Just as for centuries, if not millennia, humans have carried the burden of myths about honor and war, in contemporary times (19th and 20th centuries) this began to change. The greater our destructive capacity, the more alarms were raised. The Kantian philosophical-political idea of Perpetual peace (1795) has been slowly making its way into our minds and hearts. A winding road, with dead ends, whose end we will still have to wait to see, if there is an end at all. It's so hard to believe in happy endings, isn't it? Today, almost no fiction has one. Neither happy nor unhappy. Everything is open, uncertain. Series don't really end... We are in a to be continued Infinite. War resists disappearing tooth and nail. It's ingrained in us.

The fact that the contempt with which the President of the United States refers to Europe is insulting, and that Donald Trump is a product of the speculative jungle, does not negate the need to ask ourselves if he is right in any of his statements. This is not out of a desire for self-flagellation, but rather to break free from the complacency that we Europeans will pay dearly for.

We're returning from a long weekend, on the cusp of social obligations and Christmas shopping, and today you'll hear that polls indicate PP voters value the president of Madrid, Díaz Ayuso, more than the party president, Núñez Feijóo. But while daily life dictates their immediate agenda, the underlying current is very strong, so strong that it's already shaping the immediate agenda. We are witnessing a changing of the guard. Just read the news story that opens our front page today:

"I hate Putin." So says Margarita, a Ukrainian girl kidnapped from her home and given to a Russian family. An irrefutable condemnation that refutes the false narrative of Russian propaganda. And a war crime according to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in 2023 issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president... and which becomes a reality in Margarita's mind in the play. The Hague (The Hague) by the Ukrainian playwright based in Barcelona, Sasha Denisova, which has been programmed at the Municipal Theatre of Girona within the High Season festival.

It's unsettling to see Donald Trump meeting with Viktor Orbán and promising him flexibility so that Hungary can continue buying gas and oil from Russia, despite the sanctions against Putin, circumventing US proposals to end the war in Ukraine. And all this knowing, as Trump knows very well, that Orbán's Hungary is a center of espionage that has the institutions of the European Union in its sights. Trump knows that FSB agents move freely in Budapest, and he surely doesn't care. It neither moves him nor affects him. He carries the accusation of having collaborated with the Kageb regime almost four decades ago. For thirty-eight years, and in different guises, the US president would have been the agent Krasnov..

(This interview was published on November 10, 2025, before Donald Trump's latest threat to conquer Greenland)

In 1982, Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposed an ironic hypothesis about "underdevelopment as the highest stage of socialism." He was referring to communism, nothing like the social democracy championed by New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. A few years after Enzensberger's insightful observation, the joke was over: in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Finally, East Germans, and after them the citizens of all the Soviet republics, could escape the prison that a communist world marked by scarcity, bureaucracy, terror, waste, disinformation, and an inability to innovate had become. Nothing worked; everyone was working for themselves. It was the end of totalitarian societies that, through terror, had guaranteed themselves fanatical support or passive loyalty. The fall of communism seemed definitive and total. But history is never linear.

For decades, at the height of the Cold War, the world lived in anguish over the latent threat of nuclear war. The memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh. The division into irreconcilable blocs—capitalist West versus communist Russia and its satellites—kept the international community in a state of constant tension. Pacifism gained ground (as did environmentalism, which opposed nuclear energy). Détente and de-escalation in nuclear armament came with the agreements between US President Reagan and Russian President Gorbachev, beginning in 1985 and culminating in the START Treaty of 1991. With the fall and dissolution of the USSR, there was a relaxation of the nuclear threat. But despite the destruction of arsenals, the danger has persisted. The weapons are still there, possessing immense destructive potential, infinitely greater than the devastating mushroom clouds that, in Japan, brought the tragic end of World War II.

With the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump is failing. The US president's naiveté and his dependence on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, are increasingly ostentatious and worrying. The facts are stubborn. The war doesn't stop, and Ukrainian fatigue and European bewilderment are as striking as Moscow's brazenness.

It is the most repeated generational accusation. And they are right. boomers We have failed. Democracies are failing, the climate crisis seems unrelenting, authoritarian leaders dominate geopolitics, a climate of war is returning, social inequalities are becoming bloody, educational disarray is growing, ideological and religious polarization is advancing hand in hand with new dogmas, cultural wars are driving away dialogue...

This week, the presidents of China and Russia have speculated about the possibility of living to 150. I've been reading articles on the subject because, I confess, I'm interested. The articles I've read that prompted the conversation between Putin and Xi Jinping focus on whether this will be biologically possible: organs; cell therapies; how to stop aging. Even how to stimulate bone marrow to generate antibodies that keep us younger.

Peace negotiations in Ukraine appear to be at a standstill, but Europe is moving forward to prepare for the future peace scenario. French President Emmanuel Macron announced this Thursday that 26 countries—mostly European— have agreed to participate in the peace mission in Ukraine that will be deployed when there is anCeasefire. "Twenty-six countries have pledged to deploy troops in Ukraine as a guarantee force, or to be present by land, sea, or air," the French president assured after the summit held this Thursday in Paris.

In one way or another, most of us manage to encapsulate ourselves for a few days in summer when we're allowed to recover the basics, be it the scent of a fig tree or watching the clouds pass by. From the calm, current events take on an even greater appearance of a stage driven by cruelty and arbitrariness. A sinister circus from which it seems worth protecting oneself, distancing oneself. This summer we have witnessed what seems like the end of the world: inextinguishable flames that incinerate trees, animals, and villages; narcissistic leaders and hypertrophied egos that set the pace of international relations, incapable of stopping the killings in Ukraine or Gaza. History, in the case of the Alaska summit, has passed us by like a bad B-movie, where the supposed president of the free world, transformed into a capricious CEO, flatters the bloodthirsty Russian president by driving him around in the Beast, the presidential armored vehicle, while being unable to force a decent ceasefire agreement for kyiv. With the golden stage set dedicated to Putin, the United States provided cover for those who believe that Russia's unity and stability can only be achieved through force and the distortion of history, those who believe that power is fueled by cruelty, mystery, theatricality, and manipulation.

So far this century, there have been 49 wars worldwide, 30% of which have ended with a peace agreement, 38% are still active, and 14.3% have resulted in military victory for one of the parties. The remaining wars are deactivated but not yet resolved. For decades, the tendency has been to resolve armed conflicts through negotiation and the signing of a peace agreement, something that has always satisfied me. But in recent years, the trend has changed, with wars that end with victory for one side and defeat for the other beginning to proliferate. This is a worrying trend, especially at a time when global military spending and the arms trade have increased dramatically, and militaristic thinking is once again prevalent, in a new Cold War dominated by the paranoia of being attacked.

Donald Trump's naive optimism regarding Vladimir Putin has been evident once again. The American president's exaggerated self-confidence is not enough to soften the imperial resolve of his Russian counterpart, a beast of power that has set itself the mission of restoring Russia to greatness. The Alaska summit, complete with a red carpet, beyond legitimizing the invader of Ukraine, apparently achieved little. Putin emerged satisfied and even joked about a meeting with Trump in Moscow. Trump, on the other hand, emerged walled in and summoned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on Monday. We hope this time it won't be to boo him in public.

This summer, Vladimir Putin's popularity among Russians has dropped from 83% to 79%. These are extremely high figures for a leader, but the decline reflects a certain discontent among the population. The reason is the average 12% increase in the prices of basic services in a context of skyrocketing inflation. Furthermore, the Russian president's approval rating could drop even further at the end of August, coinciding with the time when families buy school supplies.

Neither a ceasefire nor a reduction in hostilities in Ukraine. This seems to be what Vladimir Putin is thinking as the end of the war approaches. face to face with Donald TrumpAnd that also seems to be what we're smelling—and he's been saying it for days—from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk: "I fear we're heading towards a freezing of the conflict." Alaska is thus emerging as the stage for the umpteenth Putin-Trump game of vagueness and ambiguity. The result would be more uncertainty, leading us to where we've perhaps never really moved: what Trump and Putin want is to agree on the future of Ukraine and Europe. Putin hasn't renounced the territorial spoils—Crimea and a good part of Donbas—a success disguised as a victory in the eyes of Russian society, and which would leave Ukraine with almost unconditional surrender: obligatory neutrality—always threatened with satellization—and no question of joining NATO.

European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are confident that The Alaska summit on Ukraine between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, be successful and translate into a ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine. For now, the first good news for Zelensky is that the US president has assured him that there will be no cession of Ukrainian territory to Russia without Kiev's approval.

Vladimir Putin's unexpected move to counter Donald Trump's threat if he doesn't stop the fighting in Ukraine by Friday. The Kremlin reported that the two presidents will meet "in the coming days" at a location "already agreed upon," but that "an announcement will be made shortly." as the White House had announced on WednesdayAccording to Russian presidential adviser Yuri Uyzakov, next week has been designated as the "reference date" for the meeting, although it is "difficult to say how many days the preparation will take."

US President Donald Trump has threatened his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, saying he is giving him 10 to 12 days to reach a ceasefire agreement with Ukraine, instead of 50 which was granted two weeks ago. "I've spoken a lot with President Putin, and I've gotten along very well with him," Trump said in an appearance from Scotland, in which he criticized the Russian leader for having "fired rockets at some cities, like Kiev, and killed many people in a residence." "There are bodies scattered all over the streets," he denounced.