Monday 27 July 2026 Politics rewards conviction. Reality, however, has a persistent habit of challenging it. Public life is filled with figures who have built careers upon unwavering certainty, only to discover that events witnessed firsthand possess a remarkable capacity to unsettle assumptions formed at a distance. Laura Loomer’s recent visit to Kyiv, and the subsequent moderation of her rhetoric towards Ukraine, offers an intriguing illustration of this phenomenon. For yea

Monday 27 July 2026 For much of the war, Ukraine’s long-range strikes inside Russia concentrated upon the arteries of military power: oil refineries, ammunition depots, airfields, radar installations and factories producing weapons. These targets were selected because they directly sustained Russia’s capacity to wage war. More recently, however, the battlefield has expanded into another sphere entirely: the infrastructure underpinning everyday Russian commerce. The repeated a

Sunday 26 July 2026 Wars have always depended upon communications. From mounted couriers and semaphore towers to telegraph wires, encrypted radio transmissions and fibre-optic cables, the side able to transmit information more quickly and more securely has usually enjoyed a decisive advantage. The war in Ukraine has elevated this timeless military principle into a new technological age, in which satellite internet has become as strategically important as ammunition, fuel or a

Sunday 26 July 2026 The latest forecasts from the Central Bank of Russia mark an important moment in the evolution of the Russian wartime economy. Having revised expected economic growth for 2026 down to a range of between zero and one per cent while simultaneously increasing its inflation forecast to between six and seven per cent, the Bank has acknowledged a combination of stagnating output and renewed price pressures that presents one of the most difficult policy environme