Tuesday 7 July 2026 Wars often strengthen authoritarian governments. They rally populations around the flag, justify emergency powers and encourage citizens to subordinate personal grievances to national survival. Yet when the fighting stops, societies frequently return to unresolved domestic questions with renewed determination. In Iran, the cessation of hostilities with the United States appears to have coincided with another visible stage in a social transformation that be

Tuesday 7 July 2026 The privatisations of the 1990s were once regarded as one of the defining features of post-Soviet Russia. Vast industrial empires, ports, airports, banks, mines and manufacturing companies passed from state ownership into private hands, often in chaotic circumstances and at prices that bore little resemblance to their intrinsic value. Whatever their flaws, those reforms created an economic settlement that endured for more than three decades. Today that set

By Matthew Parish Monday 6 June 2026 The buses still arrive on time, or near enough that nobody remarks upon the difference. A woman buys black bread, counts her change, folds it twice into a purse already thinning at the seams. Outside, another warning starts, its tired metallic rise and fall,less like alarm than something practised into habit. Heads incline,then lift again. There is shopping to be done. The cafés wipe their tables clean. Children chase a punctured ballbetwe

Monday 6 July 2026 For much of the post-Soviet era, Russia’s stand-up comedy clubs represented an unusual pocket of freedom. While television became increasingly dominated by state-approved entertainment and carefully choreographed patriotism, small comedy venues in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities offered audiences something more authentic. Young comedians joked about relationships, corruption, bureaucracy, provincial life and, occasionally, politics. Th

Monday 6 July 2026 Most people never think about the operating system running beneath their computers, telephones or internet servers. It simply works, quietly managing hardware, memory, storage and communications while applications perform the visible tasks that users actually care about. Yet occasionally researchers discover a flaw so deep inside the operating system that it reminds us how much of modern civilisation depends upon software that almost nobody ever sees. The n

Monday 6 June 2026 Politics rewards certainty far more readily than it rewards reflection. Public figures who change their minds are routinely accused of inconsistency, opportunism or weakness. Yet history also demonstrates that the most successful statesmen have often been those willing to adjust their judgments as circumstances evolve. The recent evolution in United States Vice President JD Vance’s assessment of Ukraine’s military prospects appears to belong to this more co