Saturday 4 July 2026 Russia’s decision to close its remaining railway border crossings with Finland, Estonia and Latvia is striking less because of its immediate economic impact than because of what it reveals about the Kremlin’s conception of security. Most of these routes had already seen dramatically reduced traffic as a consequence of sanctions, Finland’s closure of its land border and the collapse of commercial relations following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

By Robert Harris Saturday 4 July 2026 Today is July 4th. For US citizens, it's a beer-and-fireworks-fueled celebration of independence, an idea that takes on a far less abstract meaning for an American living in Ukraine during the present war. For EU citizens, it's a chance to indulge in jokes mostly centered around their favorite stereotypes about the American fondness for alcohol, calories and explosives, stereotypes which Americans do nothing to dissuade on this particular

Friday 3 July 2026 The first great boom in artificial intelligence has taken place almost entirely inside computers. Large language models have transformed the production of text, images, software and research. Businesses have rushed to automate customer service, legal drafting, marketing, accounting and countless other information-intensive tasks. Billions of dollars have flowed into data centres, graphics processors and cloud infrastructure, creating a technological revolut

Friday 3 July 2026 The Soviet Union was founded upon an explicit rejection of religion. Yet one of the great paradoxes of the twentieth century is that under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the officially atheist state developed many of the characteristics of a religious civilisation. Churches were demolished, priests were imprisoned and religious education was prohibited. Nevertheless faith did not disappear. Rather, it was redirected. Stalin’s regime created a political theology

Friday 3 July 2026 The modern Russian military-industrial complex is sustained not only by the giant state corporations whose names dominate official propaganda but also by a network of specialised research institutes that quietly develop the technologies upon which modern weapons depend. Amongst the most important of these is the Polyus Research Institute, formally the M. F. Stelmakh Polyus Scientific Research Institute, an organisation whose work spans quantum electronics,