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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Kuril Islands for the first time this Thursday, the disputed Pacific archipelago administered by Moscow but claimed by Tokyo for over eight decades. The visit, which had not been previously announced, has sparked the indignation of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who called it "absolutely unacceptable" and warned that it "hurts the feelings of the Japanese people." Consequently, the Japanese Foreign Minister has urgently summoned the Russian ambassador to Tokyo, Nikolai Nozdrеv, to lodge a formal protest.

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.

The Ukrainian army intensified attacks inside Russia this Friday, far from its borders, and Vladimir Putin responded with a missile bombing against Kyiv in broad daylight. Today's is one of the deadliest days in recent times, with a provisional death toll of eleven in Ukraine and six in Russia. The attack on the Ukrainian capital caused at least six deaths and dozens of injuries, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who also lamented five more deaths in Sloviansk, eastern Ukraine. In Russian territory, six people died and 26 more were injured in a Ukrainian bombing at a factory in the Kirov region, about 900 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

The last time the Russian writer Artem Mozgovoy (Kemerovo, 1985) left his mother's house, he destroyed all his childhood and youth diaries. "I didn't want to leave them and I couldn't take them with me. It was very sad, because all those notebooks contained my loves and heartbreaks, the good and bad things I had experienced up to then," explains Mozgovoy. Paradoxically, that gesture would give birth some time later to his first novel, Spring in Siberia, which was originally published in English in 2023 and has now arrived in bookstores in Catalan from Comanegra with a translation by Jordi Martín Lloret. Once settled in another country, when he already felt "safe, a new man", Mozgovoy began to dig into his memory.

Margaryta Yakovenko (Tokmak, Ukraine, 1992) arrived in Spain at 6 years old, but every summer she returned to her hometown to spend it with her family. In 2022, with the Russian invasion, everything changed. Now Tokmak is an occupied city to which she cannot return. This is the common thread of the book Occupation (Seix Barral).

With NATO mired in its internal tensions, Russia and Ukraine have decided to intensify the strategy of inflicting maximum possible damage on each other, before any talk of negotiating their immediate future resumes.

Russia does not loosen its pressure on Ukraine. This Monday in the early morning, Moscow has once again bombed Kyiv, just four days after the last fatal attack on the Ukrainian capital. At least 14 people have died in Kyiv and six more have lost their lives in the neighboring town of Vyshneve, where 500 people have been evacuated due to the risk of new explosions following attacks on fuel depots. In addition, according to the balance of the Ukrainian authorities, 87 people have been injured.

It is not at all common to see Putin take responsibility for political or military errors with words equivalent to self-criticism. Such as acknowledging that Ukrainian drones are putting Russia in difficulty. He said it just ten days ago. The head of the Kremlin promised security to Russians with a tone of humility. Citizens who for weeks have been forced to endure air raid alerts, drone explosions, and the surprise of discovering fuel shortages for their vehicles. Shocks that are added to figures that can no longer be hidden, not in the kitchens, nor in the air shafts, nor on the street sidewalks: half a million Russian soldiers could have died in the war in Ukraine according to the latest data from British intelligence services.

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.

Ukraine is determined to de facto turn the occupied peninsula of Crimea into an island. On Sunday morning, Kyiv's drones attacked the ports on both sides de facto the occupied Crimean Peninsula into an island. In the early hours of Sunday, Kyiv's drones attacked ports on both sides During the last few days, Ukrainian medium-range drones

In the great Russian metropolises there are no air-raid shelters, no emergency protocols, the sirens do not sound when drones approach. People record from home, between fascination and unreality, how the aircraft fly over buildings with an unsettling parsimony until they crash. No one wants to think that these explosions could affect their apartment or that they could be the next victims. In the fifth summer of the war, the bulk of Russian urban society refuses to accept that it is at war, even though it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to hide the ravages of the conflict within its cities.

The impact of a drone against the Kapotnya refinery, about 15 kilometers south of central Moscow, caused an explosion this Thursday that blew the roof off the plant. The striking moment, captured on video by dozens of residents, testifies to Ukraine's most massive attack on the Russian capital since the war began. In total, 555 aircraft flew towards Russian territory, of which 194 headed for the city. The bombing caused 17 injuries and once again highlighted the vulnerabilities of Russian air defenses and further aggravated the fuel crisis the country is going through.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for legislative elections on September 20. For the first time, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, the four Ukrainian provinces annexed by Moscow, will be able to vote in Duma elections. All four had already participated in the last elections in which Putin was re-elected.