Friday 10 July 2026 The NATO summit held in Ankara this week may ultimately be remembered less for dramatic declarations than for confirming a profound transformation already under way. Throughout the Cold War and the decades that followed, NATO rested upon a relatively simple geopolitical foundation: overwhelming American military predominance combined with European economic power. The Ankara summit suggested that this formula is evolving into something more complex. The Uni

Friday 10 July 2026 Few western observers have spent as much time studying Vladimir Putin, or have paid as high a personal price for doing so, as Bill Browder. Once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, Browder transformed from enthusiastic capitalist into Putin’s most persistent international critic after the imprisonment and death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow prison in 2009. Since then, Browder has devoted his life to exposing corruption within t

Friday 10 July 2026 For much of the twentieth century, western democracies liked to think of themselves as the political antithesis of oligarchy. Governments were chosen through competitive elections, public institutions were constrained by law and power was presumed to derive ultimately from the electorate rather than from inherited wealth or private fortunes. Yet in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, this distinction has become increasingly difficult to sustai

Friday 10 July 2026 The Russian Armed Forces present one of the great paradoxes of modern military history. They belong to a state possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, vast natural resources, a long military tradition and an immense defence budget by international standards. They inherit the mythology of victory in the Second World War, celebrate generations of celebrated generals and possess a sophisticated arms industry capable of producing advanced missiles, sub

Friday 10 July 2026 The story of Izolyatsiya is one of the most disturbing episodes of Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine. It is a story that begins not with soldiers or prisons but with art, culture and the optimism of an independent Ukraine. The transformation of a celebrated cultural centre into an alleged torture prison encapsulates the broader tragedy of the Donbas since 2014: places built to encourage creativity and freedom have been repurposed into instruments of r