Greece will veto Turkish defence contractors’ participation in European SAFE programmes with European defence industries, unless Turkey drops a 30 year-old threat of war against Greece. The EU supports the Greek position. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Ukraine has continued a highly successful, two-pronged strategy to choke off fuel supplies to the Russian economy and military, and to choke off Russian revenues from energy exports. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Greece is pursuing a transport, energy and data corridor from Alexandroupolis to Odesa as part of a vision to rebuild Ukraine and strengthen economic and military resilience in Southeast Europe. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Ukrainian defenders reclaimed 62 sq km of territory in Donetsk during August, foiling Russian attacks, but warns they are preparing new assaults. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on September 6 announced a €1.6 billion package of tax cuts affecting more than four million taxpayers - essentially all working Greeks - hoping to stave off the populism plaguing Western democracies. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Beijing postures as a neutral mediator, but it has materially and politically backed Russia’s war and profits from it. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/...

Greece’s small businesses continue to provide 90 percent of jobs as multinationals are turned away by lengthy court procedures, a bloated state bureaucracy, lack of meritocracy which exposes them to costly political favours, and an absence of the rule of law. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Putin lieutenants inflated Russia’s war record ahead of his trip to China. Meanwhile Ukraine caused genuine injury to his economic backbone. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Russia is not making much progress in Donetsk, where Ukraine has reprioritised defence in light of Putin’s demand that the unoccupied part of the territory be handed over. Ukraine is answering with a barrage on Russia’s refineries. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Divers exploring the wreck of the Britannic in Greek waters have discovered clues about why its sister ship, the Titanic, sank in the north Atlantic. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Since assuming office, Trump has veered closer to Russian positions on Ukraine than European. Two summits on August 15 and 18 pushed him further in that direction. Europe still relies on the US for security while transitioning to autonomy, but time is running out. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Salamis cemented the Athenian people into a democratic state with a sense of public purpose. Everyone was needed to man the navy & army. Its political unity was a threat to Persia & Sparta, who colluded to defeat it. Beware, democracies, of foreign malign influence. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

As Putin and Trump prepare to meet in Alaska, Putin is intensifying his ground assaults on Ukraine and expanding his army at a rate of a division every two months. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

There are at least five good reasons why Germany should distinguish between reparations, which it considers settled, and an occupation-era loan it extracted from the Bank of Greece in 1941-44, which constitutes intra-EU debt and should be repaid. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

The German occupation of Greece ended 81 years ago. Berlin still refuses to discuss an occupation-era loan extracted from the Bank of Greece, considering it a settled reparations issue. Experts say it is a sovereign debt separate from reparations. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

After a 16-month battle, Russia finally overran a key high ground in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, and claimed to have laid siege to Kupyansk in the north. Now he eyes Ukraine’s ‘fortress belt’ of cities in the east. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Two remarkable books on the Greeks reveal that soft power preserved them as a nation during periods when they failed at political unity. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

The US sought to formally position itself as Europe’s biggest seller of protection and energy security following a $750bn trade ‘deal’ on Sunday July 27. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Turkey has said it won’t respect marine nature preserves Greece announced on July 21, and has threatened to launch rival environmental projects challenging Greek sovereignty in the Aegean Sea. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Week 178 in the Ukraine war: Europe passed an 18th raft of sanctions severing all energy imports from Russia, is working to deliver the defences Ukraine needs to deny Russia access to its airspace, and is proposing to quintuple its confederal defence budget. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Henry Kissinger, Adnan Menderes and the vindictive Harold MacMillan all had something to do with enabling Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus 51 years ago, but it was Greek and Greek-Cypriot errors that allowed their efforts to succeed. johntpsaropoulos.substack.com/p/the-road-t...

Henry Kissinger, Adnan Menderes and the vindictive Harold MacMillan all had something to do with enabling Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus 51 years ago, but it was Greek and Greek-Cypriot errors that allowed their efforts to succeed. johntpsaropoulos.substack.com/p/the-road-t...

Libya’s Halifa Haftar threatens to support ratification of a maritime delimitation with Turkey which Europe has called illegal. At the same time, refugee flows from Libya are reaching Crete in challenging numbers. Is Haftar behind this, too, and what does he want? open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

With the announced sale this week of $10bn of US weapons to Europe, the continent has become Ukraine’s main sponsor in its war against Russia’s invasion. The US has become a beneficiary of that war, without an ideological standpoint. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Libya’s Halifa Haftar threatens to support ratification of a maritime delimitation with Turkey which Europe has called illegal. At the same time, refugee flows from Libya are reaching Crete in challenging numbers. Is Haftar behind this, too, and what does he want? open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Last week’s NATO summit did not bring the US back among the countries helping Ukraine militarily, but secretary general Mark Rutte revealed European allies have stepped up their aid to keep Ukraine in the fight. Meanwhile Putin confessed he wants all of Ukraine. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

After blowing up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018, Trump finally blew up Iran’s secret nuclear sites as well. Will he stop there? Two regional wars are growing under the peacemaker president. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

With the Trump administration no longer interested in sanctioning Russia or helping Ukraine, the EU has accelerated both. On the chopping block are Europe’s last remaining €22bn in oil & gas purchases, a fifth of its pre-war energy purchases. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Greece has announced the creation of the South Cyclades marine protected area, a curtailment of its original vision for a South Aegean park stretching to the Dodecanese. It is a loss for the environment and a loss for international law to Turkish coercion. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Ukraine kept up the pressure on Russian airfields and war production in the past week, following its highly successful Spiderweb operation that destroyed Russian strategic bombers on June 1. Russia responded with its biggest yet air raids on Ukrainian cities. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

The EU is stiffening its directive on returns of non-legally resident migrants. It relies on coercion to persuade people to leave voluntarily, because forced returns are legally and practically difficult. Greece, is advocating even stiffer prison terms than the EU. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

A day after losing up to 40 irreplaceable strategic bombers and a $500mn surveillance plane to a Ukrainian special op 4,000km inside Russia, Russia presented Ukraine with the same terms of capitulation as in March 2022, when its troops were in the outskirts of Kyiv. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Greece is reportedly about to make two announced marine parks a reality, almost doubling its marine protected areas to 30% of territorial waters, in line with UN goals. It says these will not be paper parks, but properly monitored and policed. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Russia and Ukraine are to meet for a second round of talks on Monday, but the outlook is grim. Russia accompanied the 1,000-man POW exchange it proposed with its largest strikes against Ukraine’s cities, and refused to submit its ceasefire plan ahead of talks. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

This is the size of the “buffer zone” Dmitry Medvedev deems may be necessary to protect Russia from Ukraine. It seems entirely fair, given the temerity with which the country defended itself after Russia invaded it.

America is now in a similar position to Greece in 1915, fighting to preserve its democracy against a cynical élite. King Konstantine didn’t believe the Entente could win in 1915, and Trump doesn’t believe the Ukrainians can win now. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Russia questioned Ukrainian sovereignty and undermined the authority of its president as they engaged in their first direct talks since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, creating suspicion that Moscow is laying the groundwork to wriggle out of any agreement. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine may soon be underway, but Ukraine’s economic recovery will be hobbled unless the EU fast-tracks Ukraine’s membership and provides hundreds of billions in insurance and investment, experts tell Al Jazeera. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/...

Ukraine’s European allies are considering the possibility of using their air forces to defend the country’s western skies from drone and missile attacks without the help of the United States, sources familiar with the talks tell Al Jazeera. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/...

It is a conceit of smaller nations to see themselves as pivotal at particular moments in world affairs through the influence they exert on the great and powerful states. This sentiment was on display at the 16th Conference on Baltic Studies in Cambridge. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Moscow walked back from its own offer of direct talks with Ukraine this week as Russian forces made creeping advances through Ukraine’s east, revealing that there is no appetite for a ceasefire or a peace in the Kremlin. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Moscow walked back from its own offer of direct talks with Ukraine this week as Russian forces made creeping advances through Ukraine’s east, revealing that there is no appetite for a ceasefire or a peace in the Kremlin. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Self-production capacity by Greek households, businesses and farms is approaching the 1GW mark, but the grid has refused to connect more than half of all applicants, harming decarbonisation, social fairness and strategic decentralization of large-scale production. open.substack.com/pub/johntpsa...

Long-distance strikes between Russia and Ukraine came to a halt for 30 hours on April 19-20, and Zelenskyy suggested extending it, expanding it into the general ceasefire he and Trump proposed in March. Putin rejected the offer. johntpsaropoulos.substack.com/p/putin-tant...

Grateful for this generous and insightful review of Frieze Frame in the TLS: the-tls.co.uk/classics/fri...

Ukrainian sources are reporting that, as a result of several massive secondary explosions, the 51st GRAU depot and its 200,000 tons of ammunition was virtually destroyed. #OSINT

Robert Reich calls for a rolling series of national strikes of labour and consumption. open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

OK, interview today about the new book (Frieze Frame), admin, pome tinkering, reading, translation. (Bascially, all the things!) Coffee.

Oxford area folks: www.lmh.ox.ac.uk/events/dead-...