Tuesday 10 February 2026 The war in Ukraine is often compared, sometimes lazily, with the wars of the Balkans in the 1990s. The analogy is tempting. Both involve the violent unravelling of imperial legacies, both are fought on Europe’s periphery yet shape the continent’s moral centre, and both have produced a familiar vocabulary of ethnic cleansing, frozen conflicts, peace conferences and weary diplomats insisting that there is ‘no military solution’. For Ukraine the Balkans

Tuesday 10 February 2026 By Oleh Zhyntychka In May 2022, at the age of 28, I lost a significant portion of my savings due to fraud (which later caused me to have a problem with accommodation included), which put me out of commission for a long time. It was an incredibly stressful experience: not only did the constant air raid alarms cause anxiety (just imagine waking up in the middle of the night and running to hide because a missile could hit the house you live in at any mom

Thursday 10 February 2026 For much of the past decade Europe’s energy debate was framed as a moral contest: hydrocarbons were yesterday’s problem and the future belonged to wind, solar and electrification. The shock of 2022 did not repeal that logic, but it did expose how quickly slogans melt when households cannot pay their bills and factories cannot plan their costs. What is now emerging, across several corners of the continent, is a pragmatic, sometimes awkward recalibrati

Tuesday 10 February 2026 The question of whether United States President Donald Trump may be suffering from diminished mental capacity due to age is both politically sensitive and medically complex. It touches upon issues of cognition, leadership, and the constitutional mechanisms by which the fitness of a president may be assessed. To consider the matter fairly, one must distinguish between partisan rhetoric and observable evidence, and must also take account of the natural

Tuesday 10 February 2026 Washington and Tbilisi used to speak to one another in the shorthand of certainties. Georgia was she who had been invaded by Russia in 2008, she who hosted Western training missions, she who wanted NATO and European Union membership, she who offered the West a strategic vantage point on the Black Sea and the Caucasus. For the United States Georgia was not merely a small state with a large security dilemma; she was a proof-of-concept that a post-Soviet