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.

Vladimir Putin has already achieved the popular endorsement he so desired for his war and that no one doubted he would obtain. His party, United Russia, has received almost 58% of the votes in the legislative elections, with more than 95% of the results counted, and will have the highest number of deputies in history: 355 out of the 450 in the Duma. Figures higher than those of five years ago, when it scraped 50% of the votes, and which will even allow him to expand the constitutional majority, but which does not correspond to the unrest expressed by the population in recent months.

It had been three years since Vladimir Putin kissed children in public, a symptom that his popularity is wavering. The poor polls for his party, United Russia, have forced him to get involved in the campaign for the Russian legislative elections, which are being held between this Friday and Sunday. They are the first in wartime and the first in which the inhabitants of the occupied Ukrainian territories are participating, who have already begun to vote in ballot boxes guarded by armed soldiers. These are elections manipulated by the Kremlin, with the pacifist opposition banned, where the overwhelming victory of the ruling party is taken for granted and which, in a context of social unrest due to economic problems, internet blocks, and conflict fatigue, the authorities hope will pass without much notice or surprise.

Russia and Ukraine have maintained their cross-attacks against energy infrastructure in recent hours, despite the fact that this Monday the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced a ceasefire on attacks against these types of targets. Russia has attacked gas stations in Kyiv and energy and port infrastructure in other regions, while Ukraine has bombed an oil refinery in the Russian region of Samara.

“They have opened Pandora’s box,” Vladimir Putin warned recently, after a month of the Ukrainian campaign against Russian online retail warehouses. That threat seemed like a new step in the rhetorical escalation with which the Kremlin has been pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskyy for months, and which until now had not translated into the promised wave of systematic attacks. In recent weeks, however, this warning has become a reality. Russia has been relentless day and night against Kyiv and its region, causing dozens of deaths. Moscow is chest-thumping about having turned the Ukrainian capital into a city in permanent alert and has once again recommended that foreign diplomats flee. Furthermore, it has given the starting signal for the season of bombings against Ukrainian energy facilities with the drop in temperatures.

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.