After more than half a year with peace talks stalled due to the conflict in the Middle East, Donald Trump seeks to relaunch negotiations to reach an agreement that puts an end to the war in Ukraine. His emissaries, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, landed this Saturday in Moscow, where they met with Vladimir Putin, and this Sunday they will be in Kyiv for the first time to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The visit takes place in the midst of an escalation of long-range cross-bombardments and with the Russian president less willing than ever to make concessions. Despite this, both sides have ended up accepting a three-day ceasefire over the two capitals to ensure the safety of the American diplomats.

When last Saturday 38 people died near Kyiv in one of the deadliest Russian attacks of the entire war, many inevitably thought of the unstoppable destructive power of ballistic missiles. But what crashed into the ammunition depot in the suburb of Mila was not a fearsome Iskander, but a new-generation drone. The Geran-4 and Geran-5, the latest Russian evolutions of the Iranian Shahed, have also become the latest headache for Ukrainian air defenses, which see with impotence how, in addition to missiles, they now also have difficulties stopping this new Kremlin weapon.

Volodymyr Zelensky is looking for new ways to pressure Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine. In the last few hours, the rhetorical escalation has reached a new level after the Ukrainian president issued a warning to international airlines that still maintain flights to Russia. “Russian airspace will become completely unsafe,” he stated on Tuesday night. While clarifying that Kyiv “does not threaten civil air transport nor does it threaten a single aircraft,” Zelensky holds the Russian authorities responsible for how they manage their airspace from now on, taking into account that “there will be drones in the Russian sky to a dimension that must be considered”.

The escalation in the Ukraine conflict is not pleasing to Russia's partners. The latest to make this known to Vladimir Putin has been the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Both met in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, within the framework of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which also hosted a meeting between the Russian and Chinese presidents, Xi Jinping. The Indian leader warned Putin that “every day the war continues, humanity takes a step back” and demanded that he “move from an interminable war to the end of hostilities as soon as possible”. He also assured that New Delhi supports all peace efforts and will continue to do so in the future.

Vladimir Putin not only does not believe that the stubbornness to continue the war in Ukraine to the bitter end could be a burden for the legislative elections of September 20, but he considers it an attraction. The Russian president has dedicated a large part of his speech at the congress of his party, United Russia, to defending the need to achieve victory. Although the event was supposed to serve to present the campaign program, Putin has overlooked the citizens' major concerns and has avoided making any concrete promises to reverse the poor economic situation or internet blockages.

Long-range attacks have once again been deadly, another night, in the war in Ukraine. At least fifteen people have died in Kyiv and its region, and around forty more have been injured, after a massive Russian bombing with missiles and drones, one of the most brutal since the start of the invasion, according to authorities. Air defenses have seen, again helplessly, how an indeterminate number of ballistic missiles – military analysts estimate around 25 – bypassed their protection and hit various locations in the capital. Ukrainian air forces have stopped providing the quantity of these devices fired by Russia because they cannot shoot any down.

When the third round of trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States concluded on February 18, everyone took for granted that there would be a fourth in a few days. With the same conviction, no one expected those negotiations to lead to a short-term ceasefire. Although they had not been unfruitful, especially in the military aspect, political issues remained entrenched. What was unthinkable then was that, half a year later, there would have been no further talks to address the end of the conflict, that the peace process would be frozen, that the positions of both sides would have only moved further apart, and that the war would have entered its most destructive phase. Just this morning, ten people were killed and seventeen more were injured in a Russian attack in the Kharkiv region. This is because both Kyiv and Moscow believe they have more to gain on the battlefield than at the negotiating table.

The Kremlin intensifies its crusade against the pacifist opposition one month before the legislative elections. Specifically, it seeks to punish the only party opposed to the war in Ukraine that had initially been authorized to participate in the elections, Yabloko. The justice system has sentenced one of its vice-presidents, Lev Shlosberg, to 11 years and one month in prison for having defended the need for a ceasefire and criticized Vladimir Putin. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has rejected the party's appeal against the decision to ban them from the electoral process, after Yabloko's popularity soared in polls in recent weeks and an unprecedented wave of support among young people was generated.

One year after the historic summit in Alaska between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, a peace agreement in Ukraine seems much further away than at that moment, although in reality it has never been close. During these months, Russian diplomacy has coined the concept spirit of Anchorage –the military base where the meeting was held– to argue that in Alaska the Americans had accepted the Kremlin's conditions to end the conflict. However, the passing weeks have shown that this spirit was an evanescent chimera. Relations between Russia and the United States are now going through one of the worst moments since the Republican's return to the White House,, and the thawing process that peaked a year ago is heading into a dead end.

Vladimir Putin wants to turn large families into the traditional Russian family. But while only 5% of households are made up of a father, a mother, and three or more children, almost 40% of families are single-parent and, in the vast majority of cases, matriarchal. Katia and Anya – fictitious names to preserve their anonymity –, a mother and daughter aged 45 and 11 respectively, are an example of this archetypal model in a society historically marked by high male mortality, the central role of women in care, and, after the fall of the USSR, by high divorce rates.

In Russia, a country where elections are conceived as a bureaucratic formality intended to legitimize the regime, the exclusion of the only party opposed to the "Ukraine war of the upcoming legislative elections has shaken up the campaign. After the Electoral Commission unexpectedly registered Yabloko, a party with historically very low support, the opposition almost unanimously called for votes for them and their popularity soared on the internet, especially among young people.

The escalation in aerial attacks in the Ukraine war has once again resulted in civilian casualties. Following last week's deadly bombings against Kyiv, this Monday Ukrainian drones attacked the Republic of Tatarstan, in the center of European Russia, killing at least thirteen people and injuring 75 more. The unusual magnitude of the attack's consequences, one of the deadliest on Russian territory since the start of the invasion, reveals the difficulties Vladimir Putin faces in protecting the country's immense expanse, beyond Moscow, an almost impregnable city.

The “war of cities” that some experts predicted a few months ago is now a reality. The conflict in Ukraine has entered a destructive phase in which each side tries to strike the other with all its might in the hope of breaking its will. While Vladimir Putin's missiles terrorize Kyiv and the major Ukrainian cities, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's drones set fire to refineries and warehouses in the interior of Russia. The consequence is that this summer is the bloodiest since the start of the invasion for civilians, with each month registering a higher number of casualties than the previous one.

Vladimir Putin has once again taken advantage of the weakness of Kyiv's air defenses to lash out at the Ukrainian capital. 24 ballistic and four hypersonic missiles hit the city and surrounding areas without any opposition, causing at least 17 deaths and more than forty injuries. The Russian army is responding in this way to Volodymyr Zelensky's strategy of daily targeting Wildberries warehouses, Russia's main online trading company.

Ukraine has gone a step further in its strategy to put pressure on the Russian economy. In addition to systematically hitting oil refineries and logistics routes, it has now launched a campaign against the warehouses of the main Russian e-commerce company, Wildberries. In just over two weeks, it has attacked them nearly thirty times and rendered more than one and a half million square meters unusable.

A terrorist attack in the heart of Moscow has once again set off alarms among the Russian army's top brass. On Saturday evening, a bomb exploded at the entrance of a luxury restaurant where General Aleksandr Tchaikovsky was celebrating his fifty-fifth birthday. He and the guests from the political and military elite with him escaped unharmed, but five patrons of the establishment died and 19 more were injured, some of them in critical condition.

When Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner, rebelled against the then Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, on June 23, 2023, Vladimir Putin had already decided to disband Russia's most popular mercenary group due to the threat it posed to the regime's stability. Despite having been key in the conquest of towns like Bakhmut or Soledar, in Donetsk, the failure of the mutiny led private fighters to integrate into the regular army or return home. Some agreed to enlist in the armed forces, others sought a way to continue fighting in Ukraine while maintaining a certain autonomy, and many preferred to travel to Africa, where Wagner had become strong by defending local putschists and where it still struggles today to preserve the remnants of its empire.

Russian security services continue their crusade against Telegram and its founder, Pavel Durov. While the Kremlin and its technocrats resist definitively burying the application, aware of how popular it is in the country, the FSB – the former KGB – goes ahead, accuses its head of “collaborating with terrorist activities” and places him on the wanted list. According to the spies, the platform has done nothing to prevent Ukrainian secret services from using a dating chatbot to recruit Russian youth and adolescents with the aim of carrying out “acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murders, and cyber fraud operations”.

In Russia, the fight against Satanism is not a relic of the past, but a state policy. The powerful Russian Orthodox Church has promoted the persecution of this belief as a catch-all to accommodate an ultraconservative agenda and repression of identities that deviate from traditional Russian values. Heavy metal bands, Halloween festival organizers, or psychics are the latest victims of a crusade that authorities also use to demonize the LGBTI community and justify the war in Ukraine as a "de-Satanization" operation.

Vladimir Putin has been annoyed that in recent weeks a narrative has emerged according to which Ukraine is on the verge of turning the tide of the war. “Europeans have the categorically incorrect impression that the situation on the battlefield is changing in favor of the Ukrainian forces,” they say from the Kremlin. The reason is the partially successful effort by Kyiv's troops to stifle Russian logistics on the southeastern front, which opens a window of opportunity for Volodymyr Zelensky. However, in the east, in Donbas, Russia continues to advance and will soon conquer Kostiantynivka, one of the last major towns in the region. The problem is that it is advancing so slowly that pressure is growing from the warmongering sectors for the Russian president to decree a new mobilization, a hugely unpopular measure that could prove entirely ineffective.