Григорий Явлинский:

Пора уже признать, что ничего фантастического в проекте Большой Европы от Лиссабона до Владивостока нет. На самом деле, это предложение продолжить путь, начатый европейскими странами после завершения Второй мировой войны.

Guardian:

Sánchez said a government’s overriding duty was ‘to protect and improve the lives of its citizens, not to manipulate or profit from global conflicts’. Photograph: Jon Nazca/Reuters

“It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this duty use the smokescreen of war to hide their failure and, in the process, line the pockets of a select few – the same ones as always; the only ones who profit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles,” he said.

Then came the lines: “It is naive to believe that democracies or respect between nations can spring from ruins. Or to think that practising blind and servile obedience is a form of leadership … We will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world and that is also contrary to our values ​​and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”

…

It is from Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, however, that Europe has seen rhetoric most sharply differing from Sánchez’s. On Sunday, as he prepared to head to Washington, Merz struck a remarkably conciliatory note in a statement for the cameras at his chancellery in Berlin.

“Categorising the events [in Iran] under international law will have relatively little effect,” Merz stated. “Therefore, this is not the time to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their goals without being able to actually achieve them ourselves.”

U.S. Secretary of War Hegseth:

Starting last night and to be completed in a few days, in under a week, the two most powerful Air Forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies, uncontested airspace. I hope all the folks watching understand what uncontested airspace and complete control means. It means we will fly all day, all night, day and night finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders, flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over.

And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.

SF Gate:

“An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon news briefing.

One of the last articles Stalin ever read was A. A. Poletaev’s ‚V. I. Lenin and the American Workers Movement‘, published in a 1952 issue of Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History) devoted to Lenin.

Poletaev’s article seems to have been the only one that Stalin read in that issue of the journal and the first passage he marked was a 1907 citation from Lenin on the characteristics of the ‚Anglo-American workers‘ movement‘. There were four, and Stalin, as he often did, went to the trouble of numbering them: the fact that the proletariats of these two countries had no important social-national democratic tasks to fulfil; the complete subordination of the proletariat to bourgeois policy; the sectarianism and isolation of the socialist movement; and the lack of support for the left in elections.

—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 169-170.

Volodymyr Ishchenko in the New Statesman:

The four years of the Russia-Ukraine war have laid bare a profound crisis of knowledge regarding Ukraine, Russia, the post-Soviet region and the world at large. This epistemological failure is manifest in the way so many experts have been systematically wrong on virtually every major development – not merely military, but socio-political, economic and international. We witnessed the initial shock of invasion and erroneous forecasts of a swift Russian victory, followed by equally flawed expectations of inevitable Ukrainian triumph, internal Russian fragility and unwavering Western support. Analysts systematically overestimated Ukrainian unity and resilience while underestimating Russia’s authoritarian consolidation, blinding themselves to the deep-seated crisis of liberal democracy and the political fragmentation of Western elites.

These were not merely individual misjudgements, collective conformism or the by-product of war propaganda. Rather, they revealed fundamental flaws in our grand narratives of post-Soviet transformation. Neither the teleology of “democratisation” anticipated since 1989, nor the “decolonisation” buzzword embraced since 2022, nor the cyclical models of patronal politics could predict the grim reality looming in early 2026. The war revealed and escalated fundamental national, regional and global crises. It has also shattered our basic interpretive frameworks about what is happening and what to expect next. Ukraine had served as a broken mirror for a disintegrating world sliding into a frightening, unknown future.