Tuesday 9 June 2026 In recent days controversy has erupted in Russia following statements by Moscow’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, Olga Yaroslavskaya, suggesting that children as young as twelve should be permitted to work during school holidays and that Soviet-style labour camps for young people should be revived. The proposals have emerged amidst an increasingly severe labour shortage in the Russian Federation, one driven by a combination of demographic decline, military

Tuesday 9 June 2026 The European Union’s proposed twenty-first package of sanctions against Russia, unveiled in early June 2026, represents another stage in a sanctions campaign that has become one of the most extensive economic coercion efforts in modern history. More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Brussels faces a difficult challenge: maintaining pressure upon the Russian state while adapting to the increasingly sophisticated methods Moscow h

Tuesday 9 June 2026 As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth summer campaigning season, the character of the front line has changed in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a year ago. The significant Russian advances that characterised much of 2024 and parts of 2025 have slowed markedly. While fighting remains intense across the approximately 1,200-kilometre front, recent battlefield developments suggest that neither side currently possesses the operational capac

Tuesday 9 June 2026 Albert Einstein is reputed to have observed that one of the great difficulties faced by intelligent people is that less intelligent people often regard them as strange. Whether he expressed the sentiment in precisely those words is less important than the enduring truth concealed within it. Throughout history, societies have often treated their most original minds with suspicion, irritation or ridicule long before they were prepared to admire them. The phe

Tuesday 9 January 2026 For most of the post-Soviet period, one of the Kremlin’s most important economic achievements was persuading Russians to trust banks. The memory of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the inflationary chaos of the 1990s and repeated banking crises had left a deep cultural suspicion of financial institutions. Yet over the last two decades Russians gradually deposited increasing amounts of money into banks, attracted by rising incomes, modern electronic payment