Geopolitics

Why Central Asia is turning to Putin for nuclear power Central Asia is running out of power. The region’s Soviet-era grid was built for a different century, and a booming population is pushing it past capacity. Blackouts and rationing have become a seasonal reality from the Kazakh steppe to the Fergana Valley. Now the region’s […]

Drone relayers off: Ukraine’s diplomatic triumph over Belarus On June 19, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Alexander Lukashenko a simple choice: dismantle the relay stations on Belarusian territory that Russia was using to guide drone strikes against Ukraine, or Ukraine would do it for him. Three days later, the relay stations went silent. On June 24, […]

Europe is asking a question it thought it had settled in 1949. If the American nuclear umbrella is no longer reliable, can France and Britain hold it up alone? The question is no longer theoretical. It has moved from the back rooms of Brussels into public debate. And the answers coming back are not comforting. […]

Both sides say the shooting has stopped. The question is for how long. The United States and Iran have agreed to “stand down” after a weekend of escalating tit-for-tat strikes that brought the Persian Gulf closer to open war than at any point since the two countries began negotiating in the spring. A US official […]

An unidentified 79-year-old man was granted exclusive early access to Eli Lilly’s most promising experimental drug this spring. The drug, retatrutide, is still unauthorised by the FDA and not available to the public. Only one person got it. The identity of that person has not been confirmed. But the circumstances have led a number of […]

Putin Rejects Mutual Limits on Long-Range Strikes, Fuel Crisis Suffers Vladimir Putin has rejected a Ukrainian proposal to mutually halt long-range strikes, a decision that leaves his own country absorbing punishing damage to its energy infrastructure while his forces continue their bombardment of Ukrainian cities. The contradiction is stark. On the same day he said […]

China has added 20 Japanese entities to its export control blacklist, barring Chinese companies from supplying them with dual-use items without government approval. The list includes Japan’s National Institute for Defence Studies and subsidiaries of Mitsubishi, Komatsu, and Fujitsu. Beijing’s commerce ministry said the measures target what it called Japan’s “neo-militarism and remilitarisation.” The move […]

Israel acts on three fronts at once. On Monday its aircraft struck southern Lebanon, two days after the government signed a US-brokered framework agreement meant to end hostilities there. On the same day its bulldozers entered the village of Zububa in the occupied West Bank and pushed over olive trees that have stood for generations. […]

The contradictions of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine keep piling up. The latest is the fuel crisis. For months, the Kremlin told Russians everything was fine. For months, the message from state media was that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries were a nuisance, not a problem. Then the numbers arrived, and they told a different […]

The Democratic Republic of Congo has filed a case against Rwanda at the International Court of Justice, accusing its neighbor of three decades of abuses in the country’s east. It is the third time Kinshasa has tried this. The first case was withdrawn in 2001. The second was dismissed in 2006 because the court ruled […]