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.

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.