The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 triggered the global crisis of trust and security. It led to Trump’s presidency in 2016, Brexit in 2020, new invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gaza war in 2023, and Iran war in 2026. The retreat from Crimea will start the unwinding of the crisis

Feed: "New Statesman" By: Alexander Etkind on Thursday, May 7, 2026

The 14 points signed in Versailles? — Wrong historical analogy. Woodrow Wilson was incomparably smarter, and his advisers too. And this why the next war started decades later

Trump has offered us a profound insight into conflict resolution: All you have to do to get your enemy to stop fighting is to give him everything he wants and ask for nothing in exchange.

Wednesday Friends #2 @sunniedayye.bsky.social @neverstopthefight.bsky.social @wicked-lizzie.bsky.social @eddsmitty.bsky.social @pauhawk.bsky.social @barskin.bsky.social @frozenborderline.bsky.social @spotonthesun.bsky.social @thecaffeinator.bsky.social @jbertuglia.bsky.social

Russia is trying to bribe European politicians

Among all the components of national and regional military-industrial systems, refineries are the most vulnerable. The states subjected to petroaggression can always count on this vulnerability – the Achilles heel of the petrostate. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

🤭 The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is opening to a surreal backdrop as a massive fire rages at a nearby oil terminal.

Our new article about refineries, the global crisis, and the Critical Theory of Oil: kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

The Ukrainian decision to double down on drone warfare, from the battlefield, to mid range and long range strike, and not to draft all of its young men to make infantry, will be seen by historians as one of the most important decisions in 19th-21st century warfare.

they are clearly experimenting www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/b...

The UN General Assembly voted to adopt a landmark resolution which will advance implementation of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on climate change and state responsibility, today. The resolution passed with 141 votes in favour, 8 against and 28 abstentions.

I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia. Russia has claimed that its economy grew by around 13 percent between 2020 and 2024, but by measuring nighttime luminosity we estimate that the economy contracted by around 8 percent during this period. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/o...

amazing historical text of 1939 about Nazism, Stalinism, homosexuality and “degeneracy” — we published it from the archive, with my extended introduction and Mecacci’s annotations. We have it now in Italian and Russian — we need publishers for English, German, etc

Theodore Roosevelt: The one thing I won't do is to bluff when I cannot make good; to bluster and threaten and then fail to take the action if my words need to be backed up.

Another “temporary extension” to allow Putin to profit from Trump’s war.

FFF: Fossil Fuel Fascism. A great article about the central issue of our time. Do not miss a great joke about America, in the middle www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives. Henry Kissinger

No, there is no ‘straight Kissinger’ — not even a hint at an attempt to make China stop supporting Russia. Xi will not save Trump from his suicidal war, and Trump will not save Putin from his. Let them go, and the rest is memory — curses and pain of future generations

Any hope that this huge American group in Beijing will do a straight Kissinger rather than reverse one, which some had been talking about a lot, and then chose to forget? This would be so nice indeed

Excellent article. 👇 By undermining the international rules based order in pursuit of a neo-Russian Empire, Putin has unleashed forces he cannot control which will end up both destroying him and his imperial delusions. Russia is living on adrenalin and anger... but it has no future.

Putin did not create Trumpism, but Putin got there first. For some reason, Trump has not shown any trace of an anxiety of influence, nor did Putin claim his intellectual rights. This is, in fact, the only mystery that still remains to be solved. www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

Ivan Krastev: “the greatest achievement of May 8th was that Europeans collectively found the courage to imagine a future different from the present — and different from the past” Excellent speech: iwm.at/news/all-europ….

My article in the New Statesman www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

How it started, how it's going. Screw these unrealistic realists.

“That once seemed unthinkable.” Talk for yourself guys, and apologize —you the so called Russia experts deemed it unthinkable. Many others, including me (here and elsewhere), predicted that since 2022

For my Dutch friends www.groene.nl/artikel/de-r...

Written about a year ago

The Old Oil Order is collapsing. Strait of Ormus, Baltic Sea, Red Sea are its geographical knots, and they are bursting. Hyper-concentration, petro-aggression, and transit-obsession are the structural festures. Climate and wars will make survival of this oil-based order plainly unsustainable

Amazing clip — all this arrogance and stupidity in few seconds

you cannot threaten the free world and lead it at the same time. No nation can match American might, but for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It beats in Kyiv www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/o...

NEW: Pope Leo XIV told the world’s press today that the Catholic Church’s moral imagination has long been too narrowed to sexual ethics — and that war, migration, and human dignity are the “much greater, more important issues” of our time.

Anita Orban (no relation to Viktor the loser) — she is said to be the new foreign minister of Hungary — wrote back in 2008: the Kremlin since 1991 has systematically used Russian energy companies as players in a neo-mercantilist foreign policy designed to further Russia's neo-imperial ambitions

And for the world. What has happened in Budapest will soon occur in Washington. They have no guts anymore, these clones-clowns. It is domino, stupid

Now based in Vienna, Etkind described the war in Ukraine as a ‘special operation’ against modernity itself. The war was not only about territory or identity. It was against an emerging world shaped by climate awareness, justice and energy transition. weeklyword.eu/en/reflectio...

My congratulations to @radchenko.bsky.social, who has added this symbolic act to his many real achievements. A wonderful confession, a historic monument to our pathetic time www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Well done, thanks!

At least he understands it

Europe is having energy crisis because it failed to decarbonize fast enough to avoid it. And Europe has failed because its enemies — Putin, Orban, Trump, and oil lobbies — flood the continent with deception and violence. Dikes are too low and flimsy, which makes the catastrophe imminent

Book launch today in Amsterdam, Spui25, 17.00

How does our analysis of geopolitics change when we employ the Anthropocene as our lens? Looking forward to discussing the Dutch translation of Russia Against Modernity with @sashaetkind.bsky.social and Simone Peek tomorrow at Spui25 in Amsterdam. Come join us! spui25.nl/programma/ru...

Ivan Krastev noted that the Cold War didn't go hot because both sides believed strongly that the future was on their side. In the conflict today, he said, major players do not possess the conviction that the power of the future is on their side. www.ceu.edu/news/2026-03...

“Reading is so sexy,” popstars say in this article. “Clever is the new cool” www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026...

"That’s an admission of enormous weakness," Krugman said. "The Administration is not willing to accept pain as part of this war. They’re willing to drop bombs and all of that, but they’re not willing to shut off the revenue flow to the Iranian government."

Zelenskyy in London: The regimes in Russia and Iran are brothers in hatred – and that is why they are brothers in weapons. And we want regimes built on hatred to never win – in anything.

An interesting chart. It looks like any business decline, but most professions recovered after 2008 and 2019. Will this one recover after 2024?

This 👇 www.theguardian.com/world/commen...