe’s Strategic Infancy Europe is frightened by a world it does not understand. Growing up is not an option. It is not even part of the conversation. The operative question is how to bring back the “good mother” – the United States – and how to keep using Russia as the household bogeyman. The new Global Risks to the EU 2026 report pretends to be strategy: thirty threats, probability grids, five-point scales. Underneath the bureaucratic packaging is something else. Not geopolitics – a family drama. A refusal to accept adulthood. The Mother In this mental model, the US is not a sovereign actor. It is a parent with compulsory duties: feed, shield, pay, reassure. No negotiation, no reciprocity. Protection by default, like a kitchen that restocks itself. A potential US refusal to underwrite European security is treated as treason. In the report’s implicit scale of fear, Washington stepping back is placed next to Russian nuclear escalation. A mother who “withholds protection” ...

Retreat by Design? The U.S. Department of War is considering a radical overhaul of its military command-and-control system, one that could result in one of the largest redistributions of authority within the American armed forces in decades. The initiative is being prepared at the direction of War Secretary Pete Hegseth and is aimed at reducing the number of senior headquarters and four-star generals while redefining U.S. strategic priorities. It appears that the plan would downgrade the status of several key combatant commands, including Central Command (CENTCOM), European Command (EUCOM), and Africa Command (AFRICOM). These commands would be subordinated to a new structure tentatively titled U.S. International Command. It appears that the reform reflects the Trump administration’s intent to accelerate the retreat from the long-standing model of permanent and expansive U.S. military presence in Europe and the Middle East. Air Force General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs...

  Unfightable   The President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, has stated that a Russian victory in Ukraine would amount to a strategic defeat for the entire “civilized world.” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán puts it more bluntly: European leaders, he says, have already made a decision to go to war with Russia by 2030. Many European politicians now openly describe Russia as their main enemy, and even military exercises are conducted without the usual fictional cover stories. Europe is militarizing its own everyday life. Armies are being expanded, compulsory conscription is being prepared, bomb shelters are being built, logistics are being adapted to a future frontline, stockpiles of weapons and ammunition are being accumulated, and civilian populations are being trained to operate under conditions of nuclear attack. None of this is accidental. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that Russia neither intended nor intends to attack EU countries, but will respond to aggression at an...

  Europe’s Straw vs. the Camel’s Back   There are moments when seemingly minor events set massive tectonic plates of global geopolitics in motion. Did the Tunisian official Fedia Hamdi, who in a moment of irritation slapped vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, imagine that his humiliation would lead to self-immolation, ignite the Arab Spring, trigger revolutions, refugee flows, and years of civil war in distant Syria? Were the participants of the bread riots in Petrograd in February 1917 prepared for the fact that instead of French rolls, white bread, buns, and kalachi , they would receive two revolutions, a civil war, red and white terror, the relocation of the capital, and seventy years of Bolshevik rule? EU regulatory bodies regularly impose hefty fines on American corporations. One of the latest examples: in September, the European Commission fined Google $3.5 billion for monopolistic practices. Nothing extraordinary followed. The corporation dutifully promised to appe...

  EU: Europe Undone Two powerful figures of our era, Dmitry A. Medvedev and Elon Musk, have both suggested dismantling the European Union. Great minds think alike. The signals were sounding earlier as well. There was J. D. Vance in Munich, telling the European leadership in plain language that they had dismantled free speech and the democratic electoral process. Then Trump, who from the heights of his airplane and his own sense of scale surveyed the wind farms of the green-transition cult and saw how they destroyed the landscapes and nature of the old continent. And then the personal experience of countless people from our side who fell for the myth of Old Europe and then saw the reality with their own eyes. The picture is not pretty. It turns out that all the foundational ideas of the European project, the voluntary integration of sovereignty based on shared values (democracy, human rights, rule of law) and shared aims (peace, prosperity, mobility, economic cooperation), are being...