On the 109th anniversary of the October Revolution, Russian communists are facing one of the most delicate moments in their history. The Kremlin has banned several of the party's commemorative events for this Saturday because they fear that the rallies will overflow and turn into protests against Vladimir Putin. This is what happened a month ago in Moscow, when a group of young activists took advantage of a demonstration by the old guard to shout “Down with the Tsar!” and there were about sixty arrests.

After nine months, tens of thousands of dead soldiers, nearly 3,000 civilian casualties, and more than 150,000 drones and 1,500 missiles launched, Russia and Ukraine will sit down again to discuss the end of the war. The US attack on Iran interrupted the last round of talks in mid-February, and since then, the conflict has only escalated, stuck at the front and increasingly destructive in the cities. The new momentum of a campaigning Donald Trump has dragged Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11, in a meeting that Volodymyr Zelensky would like to see result in a truce regarding energy infrastructure and the Black Sea, but from which no major progress is expected.

Since the wave of youth unrest in Western Europe began, the suspicion of a Russian hybrid attack has loomed over public opinion. The confusion over coordinated actions through channels specifically created for the occasion and the absence of visible leaders have spurred the shadow of an influence operation by Vladimir Putin's government. The reality, however, is that it is impossible to attribute the origin of the protests to Russia. What has been proven is that Moscow has amplified the disturbances and has tried to present them as the social reaction to the militarism of community elites devoted to Ukraine. A very convenient approach on the eve of an electoral cycle that could catapult the European parties most opposed to support for Kyiv.

“They have killed us.” This is how the statement from Novaya Gazeta, the last opposition newspaper still operating within Russia, begins, announcing the end of its activity due to persecution by the authorities. In the last few hours, the workers have been evicted from their headquarters in the center of Moscow and all their sources of funding have been cut off. That is why the editorial team, fearing that the repression would intensify even further, has explained that they have no choice but to shut down permanently on November 9, after thirty-three years in operation.

For the first time since 2022, a European leader allied with Ukraine is viewed favorably by the Kremlin as a possible negotiator for the European Union. The President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, spoke by phone this Tuesday with Vladimir Putin, together with the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, and they have opened a path for dialogue that did not exist until now. However, the Russian president made it clear to them that a “just and lasting peace” will only be achieved if “the legitimate interests of Russia are taken into account fully and unconditionally.”

“We must seize the opportunity to plunge Ukraine into the Stone Age.” This phrase from a columnist for the pro-government newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets summarizes Russia's approach to Donald Trump’s new turn. While the President of the United States tries to be indulgent with Vladimir Putin to the point of adulation, the Russian leader interprets the tension between Washington and Kyiv as a window to increase his peace demands and press the accelerator on the front. The White House intends to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table with offers of economic cooperation, which Moscow gladly accepts, but decouples from the talks to end the conflict.

Russian commanders have been promising Vladimir Putin the imminent conquest of the Donbas for months. The Russian president's triumphalism led him to proclaim, at the beginning of October, that this territory would fall much sooner than Volodymyr Zelensky and the European allies predicted. However, over the last few months, a counter-offensive by the Ukrainian army, which has had no publicity and the details of which have only recently begun to be known, has caught Russian troops and military observers themselves by surprise. Kyiv has been able to stabilize the advance of the Kremlin's soldiers at the Donetsk fortress belt and has thwarted Putin's plans to achieve one of his fixations in this war before the end of the year.

It is difficult to avoid the obvious cinematic reference in the latest episode of the conflict in Ukraine. In recent days, a Russian satellite has been chasing an American one used by the Ukrainian army and, finally, it has abruptly changed direction, in what experts warn could be considered the first example of space warfare in history. However, the real version of Star Wars is not as epic as that of the famous saga, nor is it fought with laser swords. In the midst of the battle for communications, with Donald Trump using Starlink to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin trying to build his own network of satellites, the Russian device could have inaugurated a new form of combat in Earth's orbit.

The two worst moments in the relationship between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have had a common denominator: they have arrived preceded by a telephone conversation between the United States president and Vladimir Putin, in which the Kremlin leader promised him major joint business deals. It happened in February 2025, before the public brawl between the American leader and the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office of the White House, and it has happened again now, following the agreement for Moscow to sell diesel with Washington's permission, which caught Kyiv off guard. The Russian president has known at all times how to offer Trump what he desired, persuade him with his reasons, draw him to his positions, and pit him against Zelenskyy.

“Guys, tell me: have you all signed the contract voluntarily? Have they forced you?” The scene takes place in Penza, in the south of European Russia, in front of one of the municipality's military commissariats. Plainclothes men are trying to forcibly take away some residents in a van, in front of the desperation of a group of women blocking the vehicle's path. Raids like this one, in which civilians are recruited under coercion to go fight in Ukraine, have become common in dozens of Russian regions in recent months. Vladimir Putin does not want to formally decree a new mobilization like the one in 2022, and therefore resorts to surreptitious methods. In this context, citizens have no choice but to defend themselves or go into exile.

United States President Donald Trump is escalating his tone against his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. "It is time for Ukraine to have a new president," Trump said, following Ukrainian attacks against a Russian oil export terminal. "We told him he could do whatever he wanted with Russia, but no attacks on the refineries because it is causing a global problem," the United States President asserted, in reference to the increase in diesel prices.

The city of Oleshky, in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson, has become a symbol of the human tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Trapped on the front line since 2022, in recent months its residents have stopped receiving food because the road that connects the municipality to the outside is completely mined and at the mercy of drones. Without water, electricity, or heating, and now also without food, its inhabitants are trying to survive as best they can and fear the arrival of winter, while the Kremlin refuses to evacuate them and accuses Kyiv of being responsible for the siege.

Whatever the truth may be regarding what is happening in Siberia with the possible case of pneumonic plague, the Kremlin has chosen to manage information with an eyedropper. The Russian health authority asserts that the epidemiological situation in Irkutsk is “calm,” following the death last Friday of Daria Shipilova, a researcher at the Research Institute for Plague Control, due to a fulminant respiratory illness. The World Health Organization considers the risk to Europe to be “very low,” but, like the United States, it is annoyed by Moscow's opacity, as it continues to not clarify what the laboratory worker died from.

The Black Sea had not been this dangerous since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian drones have turned its waters into a deadly route for commercial vessels. This morning, several devices of unknown origin struck two vessels off the coast of Bulgaria in the first attack against the exclusive economic zone of a NATO member country. One of the ships caught fire and two of the crew members were seriously injured, while the other sank and its sailors remain missing.

The death of a laboratory worker researching the plague pathogen has raised alarms in Russia. Authorities have placed nearly 200 people under surveillance in Shelekhov, in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, and have quarantined the city's hospitals to prevent a potential bacterial outbreak. The Kremlin denies that any incident occurred while handling test tubes, but speaks of a “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” The lack of information and the erratic communication from local governors have put global health organizations on alert.

A few days after the incontestable victory of Vladimir Putin's party in the legislative elections, the predictions of those who foresaw an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, a radicalization of Kremlin policies, and a hardening of repression are beginning to come true. The new Duma, constituted this Wednesday, has a record number of war veterans and, on the United Russia bench, the largest in history, sit deputies known for promoting illiberal laws.

Vladimir Putin insists on resorting to nuclear rhetoric to threaten the West. After the alarm generated by the letters that Russia sent to NATO warning of the possible use of atomic weapons if European countries blocked the Russian region of Kaliningrad, the Kremlin leader has escalated the tone of the threats. “The point of no return, the moment when nothing can be changed anymore, can arrive unexpectedly for everyone,” he said from the Valdai Forum, the stage he uses every year to set Moscow’s position on foreign policy.

On July 30, Viktor Kalinin, aged 14 years and three months, became the youngest person to be included in Russia's list of terrorists and extremists. His crime: having set fire to a railway signaling system box. Although he stated that he had acted under coercion, the police accused him of terrorism. That same day, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, was also accused of collaborating with terrorism, in the latest episode of his war with the secret services.

"It is not only nonsense, but also an example of provocation." Vladimir Putin has grown tired of denying his responsibility for the acts of sabotage that European authorities attribute to Moscow and of dismissing Western intelligence reports that warn that Russia is preparing to attack NATO. On the contrary, in the Russian capital they claim to feel threatened by the growing militarization of Europe and fear that the allies will use Ukraine to try to inflict a strategic defeat on them. In fact, they are convinced that the Atlantic Alliance is already in conflict with Russia and that, therefore, European countries are legitimate targets, if not for a conventional war, then for a hybrid war.

The Russian pacifist opposition is debating between boycotting, protesting, and pragmatism in the legislative elections that end this Sunday and in which no one doubts the victory of Vladimir Putin's party. Voters opposed to the war have seen how the authorities removed the only anti-war formation, Yabloko, and how all candidates potentially dangerous to the regime were disqualified. In addition to the usual strategies to coerce public workers into marking the official list –the “administrative mobilization”– and to prevent the presence of independent observers, this time the Kremlin has generalized electronic voting, a system that analysts denounce as facilitating the manipulation of results.