Putin has completed twenty-six years in power this year (he did so in May). He was the second president of Russia, and is its fourth, and for two consecutive terms he and his loyal Dmitri Medvedev alternated as president of Russia and as prime minister. President of Russia is the position that was created to replace that of the president of the Supreme Soviet, the highest Russian authority during the years of the USSR. It was held, in the early years, by the dipsomaniac Boris Yeltsin, and then always by Putin, directly or through his puppets: first Medvedev and now Mikhail Mishustin, who serves as prime minister once Putin has ensured (via the 2020 Constitutional reform, known as the "reset counter" reform) that he can continue as president until 2036. How did he do it? He restarted the count of his terms with a law that "erased" the previous two. In this way, he has maintained the limitation of two presidential terms, but in practice he has added two more (of six years each) because the first two stopped counting.To remain in power, he needs to win the elections, but the tendency of his opponents to die prematurely and in circumstances as appalling as they are enigmatic is well known. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova, or Paul Klebnikov, exiled magnates like Boris Berezovsky or his collaborator Alexander Litvinenko, the mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin, or political leaders like Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny form the list of the most prominent figures allegedly murdered by Putin's regime. Beyond these famous names, the victims of political repression in Putin's Russia number in the tens of thousands, including journalists, activists, writers, politicians, etc.Of these twenty-six years, it has been four and a half years since Putin gave the order to invade Ukraine, while in the West it was still being said that he would not dare. In 2022, Putin claimed that the war would be short and that he was carrying it out with the aim of “desnazifying” Ukraine, an argument that neither Putin himself remembers anymore. The war has generated hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides and millions of displaced people and refugees, and for now, there is no end in sight. But the invasion (this one really is) and the war in Ukraine have become geostrategic actors that no longer cause surprise or scandal, but are fully normalized within European politics. Like Putin himself, who for a quarter of a century has committed crimes, violations, and breaches of international law in the face of the passivity of the West, underpinned by all sorts of economic, energy, and logistical interests. Europe has begun in recent years a night that will be long and extremely hot (due to climate change and violence), surrounded by howling wolves. It would be good if at some point someone thought about how Europe itself, instead of trying to fight the wolves that now harass it, has dedicated itself to feeding them.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump face an autumn where they will have to navigate between ballot boxes. Parliamentary elections in Russia, and in the United States, which do not decide who will continue to rule the Kremlin and the White House, but which can condition the immediate future on crucial issues such as the war in Ukraine or the one in the Middle East. Between the elections for the Russian Duma on September 20 and those for the US Congress on November 3, six weeks will pass, a short enough period to detect in which interests Putin and Trump coincide, and where they clash and grate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In geopolitics, things change very quickly, and while a few weeks ago Vladimir Putin appeared to be one of the indirect winners of the Iran war, as the closure of Hormuz benefited his oil exports, now with the agreement to reopen the strait, the tables may have turned. At least that is what the European members of the G-7 intend, who plan to pressure Donald Trump to take advantage now to increase pressure on the Kremlin to desist from the occupation of Ukraine and agree to sign a peace deal. Trump himself has agreed, and he was seen in a friendly attitude chatting with Volodymyr Zelensky at the Evian summit in France.

Russia launched one of the most massive aerial attacks in recent months against Ukraine early Monday. Among the affected targets is the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, one of the great spiritual and cultural emblems of Ukraine and Orthodox Christianity, founded in the 11th century, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The attack caused a spectacular fire.

For the first time, Vladimir Putin is concerned about the results of parliamentary elections in Armenia like those of this Sunday. If the polls are confirmed and the prime minister, the liberal Nikol Pashinyan, renews his mandate, the Kremlin may find itself with an Armenia willing to stop being a Russian protectorate.

No face-to-face meetings or concessions. The letter that Volodymyr Zelensky sent to Vladimir Putin in which he asked him to end the war in Ukraine has received the expected response: an unappealable no. The Russian president appeared at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum amidst escalating bombings and with his soldiers struggling to advance a few meters on the front, but he showed himself convinced, once again, that the conflict can only end with Russia's victory. 

Volodymyr Zelensky warns Vladimir Putin that if he does not decide to end the war in Ukraine, he runs the risk of being a victim of a coup. In an open letter to the Russian president, the Ukrainian leader assures that it is not a threat, but that this is how Russian history works. "When Russia gets tired, changes occur," he writes. According to Zelensky, if Putin does not come to the conclusion that this conflict must end, "he will have to fight for his own survival".

The Russian economy has faced pessimistic forecasts since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when a large part of Western countries gradually imposed all kinds of industrial and financial sanctions on it. Despite this, Moscow's narrative had been that the country's economy was holding up well to the economic shock, partly thanks to public investment and industrial activity resulting from the war, which offset the impact of the sanctions.

“We do not want to be dragged into an arms race”, said Vladimir Putin after launching the largest strategic nuclear weapons exercises in Russian history – those with long range, designed to strike the enemy's centers of power. For the first time, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko has commanded such tests together with his Russian counterpart. These maneuvers are taking place coinciding with warnings from Volodymyr Zelensky that Moscow is trying to drag Minsk into attacking Kyiv from its territory.

China is becoming the epicenter of world diplomacy. Official media boasts about it and, indeed, it seems that right now almost everything goes through Beijing, although it is not clear whether the solution to the many crises in the world will emerge from there. These days it has received a visit from Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, and last week it was the turn of Donald Trump, the President of the United States. In recent months, Xi Jinping has received the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain, and South Korea, to name but a few, not to mention the visit at the beginning of the month by Iran's Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi. Thus, China has first-hand information about everything that is happening, but so far it has not become directly involved, although it is dropping some hints.

If the Soviet Victory Day truce against Nazi Germany in 2025 led to the first round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in three years, this year's ceasefire has led to an escalation of the conflict. Volodymyr Zelensky promised on Thursday that he would respond "fairly" to the large-scale Russian bombing with more than 1,600 drones and missiles, which ravaged Kyiv, leaving 24 dead and around fifty injured. And this Sunday he has responded. Russian air defenses detected 556 Ukrainian drones during the early hours of the morning, 120 of which were heading towards Moscow, in the largest attack on the capital since the start of the war, now more than four years ago.

A regime of Soviet origin that has been in power for more than 25 years is telling us about its rigid and hermetic nature. Vladimir Putin's quarter-century in the Kremlin is one of the longest authoritarian periods in Russian history, and it already surpasses Stalin's. That is why the bleak climate surrounding the Red Army parade –it is still called that– on May 9th in Red Square also spoke volumes: the images say a lot. And, beyond that, messages and comments about a Putin distanced from his usual residences, confined to the Kremlin and surrounded by security devices for fear of an attack. This had not happened since, almost three years ago, Wagner mercenaries, with Yevgeny Prigozhin at the forefront, staged an impromptu march towards Moscow. A logistical and political blunder that sought to impose conditions on Putin regarding the war in Ukraine.

This year's Victory Day military parade will be remembered for two circumstances. The first, Vladimir Putin's fear, which led him to turn his showcase of military power into a minimal and unprecedented spectacle: without tanks or missiles, practically without foreign guests and without Western media. The second, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's mockery, who, urged at the last minute by Donald Trump, desisted from threatening Red Square with his drones and signed a sarcastic decree to “allow” the Russian celebration this Saturday.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a three-day ceasefire, from this Saturday to Monday, coinciding with the commemoration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in Moscow. The first to announce it was the President of the United States, Donald Trump, but shortly after, Volodymyr Zelensky and the Kremlin confirmed it. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the truce would include a suspension "of all kinetic activity" and also an exchange of a thousand prisoners from each country. The announcement comes the day after the Russian Ministry of Defense declared a unilateral three-day truce, in this case, from Friday to Sunday. For his part, the Ukrainian president had proposed that the ceasefire begin on Wednesday.

It was the last thing Vladimir Putin wanted in the most important week of the year. A Ukrainian drone has impacted an emblematic luxury residential skyscraper just a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The incident, which has not caused casualties, takes place five days before the Victory Day military parade, the global showcase of Russian military might. For the first time in almost two decades, neither tanks nor missiles will be exhibited because security cannot be guaranteed, and Putin, in full psychosis over a possible attack by Kyiv, has even desperately proposed a truce of a few hours to ensure that Volodymyr Zelensky does not spoil the party.