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I’m in London today, to appear on The Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast and to meet with key British supporters of Ukrainian victory. —JP Lindsley

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UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

• Kyiv Reinforces the North—Ukraine is reinforcing its northern defenses after intelligence pointed to Russian planning for possible offensive operations in the Chernihiv–Kyiv direction. Zelenskyy says Kyiv has reviewed five Russian scenarios for expanding the war from the north, while Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi says Russia’s General Staff is actively calculating offensive options there.
  
  No movement of Russian or Belarusian troops has been detected directly at the border, but Ukraine is taking the pressure seriously, especially because Belarus already served as the launchpad for Russia’s failed 2022 drive on Kyiv. The military response will be paired with diplomatic pressure on Minsk, which remains Moscow’s most obedient accomplice and is already hosting Russian nuclear theatre

• Moscow Threatens the Baltics—Russia is accusing Latvia and other Baltic states of preparing to let Ukraine launch military drones from their territory, warning that NATO membership would not protect them from retaliation. Latvia called the allegation “pure fiction,” summoned Russia’s acting envoy, and repeated that its territory and airspace are not being used for attacks on Russia, while Ukraine also rejected the claim.
  
  The timing is not random: the Baltics have faced drone alerts for three days in a row now, including Latvian air-threat warnings in the capital and near the Russian border, as well as a separate incident in which a drone entered Estonian airspace and was shot down by a NATO jet.

• Ukraine Keeps Drilling Russia’s Oil Nerve—Drones struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region overnight, with locals reporting explosions, fire and thick smoke above the plant. Syzran is one of Rosneft’s important refining sites in the Volga region and has already been hit before, which makes the message fairly plain: Ukraine is not firing randomly into the Russian map, but repeatedly going after the fuel infrastructure that feeds the Russian war machine. The broader campaign is starting to bite. Nearly all major refineries in central Russia have reportedly halted or sharply reduced production after recent Ukrainian drone strikes, affecting facilities that account for a substantial share of Russia’s gasoline and diesel output.

• The Refinery War Starts Working—Ukraine’s drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure is now doing more than producing dramatic fireballs: it has pushed much of central Russia’s refining system into standstill or reduced output. Major facilities hit include Kirishi, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan and Yaroslavl, with affected plants accounting for more than 30 percent of Russia’s gasoline output and about a quarter of its diesel production. The combined refining capacity that has fully or partly stopped exceeds 83 million metric tons a year, roughly a quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity, while Moscow has already imposed a gasoline export ban until the end of July.

• Trump Sends Havana a Floating Reminder—The USS Nimitz carrier strike group has entered the Caribbean as Washington turns up the pressure on Cuba’s communist regime. The strike group includes the carrier, its air wing of F/A-18E Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and support aircraft, plus the destroyer USS Gridley and the oiler USNS Patuxent, enough firepower to make “diplomatic messaging” feel a little less metaphorical. The move follows the Justice Department’s indictment of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro over the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft, while Marco Rubio has backed the U.S. fuel blockade and blamed Cuba’s chronic blackouts on Havana’s own failed system.

• Moscow Waves the Warheads. NATO Waves Back.—NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned that any Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine would trigger a “devastating” response, after Russia and Belarus launched joint drills practising the movement and preparation of nuclear-capable systems. Moscow says the exercises are defensive and pre-planned, which is exactly what Moscow says whenever it wants everyone to stare at the mushroom cloud painted on the wall. The drills include Belarusian missile units handling Iskander-M systems, while Russia has released footage of warhead-related movements, launch preparations and tactical nuclear choreography meant to unsettle Europe’s political class.

• Iran Turns Hormuz Into a Toll Booth—Ships trying to escape the Gulf now face a layered clearance system run through Iranian institutions and the IRGC, with vessels vetted for links to the U.S. or Israel, routed past island checkpoints, sometimes inspected by speedboats, and in some cases allegedly charged “security” or navigation fees for safe passage.
  
  One Iraqi crude tanker bound for Vietnam turned a normal five-hour transit into a two-day ordeal after moving along an Iranian-designated route and being stopped near Hormuz Island; other shippers have reportedly paid more than $150,000 to get through. Before the war, roughly 120 to 140 ships crossed the strait daily; between April 18 and May 6, fewer than 60 made it through.

• Musk Takes Mars to Market—SpaceX has unveiled its IPO filing, aiming for what could become the first U.S. market debut above $1 trillion and a potential valuation of around $1.75 trillion. The business case is part hard reality, part Muskian religion: Starlink is already a profit engine, generating $1.19 billion in operating profit in the first quarter, while the broader company still posted a $1.94 billion operating loss on $4.69 billion in revenue, dragged down heavily by its AI division.

• The Robot That Becomes a Cell Tower—Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has codified Pliushch, a one-ton unmanned ground vehicle built by Robotic Complexes to serve as a mobile communications relay, mesh-network node, reconnaissance platform or carrier for SIGINT and electronic-warfare equipment. Its signature feature is a retractable 9.8-meter mast that expands coverage across difficult terrain, helping units keep drones, sensors and operators connected where distance, trenches, forests and Russian jamming make normal links unreliable.
  
  The platform can carry up to 40 kg, move at 12 km/h, operate out to 40 km, and stay hidden in standby mode for more than four days. Its data links can run through MIL ERLS, Starlink or fiber-optic lines. It is already in frontline use, reportedly takes about a minute to deploy, and costs around $33,000.

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BERLIN—Alexander Jag, who worked for years in the security sector in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, including as office director of the international security and consulting firm GLOBAL.AG, does not speak about Russia’s war in the language of fashionable abstractions. He speaks instead about power, legitimacy, morale, history, and civilizational gravity.

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In his reading, Russia is not a rising empire but a declining one, living on borrowed symbols, borrowed myths, and the inertia of fear, while Ukraine is not merely a battlefield but a civilizational hinge, a nation with depth, memory and organic continuity.

Russia underestimates not only Ukrainian military capability, but also Ukrainian psychology.

“The Russians have nothing to offer.”

That is why, he argues, there is no scenario, no universe, in which the Russians can truly win. His central thesis is stark. Russia might still destroy much, terrorize millions, and prolong the war, but it cannot offer an attractive order. “The Russians have nothing to offer,” he says bluntly, and in his view that is the deeper reason why Moscow’s propaganda has increasingly collapsed in occupied and contested regions alike.

The fantasy of the so called Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”) was tested in reality and exposed by reality. In places where Russian speaking Ukrainians once felt nostalgia, familiarity, or at least ambiguity toward Moscow, Russian occupation often arrived with brutality rather than belonging. For Jag, that matters more than any slogan or map, because a state that cannot inspire but only intimidate is already decaying.

If Europe is to survive the century, it must stop speaking and acting like a tired technocracy and begin once more to think like a civilization conscious of its roots.

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This was a mistake. Russia has always been an enemy of Europe.

ODESA—For a brief moment after the Cold War, it seemed possible that Russia might become a normal partner for Europe and the United States. The Soviet Union had collapsed, ideological confrontation appeared to be over, and the dominant belief in Western capitals was that economic cooperation would gradually replace geopolitical rivalry.

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Trade would bind countries together. Energy pipelines would make conflict irrational. Capitalism, many thought, had won.

That belief shaped the decades of Western policy toward Moscow.

Western governments believed economic integration would prevent Russia from maturing into another abomination of a nation.

Looking back today, it is clear how unusual that period actually was. For most of modern history, no one in Europe saw Russia as a dependable, strategic partner. Moscow might have been an ally in one of the many inter-European wars, but only a temporary one at best. Fundamentally however, Russia was a rival power, sometimes even an outright threat to European nations. An imperialistic entity whose ambitions shaped the strategic thinking of nearly every European capital. From the expansion of the Russian Empire across Eastern Europe to the Soviet domination of half the continent during the Cold War, Russia’s relationship with Europe has been defined by competition, not cooperation, at almost every point in history.

Europe ignored early warnings that energy dependence could become strategic vulnerability.

The assumption that this historical pattern had permanently changed emerged only after 1991, when Russia was at its weakest point in a century. The Soviet empire had broken apart, and much like after the fall of the Tsarist empire, the post-Soviet Russian state was struggling with itself, not with its neighbors. Western governments believed that this time around, economic integration would gradually nurture Russia into the Western orbit instead of maturing into another abomination of a nation. If Moscow depended on European markets, it would have a stake in stability.

Energy policy became the centerpiece of this idea. And by threatening to completely cut off Europe’s gas supply just as war broke out in the Middle East, Russia just gave another example of how naïve that idea really was.

Before Russia’s war on Ukraine, Moscow supplied roughly 45 percent of the European Union’s imported gas. The logic behind this arrangement seemed straightforward: Europe needed energy, Russia needed revenue, and mutual dependence would ensure reliability.

What actually happened was very different.

In 2006 and again in 2009, disputes with Ukraine led Moscow to cut gas flows that also affected customers across Europe in the middle of winter.

Russia repeatedly demonstrated that it viewed energy not simply as a commodity but as a political instrument. In 2006 and again in 2009, disputes with Ukraine led Moscow to cut gas flows that also affected customers across Europe in the middle of winter. These crises were early warnings that energy dependence could become strategic vulnerability.

The pattern intensified in the years leading up to the war in Ukraine.

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Russia doesn’t believe in partnerships. Russia believes in servitude. In hindsight, the energy blackmail was inevitable: Russia has never operated within a Western framework of economic thinking.

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UFN’s Lilia Maturo opens a new series on the Kremlin’s oldest weapon—propaganda from Peter to the Patriarch.

MANCHESTER, UK, AND ODESA, UKRAINE—The origins of print news and propaganda in Russia bear an uncanny resemblance to the present day.

Tsar Peter the Great started the country’s first newspaper, Vedomosti, in 1703 as a state-run enterprise over which he had complete editorial control. One of its main aims was to justify the increasing human and monetary cost of the Great Northern War against Sweden. Peter had suffered a number of embarrassing defeats, including the Battle of Narva, in present-day Estonia, in which Russian forces lost to an army just a quarter of its size. This marked the start of nearly 300 years of top-down, government-sponsored media, or propaganda in simpler terms, shaping the minds of the Russian public.

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Little changed under successive tsars, with the three ‘Pillars of Autocracy’—the army, civil service, and Orthodox Church—cementing the state’s iron fist over the flow of information. Anyone who tried to counter the state narrative was imprisoned, exiled, or executed, with Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky being famous examples. Resistance, however, was largely limited to the upper strata of society, as even in the last years of the Russian Empire, more than 60 percent of the population was unable to read.

Religious messaging was gone, and the image of the new Soviet person was literate, hardworking, atheist, and egalitarian.

With the 1917 communist revolutions, messaging shifted but the need for propaganda, especially to drum up support for war, only increased. The new government had the task of fighting a civil war against the White loyalists, putting down an uprising in Central Asia, and projecting an overall image of power at home and abroad. Most importantly, it needed to reinvent how the Russian public saw itself. Religious messaging was gone, and the image of the new Soviet person was literate, hardworking, atheist, and egalitarian.

Stalin himself faded from view after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 denouncing his predecessor’s cult of personality.

The narrative wasn’t always consistent. Religious oppression and atheist messaging was particularly severe during Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s reigns and right before the Union’s collapse in a desperate bid to halt a religious revival, but slowed in the intervening decades.

Cults of personality were also ever changing: Lenin’s almost mythical status was first emphasized during the civil war and early Stalinist period, but quickly faded when Stalin wanted messaging to focus on himself above all. Subsequently, Stalin himself faded from view after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 denouncing his predecessor’s cult of personality. The efforts were so effective that less than 1 percent of the Soviet public in 1988 thought Stalin would be remembered as a major figure of the Soviet era. However, after the next era of propaganda, Stalin had the highest positive rating in Russia of any Russian and Soviet political figures according to a 2012 survey.

For a brief period, the waves of propaganda slowed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Particularly with the rise of the internet, Russians had freer access to information than at any point in history. In fact, according to a 2005 UNESCO report, Russia was home to over 100,000 journalists, the highest number in the world. Even at this point though, state narratives were quickly regaining ground. More than 98 percent of the country accessed television that was fully or majority state-owned. Independent media outlets became more careful about what they covered, as 21 Russian journalists had been murdered since Putin was first elected five years earlier.

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One study found that about a third of Americans actively believe in at least one aspect of Russian disinformation and that more than 99 percent could not identify a set of 10 Russian claims as false.

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Is Spain now seeking to be the new Hungary?

VIENNA—While on Europe’s eastern flank, Ukrainians are fighting and dying to defend the principle that borders are real, that sovereignty is sacred, and that the international order cannot simply be rewritten by those powerful enough to ignore it, Spain has unilaterally welcomed 500,000 undocumented migrants into Europe’s free-travel Schengen zone.

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Last month, Spain’s Council of Ministers approved a royal decree launching what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez calls an “extraordinary regularization process,” which is in essence bureaucrat speak chosen to make something unprecedented sound routine.

Pedro Sánchez is now doing something structurally identical to Orbán, but from the opposite ideological direction.

The result of this decree: Nearly half a million irregular migrants living in Spain will be legalized, handed documents, and, by virtue of those documents, granted the freedom of movement that comes with legal residency in a Schengen country. In theory, this may be a Spanish decision. But in practice, it is a decision made for all of Europe. But, like so often, Europe was never asked.

Half a million people is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the size of a large European city. A state does not absorb a population of that scale into legality and then get to pretend it has merely cleaned up paperwork. This is not an administrative adjustment. It is a political statement, and the statement is clear enough for every European voter to understand: If enough people engage in illegal activity (because that’s what illegal migration is, illegal), and if the political class loses either the will or the capacity to enforce the rules, illegality can eventually be converted into legality by a simple legal trick.

This further undermines the European project because one of Europe’s main problems is legitimacy.

Ukraine is fighting to prove that Europe deserves to live. Spain is working against this principle.

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Here’s part three of Dr. Cemil Kerimoglu's series on the "Russian Religion."

[View Parts One and Two.]

ZURICH—Russia keeps wearing Western forms it cannot inhabit. The Bolshevik Revolution can be seen as the initial stage of Russia shedding its European veneer, or what we can call the Pseudomorphosis imposed by the Nikonian reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church under tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich and more overarching social reforms of Peter I.

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Russian contempt for liberalism is not rooted in moral concern over decadence, but in sheer civilizational hatred of the West.

Today, under Vladimir Putin, Russia continues to distance itself from European norms and values. The next stage in this evolution may be the emergence of a uniquely Russian form of Christianity—a Russian “Gothic Christianity” of sorts, one that is organically suited to the Russian soul. While it is difficult to predict the exact contours this new religious expression will take, a close study of the “Old Believers” could provide some clues. Their practices and beliefs, rooted in a pre-Petrine, pre-Westernized Russia, may offer a glimpse into what a truly indigenous Russian Christianity might look like—and what it means for the West.

For Russia, Ukraine is not a neighbor to be bargained with. It is a heresy to be extinguished.

The liberation of a nascent culture from Pseudomorphosis is often accompanied by intense hatred and ressentiment against the dominant culture under which it was suppressed. This pattern is evident in several historical examples. The rise of Islam, with its ethos of Jihad, was a manifestation of the Middle-Eastern soul freeing itself from the bonds of Graeco-Roman civilization.

Similarly, the Crusades, which coincided with the Great Schism, can be seen as an expression of the Germanic world’s ressentiment against both Islam and the Byzantine Empire, representing the East (i.e., the Middle-Eastern world) under whose shadow the European spirit had long been suppressed. In the Germanic Europe, the Byzantine world was hated as intensely as the Muslim world: After all, the Fourth Crusade was launched against the Byzantine Empire, with the ensuing sack of Constantinople by the crusaders.

Today, as Russia frees itself from its European Pseudomorphosis—a Western shell over its true Muscovite core—it too is entering its own age of Crusades and Jihad, marked by an apocalyptic hatred of Western civilization. The Russian invasion of Ukraine must be understood in this light, as part of a broader historical process. In fact, the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and various Russian political pundits already refer to the war against Ukraine as the Holy War.

In this regard, a deeper analysis of the Russian cult of victory in World War II is illuminating. Many in the West struggle to grasp how Russia—once a key force in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany—now exhibits behaviors strikingly similar to the ideology it helped defeat.

This disconnect arises because Europeans insist on viewing Russians solely from their own perspective. For the West, World War II and everything associated with it was an integral part of its civilizational lifecycle. It was a natural, in a sense, internal family matter for the West.

For Russians, however, that war carries a different meaning entirely. It is remembered not just as a struggle against Nazi Germany, but as a war, a Holy Crusade, against the West itself. Within the Russian mindset, the distinctions between Nazi Germany and the Anglo-Saxons—with whom Russians became allies circumstantially—are therefore blurred.

A common mistake among Western right-wingers is to interpret Russian criticism of liberalism, feminism, or LGBT rights as a shared affinity for traditional European values. This is a dangerous illusion. Russians are not defending European tradition, nor do they have any empathy for Europe.

This is why Russians lump together wildly different things—Nazism, liberalism, feminism, LGBT rights—into a single, undifferentiated category of Western “corruption.” To Western minds, these are distinct and often contradictory worldviews, each tied to specific historical moments in the lifecycle of European Civilization. But for Russians, as civilizational outsiders, such nuance is irrelevant. For them, these are all symptoms of the same “disease”: the West itself.

A common mistake among Western right-wingers is to interpret Russian criticism of liberalism, feminism, or LGBT rights as a shared affinity for traditional European values. This is a dangerous illusion. Russians are not defending European tradition, nor do they have any empathy for Europe. Rather, they are attacking anything and everything that comes from the West.

Only when the Russian World as we know it ceases to exist can Europe finally know peace.

Russian contempt for liberalism is not rooted in moral concern over decadence, but in sheer civilizational hatred of the West. If Europe were more traditional, religious, and family-oriented, Russians would still sneer at it—just as they do at Eastern European nations like Ukraine, Poland, or the Baltic states. These countries remain largely conservative, but that does not shield them from Russian scorn. Instead of accusing them of liberal decadence, Russia brands them as nationalists, fascists or Nazis. The label doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re part of the West.

During the Soviet era, for instance, the main rallying cry against the hated West was not its decadence, as it had yet to manifest the phenomena it does today, but rather “capitalism.” The confrontation was framed as communism versus capitalism. For Russians, however, that dichotomy was not really about between two different economic models.

The nature of the discourse and the whole confrontation ran much deeper. For Russians, “capitalist” was a loaded word, a euphemism representing Westerners themselves and the whole Western Civilization. By counterposing “communism” against “capitalism,” they were, at a deeper level, counterposing Russia against the West. Today, Russians use new labels to insult the West. Instead of decrying “capitalists”, they now decry “globalists,”, “gays,” and “decadents.” But the core message remains the same.

Since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has cast off its artificial European mask and launched a relentless crusade against the West. It took on different forms in different periods, but the substance always remained the same: be it war against Nazism, capitalism, liberalism, LGBT, feminism or trans rights—for Russians they all belong to a single category of Western-originated ills. Putin’s Russia is simply the continuation, and in a way the consummation, of this whole century-long process.

It is precisely within this framework that one should understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

For Russians, unique Ukrainian identity is heretical. Russians therefore will not rest until they eradicate Ukrainian identity.

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Russians have the resources to live like Norwegians. They choose the sty life instead.

BERLIN—Russia could live like Norway. It has the resources, the land, the educated population, and the historical proof that it is capable of technological and scientific excellence. But it does not. And that is not a coincidence.

Russia’s failure to prosperous and pleasant like Norway is the result of a political choice. Modern Russia has chosen militarization over prosperity, war over development, and control over transformation. The consequence is a country that operates far below its potential, while its population pays the price for a system that prioritizes power projection over living standards.

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What is missing is … a model of life that people would actually want to live in and others might even want to emulate.

Back in Soviet times people knew the saying: “We are poor, but at least we are powerful.” Projection of international power and fear was more important for the Kremlin and even for a lot of people, who accepted being poorer than the West in exchange for the illusion of power over huge parts of the world.

The economic gap illustrates this failure with brutal clarity. Russia, with roughly 140 million people, produces around 2.1 trillion dollars in GDP, which translates into approximately 14,000 to 15,000 dollars per capita. Norway, a country of just 5.5 million people, reaches between 85,000 and 95,000 dollars per capita. This is not a small difference, nor is it an inevitable one. It reflects a divergence in how two resource-rich countries chose to organize their economies and societies. One built long-term wealth and stability, while the other extracted enormous value and failed to translate it into broad prosperity. Because in terms of raw potential, Russia is not behind, it is ahead.

Russia is one of the most resource-rich nations on earth, with vast reserves of oil, gas, coal, metals, timber, and freshwater. Entire regions, especially east of the Urals, remain underdeveloped, not because they are unusable, but because their development would require long-term planning, infrastructure investment, and a willingness to think beyond immediate control.

Norway, by contrast, has a far smaller and more concentrated resource base, largely limited to North Sea hydrocarbons. Yet it transformed that limited advantage into a sovereign wealth fund exceeding 1.5 trillion dollars, effectively securing prosperity for future generations.

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And the explanation does not lie in a lack of human capital. This is a country that sent the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, and conducted complex interplanetary missions, including multiple probes to Venus. These achievements required a highly capable scientific and engineering base, and that base did not simply vanish, although much of that base was indeed Ukrainian.

Even today, Russia maintains a solid educational system, particularly in mathematics, physics, and engineering, capable of producing skilled specialists. The idea that Russia lacks the intellectual capacity to build a high-income society is simply wrong. The limitation lies in how that capacity is used.

The scale of Russia’s unrealized prosperity is enormous. It is not a theoretical scenario, but a plausible alternative path that was never taken.

A system built around centralized control of resource revenues has little incentive to distribute wealth broadly or to encourage independent economic development. Diversification remains limited, innovation is constrained by political structures, and long-term growth is subordinated to stability and control. The result is a form of managed underperformance: strong enough to sustain itself, but structurally incapable of reaching its full potential. This becomes even more evident when considering what Russia could realistically achieve. Even a partial convergence with countries like Norway, say, reaching half of its per capita income, would imply 40,000 to 50,000 dollars per capita across a population of over 140 million people. That would represent one of the largest affluent societies in the world. The scale of Russia’s unrealized prosperity is enormous. It is not a theoretical scenario, but a plausible alternative path that was never taken.

What is missing, ultimately, is not capability but direction and more precisely, the absence of a civilizational vision that translates material wealth into a model of life that people would actually want to live in and others might even want to emulate. Norway offers such a model: high living standards, social security, institutional trust, a functioning balance between state and individual. Russia, despite having the raw means to construct something comparable, does not present a similarly coherent or attractive vision. Instead of expanding opportunity, it narrows it, instead of projecting stability, it projects power, and instead of building a future, it manages the present.

What might once have been a question of missed opportunities becomes, over time, a pattern that is difficult to reverse.

Russia’s war on Ukraine just further locks-in managed decline. A system that directs increasing shares of its resources into sustained war, into military production, into strategic confrontation, is structurally moving further away from any path that would lead toward broad prosperity and long-term development. War compresses time horizons, absorbs talent, and hardens political structures. It reduces flexibility precisely where flexibility would be required to change course.

What might once have been a question of missed opportunities becomes, over time, a pattern that is difficult to reverse. The result is a country that continues to carry within itself the potential for a different future, yet simultaneously moves in the opposite direction. Russia could offer its population a high standard of living, a stable economic outlook, and a forward-looking societal model grounded in its immense resources and its still considerable human capital. Instead, it offers endurance, mobilization, and authoritarian control. That is the real cost of this trajectory, not just for Ukraine or Europe, but for Russia itself: a prosperous, livable future remains possible in theory, but will never become reality in practice.

What further weakens this already fragile trajectory is that the alternative Russia claims to offer on a civilizational level does not withstand closer scrutiny either. The narrative of a more traditional, more rooted, more “authentic” society, a society built around Orthodoxy, cultural continuity, and supposedly stronger social cohesion, sounds, at least on the surface, like a countermodel to what is often described as a fragmented and overstretched West.

But in practice, this promise remains largely unfulfilled. Russia faces many of the same structural problems it criticizes elsewhere: demographic decline, high divorce rates, social dislocation, alcoholism, regional inequality, and a noticeable lack of long-term orientation among parts of its population. Migration pressures exist, integration challenges persist, and the idea of a socially cohesive, internally stable, value-driven society begins to fade the closer one looks.

If Russia were offering a genuinely functioning alternative, a society perhaps less wealthy, but more stable, more meaningful, more grounded, one could at least argue that it has chosen a different, coherent path. But even that claim does not hold.

What remains instead is a gap on both levels: economically, the country underperforms relative to its immense potential, and civilizationally, it falls short of the very standards it sets for itself. The promise of being a more traditional, more coherent, even spiritually renewed version of Europe does not materialize in reality. On the contrary, it remains rhetoric without a corresponding societal outcome.

The Kremlin Elite has chosen war and has closed the doors on a brighter future.

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UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

Beware the ‘Ceasefire’ Ruse: For Putin, Victory Day, May 9, is not just commemoration, it is regime liturgy, the annual ceremony where Soviet sacrifice is repackaged into modern Russian obedience.

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He takes office 9 May. Here’s what Washington, Kyiv, Brussels, and Moscow might expect.

ODESA—For a country of its size, measuring just about 10 million people, Hungary’s election on 12 April was closely watched by a disproportionate number of people, from Moscow to Kyiv, from Berlin to Washington. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on the match between Viktor Orbán and his young challenger and former protégé, Péter Magyar.

In a contest so emotionally charged, many people did not bother to look more closely into who Magyar actually is—both sides either celebrated or hated the fact that he is not Viktor Orbán. With his victory now confirmed, it makes sense to unravel the mystery and dive more into Magyar’s history and life.

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Magyar spoke in a language Orbán once mastered but had lost: patriotic, direct, energetic, and unashamed of national feeling.

Orbán, on the other hand, campaigned almost exclusively on anti-Ukrainian and anti-EU fear-mongering.

Contrary to some claims, Péter Magyar is not the liberal messiah many in Brussels would like to imagine, nor was he “planted by the EU,” as some right-wingers claimed. He is something more formidable than that: a conservative correction to a right-wing project that had grown arrogant, corrupt, stale, and slavish to Moscow.

Magyar, whose last name literally means “Hungarian,” is a creature of the very system he just destroyed. Born into a family of lawyers, trained as a lawyer himself, he joined the Fidesz party while still at university. He then spent years moving comfortably inside Orbán’s political ecosystem, worked in Hungary’s diplomatic corps and on EU legislation, later held senior roles in state-linked institutions, and was married to former justice minister Judit Varga.

That background is the basis of the explanation for his rise. He did not beat the Orbán machine by guessing how it functioned. He beat it because he knew exactly where it had grown brittle. His break with Orbán’s world after the 2024 sexual abuse pardon scandal gave Magyar something rare in Hungarian politics: the credibility of an insider turned accuser.

Magyar also outshone Orbán where it mattered most: political energy. Orbán still looked powerful, but he no longer looked alive. He looked like a ruler defending an exhausted court. Magyar looked hungry.

That is what made Magyar more than just another protest candidate. Hungary had seen opposition before, but much of it looked either fragmented, metropolitan, or culturally foreign to the conservative voter base that makes up a large chunk of Hungary’s electorate.

But Magyar did not come from the protest fringe, the NGO class, or the habitual anti-Orbán opposition that spent years shouting at the regime without ever seriously threatening it. On the contrary, he came out of the same broad political soil as Fidesz, spoke a language ordinary Hungarians recognized, and carried himself with the confidence of a man who did not need permission from the old opposition class to enter the arena. And this background also meant voters who had once backed Orbán no longer had to cross the ideological aisle to reject him.

Orbán treated migration as permanent political theater. Magyar seems more likely to treat it as a matter of sovereignty, border control, and social cohesion rather than as an endless spectacle.

Magyar also outshone Orbán where it mattered most: political energy.

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KYIV—This week on Instagram we reached more than 1.6 million accounts: 34.3% in Ukraine, 17.5% in the USA, and roughly 35% across Europe and the UK. Our engagement rate by reach was 11.87%. Week by week, we’re consistently achieving engagement rates 3–4x the media industry standard.

What that means: Every dollar, euro, or pound you contribute here goes further than it would at a legacy outlet. We’re reaching the audiences that matter—skeptical Americans, European decision-makers, Ukrainians seeking to persuade Americans—and they're actually engaging, not scrolling past. The mission is persuasion, which begins with understanding the people we want to reach.

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THE WEEK IN REVIEW

First, a reflection on X about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night. The shooting happened at the same hotel where Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. It’s a hotel I’ve visited many times, including for the Correspondents’ Dinner when I was working at The Weekly Standard:

1 | How to Stop (Russian) Oil: A Primer

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2 | Ukrainians Hack Russian Drone Class

These Russian individuals were in a class learning how to use drones to kill people who refuse to submit to Kremlin rule.

They were perhaps hungover from the nightly vodka or not very bright (the products of a broken society) because they took awhile to realize that the special guest speaker, appearing via Zoom or some such, was a Ukrainian defender warning them to stay out of Ukraine if they wish to stay alive.

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3 | Ukrainian Olympian Shows How to Talk with MAGA

People can be persuaded.

Here, Ukrainian Olympian Vladyslav Heraskevych explains Ukraine to leading MAGA voice Will Chamberlain.

Chamberlain had previously been an opponent of Ukraine but as you can see here he is starting to change his mind.

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4 | Finland’s President Says the West Needs Ukraine’s Military Might

Finnish president: “Can we afford to keep Ukraine outside” the Western military alliances? His answer—no. They have the most war-experienced military in the free world!

“I hope the Americans understand and see this,” President Stubb told Canada’s CBC.

Alexander Stubb—Europe’s self-described “most pro-American” leader—makes the case: Ukraine is winning. Time to seize the advantage.

Soundtrack: Sibelius, “Andante festivo.”

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5 | Fixing a Trend: Rah-Rah Rasputin

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of hearing this song in my feed with attempts to exalt ‘russia,” whether imperial or kremlinist. So we’ve fixed it with a more accurate reflection of what Russia is.

Prepare yourself for some disgusting visuals but it’s good that the West see the real Russia.

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6 | Sweden’s King Visits Lviv

Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden, is the first reigning monarch to visit war-zone Ukraine.

This is huge: Previously countries would not send their “irreplaceables.”

His Majesty visited Lviv, where along with Zelensky he placed flowers for the war-dead, and he also visited school children, a bombed Catholic church, and the Superhumans center for those who have lost limbs because of Russia’s war.

“För Sverige—i tiden,” as the king’s royal motto says: “For Sweden—with the times.”

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UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

King Charles III is due to arrive in Washington Monday, amid the ongoing fallout from the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where Trump was dramatically evacuated.

• Announcing: Paid journalism internships for Ukrainians in Kyiv—Our friends at Sich Media Foundation are sponsoring paid, mentored summer journalism internships for Ukrainians at four top media outlets in Kyiv. War veterans are welcome, too. If you or someone you know would be interested, please visit and share this page. The application deadline is TODAY, 26 April, midnight Kyiv time.

• Free Speech Dinner, Gunfire Included—What was meant to be a celebration of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the First Amendment turned into something terrifying: chaos, gunfire, and a blunt reminder that even America’s most protected political theater is not immune to real-world instability. A gunman armed with multiple weapons stormed the venue, fired shots, and triggered a full-scale evacuation as guests, including US President Donald Trump, ducked for cover while Secret Service agents moved in. Trump was unharmed, one agent was hit but protected by body armor, and the suspect was arrested, with authorities believing he acted alone.

  
  In a press conference at the White House afterward, with reporters and officials alike still in ball gowns and tuxes from the dinner and still visibly running on adrenaline, Trump said, among other things, that the evening’s violence is precisely why he is building a ballroom at the White House, for security from shooters and drones.

  
  Notably, King Charles III is due to arrive in Washington Monday, amid this incident—which can either be spun as a security success (it was contained) or a breach (it happened at all).

• The Shooter Next Door—The man behind the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting is not the caricature many expected. Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old from California, appears on paper almost aggressively ordinary: a tutor, a computer programmer with a master’s degree in computer science, even a background in engineering and education. He reportedly worked for years in test prep, built small video games, and was described by former teachers as diligent and polite, hardly the profile of a man who would charge a high-security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives.
  
  That is precisely what makes the story more unsettling than comforting. There is, so far, no clear ideology, no obvious network, no neat explanation—just a lone individual who crossed the line from functioning member of society to armed attacker at one of Washington’s most tightly secured events.

• “Call Us When You’re Serious”: Diplomacy Collapses—Hopes for ending the U.S.-Iran war have taken a clear step backward after Donald Trump abruptly scrapped planned peace talks in Pakistan, effectively freezing the only active diplomatic channel. The reason, bluntly stated: Washington sees Iran’s latest offer as insufficient, while Tehran refuses to negotiate under blockade and pressure—meaning both sides are now dug in, waiting for the other to blink. What had been a fragile path toward de-escalation is now a stalemate dressed up as diplomacy: talks exist, but no one is willing to compromise enough to make them real.
  
  Trump, speaking hours after the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, said he saw no reason for envoys Witkoff and Kushner (his son-in-law) to take an 18-hour flight to Pakistan for useless negotiations.

• Ukraine Remembers the Chornobyl Disaster, 40 Years On—Ukraine marked the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster under a grim new reality: the site is no longer just a memorial to past catastrophe, but a live risk shaped by war. Russian drones and missiles have repeatedly flown near the plant, and a 2025 strike damaged the massive protective shell over reactor four, with repairs now estimated at around €500 million.

  
  Radiation levels remain stable, but the symbolism is stark: a disaster once caused by Soviet mismanagement now sits exposed to modern Russian military recklessness. Commemorations were deliberately low-key due to security risks, even as a reduced workforce continues to maintain the site.

• Alliance or Leverage Tool? The Iran War Splits NATO—An internal Pentagon email reveals U.S. officials spitballing ways to punish allies who refused to support the Iran war—including the extraordinary idea of suspending Spain from parts of the alliance. The frustration centers on European reluctance to grant basic military cooperation—access, basing, and overflight rights—which Washington considers the bare minimum of alliance solidarity. Spain, which denied use of its bases and airspace, has become the symbolic target, while even Britain is being quietly pressured through threats to revisit U.S. support for the Falklands.

• Recon, Logistics, AI—All in One Flying Toolbox—Frontline Robotics has unveiled Zoom 3.0, a new Ukrainian copter built for tactical reconnaissance, target acquisition, artillery correction, battle damage assessment, and light logistics. Its specs are practical rather than flashy: up to 90× hybrid zoom, day and night versions, 110 km/h maximum speed, 15 km tactical range, one hour of flight without payload, and up to 3 kg payload capacity.
  
  The more important detail is the AI-powered visual-inertial navigation module, designed for precise loitering, stabilized landing, and route tracking even under battlefield pressure. Add encrypted frequency-hopping communications and EW-resistant video transmission, and the logic is obvious: Ukraine’s drone industry is no longer just improvising around Russian jamming: It is designing for it from the start.

• Putin Turns Airliners Into Logistics Camouflage—A new report by private intelligence company Dallas Analytics revealed that Russia is not only hiding oil tankers in a shadow fleet, it is also weaponizing “civilian” aviation. As its military transport fleet strains under sanctions, maintenance failures, and wartime demand, Moscow is using state-linked and private cargo airlines to move troops, weapons, missile components, helicopters, and sanctioned defense supplies under commercial cover.
  
  Civil-registered aircraft can slip through routes and hubs where openly military planes would draw scrutiny, especially via Turkey, the UAE, Africa, and Central Asia. The most cynical part is the risk transfer: by routing military cargo through civilian airports and dual-use airfields, Russia blurs the line between protected commercial infrastructure and military logistics. The lesson for Europe and the US: sanctions that stop at aircraft names and tail numbers are not enough. Ground handlers, fuel suppliers, transit hubs, and governments enabling the network need to feel the cost too.

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In the second part of his series, Dr. Cemil Kerimoglu explains how Russians, much like Islamic fundamentalists, see religion not as loving thy neighbor, but rather as a militant apparatus of a violent identity.

[View part one here.]

ZURICH—Western and Eastern Christians alike are often startled by the open militarism of the Russian Orthodox Church, which not only endorses the war but also goes so far as to bless soldiers and consecrate nuclear weapons. For many in Europe, such an attitude seems to contradict the spirit of Christianity itself—a faith widely associated with peace, humility, and compassion.

The animating force behind Russian society is not Orthodox Christianity per se, but the mythic idea of the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir).

One might object: how can there be talk of a religious or quasi-religious fervor in Russia when church attendance is dismal and most Russians live secular lives? But this objection rests on a narrow, Abrahamic understanding of what religion is. Religion, in its deeper civilizational function, is not primarily about doctrine—it is about identity. It is a collective worldview, a metaphysical orientation, a sense of who we are and who we are not.

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The animating force behind Russian society is not Orthodox Christianity per se, but the mythic idea of the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir). This idea, rooted in a deep civilizational self-image, is what defines the Russian sense of purpose, belonging, and enmity. Orthodox Christianity merely serves as an auxiliary.

This newly emerging “Russian Christianity” is as inimical to European civilization as, for instance, Islam.

Consider the parallel with Islamic jihadists of the 2010s. When ISIS surged across the Middle East, Western analysts rushed to argue that the group did not represent “true Islam.” Many recruits were buying books such as Islam for Dummies before flying off to Syria or Iraq. But for these individuals, Islam was not about mastering theology. It represented their identity. It defined their self-perception, offered meaning, direction, and—most importantly—a stance against the much-hated West.

Russia today functions in the same way. The doctrine of the Orthodox Church is irrelevant to most Russians. What matters is that the Church, like everything else in Russian public life, is being reshaped to reflect and reinforce the civilizational myth of the Russian World. This myth defines who Russians believe they are—and who they believe their enemies are. And this myth is religious in every meaningful sense. It sacralizes history. It sanctifies violence. It casts the West as a satanic and corrupting force. It turns political leaders into holy warriors and military invasions into sacred missions.

So yes, Russians are religious. Not in the way Westerners today understand religion, but in the only way that truly matters. The Russian World is their faith. It defines their cosmos. And it defines the enemy.

The Russian religion is animated by an apocalyptic hatred against Europe, a religion inimical to both Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy alike.

The accusation that Russia is creating something fundamentally alien to Orthodox Christianity has received formal theological articulation through the concept of ethnophyletism—a heresy first condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 1872. Ethnophyletism refers to the subordination of the Orthodox faith to ethnic identities and national interests, effectively turning a church into an instrument of nationalist ideology rather than a universal spiritual community. The 1872 Council declared this principle contrary to the Gospel and the canons of the Church fathers.

In March 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, more than 1600 Orthodox theologians and clergy from around the world signed the landmark “Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ Teaching,” issued by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University and the Volos Academy for Theological Studies. The Declaration condemned the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) ideology as “a form of Orthodox ethno-phyletist religious fundamentalism, totalitarian in character,” and denounced it as “a false teaching.” The Declaration explicitly identified Moscow’s ideology as a heresy that conflates Russian national identity, Russian state power, and Russian Orthodoxy into a single indivisible whole.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew himself has accused the Russian Orthodox Church of ethnophyletism. In a letter to Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria— whose canonical territory in Africa Moscow had invaded by establishing a rival exarchate—Bartholomew charged that the Russian Church was being instrumentalized for nationalist purposes. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s Holy Synod went further still, formally condemning the “Russian World” doctrine as rooted in “the heretical principles of ethnophyletism, Manichaeism and Gnosticism.”

The term ethnophyletism comes closest to describing the evolution of Orthodox Christianity in Russia but still misses the mark. The issue runs deeper and is more fundamental.

“Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) does not simply refer to a narrow ethnic identity but to a wider civilizational world outlook. It is the true religion of Russians in every meaningful sense that defines their cultural identity, their place in the world and their interactions with it. In Russia, Eastern Orthodox Christianity is being subordinated to this visceral impulse and is being molded by it. The historical outcome will be the emergence of a third major Christianity—a “Russian Christianity” that is as different from Eastern Orthodoxy as it is from Western Christianity (Catholicism/Protestantism). Currently, this process is unfolding within Russia.

Importantly, this newly emerging “Russian Christianity” is as inimical to European civilization as, for instance, Islam. And it is engaged in its own holy war (Jihad) against the West. Therefore, by banning the Russian Orthodox Church inside its borders, Ukraine did not ban Orthodox Christianity. It banned an entirely different religion—a religion animated by an apocalyptic hatred against Europe, a religion inimical to both Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy alike.

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UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

Prince Harry finds purpose in a visit to Kyiv.

• Putin’s “Peace Talks,” Odesa Edition
  
  Russia hit Odesa again overnight, killing a 75-year-old married couple, injuring at least 13 people, damaging residential buildings, and striking a foreign merchant vessel moving through Ukraine’s Black Sea corridor. Ukraine says Russia launched two ballistic missiles and 107 drones, with air defenses destroying or jamming 96 of the drones. An impressive defense, but not enough when even a handful get through. The attack is another summary of Moscow’s actual negotiating position: terrorize civilians, threaten commercial shipping, then howl when Europe tightens sanctions on the shadow fleet keeping Russia’s war economy alive.

• Trump Gets Talks—Hezbollah Gets a Veto
  
  Israel and Lebanon have agreed to extend the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire by three weeks after direct talks in Washington—the second such meeting in a week and the first real diplomatic contact between the two countries in decades. That sounds historic, and in one sense it is. But the fine print is ugly: Hezbollah was not part of the talks, says it will not respect agreements made without it, and both sides have already violated the initial ceasefire. Israel still holds a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon, while Beirut hopes the process can stop a war that has killed around 2,300 people and displaced more than a million. The conservative read is simple: diplomacy can buy time, but not peace, as long as a state-within-a-state militia gets to decide whether Lebanon is at war.

• EU Targets Russia’s Wallet—But Can It Close the Leaks?
  
  The EU has rolled out its 20th sanctions package against Russia, arguably one of its most aggressive yet, targeting the real arteries of Moscow’s war economy: energy revenues, financial channels, and the military-industrial pipeline. The bloc is now going after Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, tightening restrictions on energy exports, and, crucially, moving to shut down sanctions evasion via third countries and crypto. For the first time, Brussels has imposed a blanket ban on all Russian crypto service providers and even preemptively outlawed the digital ruble, acknowledging that Moscow has been quietly rerouting transactions through digital assets. On the industrial side, dozens of companies linked to drone production and weapons manufacturing, along with facilitators in China, the UAE, and Central Asia, have been blacklisted, while new trade restrictions aim to choke off high-tech inputs. The message is clear: Europe is finally trying to fight Russia’s war economy systemically, not symbolically. The open question, as always, is whether enforcement will match ambition.

• €90 Billion for Ukraine … and a Hangover for Europe
  
  EU leaders gathered in Cyprus to celebrate unlocking a massive €90 billion loan for Ukraine, hailed as a show of unity after Hungary dropped its veto, but the morning after looked far less triumphant. Behind the applause, divisions quickly resurfaced over how Europe will fund its own defense, manage rising costs from the Iran conflict, and sustain long-term support for Kyiv. The loan may cover roughly two-thirds of Ukraine’s near-term needs, but it also underscores an uncomfortable truth: Europe is still reacting to crises rather than preparing for them. With defense budgets under pressure and energy markets rattled by Middle East instability, the summit revealed a bloc that can still agree on symbolic big moves, yet struggles when the conversation turns to sustained military readiness and economic sacrifice.

• €161 Million for Drones, EW, and Reality
  
  The European Commission and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry are launching a €161 million programme for dual-use technologies, with €140 million in EU guarantees and €21 million in investment grants aimed at unlocking up to €400 million in bank lending. The money will target the sectors Ukraine has been forced to master under fire: aerial, ground, and naval drones, electronic warfare, space tools, communications, navigation, and critical components. Politically, this is more than another funding line. It is Europe slowly admitting that Ukraine is not just a recipient of aid, but a defense-tech testbed the continent badly needs to plug into, assuming Brussels can move fast enough to matter.

• Prince Harry Arrives to Remind the West It Has an Attention Span Problem
  
  Prince Harry made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Thursday, arriving by overnight train from Poland and using the trip to deliver a message that is, for once, harder to mock than to ignore: the world must not lose sight of Ukraine simply because attention has shifted to Iran. He is set to address the Kyiv Security Forum, describe Ukraine as bravely defending Europe’s eastern flank, warn against becoming “numb” to the war, and argue that this is a fight about values, not just territory. He also plans to reconnect with the Invictus community and visit demining efforts tied to Halo Trust, whose Ukraine operation now employs around 1,300 people.

• From Battlefield Proof to French Production Lines
  
  Tencore’s new tie-up with France’s Shark Robotics is more than another memorandum dressed up as progress: it is a glimpse of what serious European defense cooperation is supposed to look like when war strips away the vanity. Under the “Build with Ukraine” initiative, the two companies plan to create two joint ventures: One in France to develop and manufacture defense robots for logistics and medical evacuation using Ukrainian battlefield feedback, and another in Ukraine to serve as an industrial and service hub for maintenance, training, and gradual component localization tied into a European supply chain. The military logic is clear enough, but so is the political one. Tencore brings combat-tested experience from thousands of TerMIT ground robots already used for logistics, evacuation, and engineering tasks, while Shark Robotics contributes mature robotics expertise from extreme-environment and emergency-response platforms deployed in more than 25 countries.

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Russia's economy is cracking and the Kremlin is hiding it—but none of that alone ends the war.

Russia’s imperial reflex will outlive Putin. The deeper contest isn't military. It's civilizational. And Ukraine is winning it.

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European drone makers are using Ukraine as a free combat lab, then selling the results back to their own governments as "battle-tested."

Ukraine doesn't need European drones. It builds more UAVs than all of NATO combined. What it needs is money to scale its own production.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We welcome guest columns from respected members of the pro-Ukraine ecosystem. American Perry Boyle, frequently in Kyiv, is co-founder and CEO of MITS Capital LLC, which invests in Ukrainian mil-tech. As always, your comments are welcome, too.

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One of my Ukrainian friends insists that Europe wants to prolong Russia’s war on Ukraine. His logic: Ukraine is holding Russia off from its next phase of attack on Europe, while Europe’s military-industrial complex is making a fortune from the war and is modernizing its defense industry.

Ukraine doesn’t need high-cost European UGVs; it needs money to scale domestic production.

Ukraine is their laboratory, not their partner. In his view, Europe will provide Ukraine with just enough money to stay on life support, but will never provide Ukraine with the resources it could deploy to defeat Russia.

Talk about cynical. What if he's right?

We have a recent example below of how Germany is exploiting Ukraine to develop its own drone industry. ARX Robotics just announced a deal with the UK MoD to invest £45 million in a UK ground drone plant to produce its Gereon UGVs for the British Army.

Foreign firms are testing—or claiming to develop—their UGVs in Ukraine. Then they donate maybe three dozen of them to Ukrainian warriors. To convince, say, the UK MoD to buy them, they tout that they are “battle-tested” in Ukraine and that they have orders for several hundred more. No one in Ukraine is asking for these drones—European governments pay for them. Ukraine doesn’t need high-cost European UGVs; it needs money to scale domestic production.

The UK pursues a similar model for its UAV program. Recently, the UK announced its “largest-ever” donation of UAVs to Ukraine. All made in the UK (from a Ukrainian design). So, “battle-tested” in Ukraine. Ukraine does not need drones from the UK. It makes more UAVs than all of NATO combined. What Ukraine needs is money to scale its domestic production.

If Ukraine does not get the €90 billion loan from the EU, it is only a matter of months until it’s game over for Ukraine.

Neither the UK nor Germany has a competitive advantage in drones. They will spend billions on what are more job programs than defense programs. They will not invest directly in a Ukrainian defense company. Instead of competing with Ukraine, they should be integrating Ukraine’s defense industrial base into NATO’s and keeping it out of Russia’s hands. What will they do if they lose their lab to Russia?

What can Ukraine do about this exploitation? Right now, not very much.

If Ukraine does not get the €90 billion loan from the EU, it is only a matter of months until it’s game over for Ukraine. Until this money is released, Ukraine has to accommodate the EU, no matter how absurd (peace negotiations with Russia) or exploitative (disadvantaging its own defense tech companies to build Europe’s) the relationship.

How does Ukraine shift the narrative from “using European money to stay alive” to “using frozen Russian assets to defeat Russia?” That is the fundamental change needed to secure not just peace in Ukraine, but also peace for Europe, and, perhaps, regime change in Russia.

UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

Lord Mandelson continued to serve on the board of a Russian defense firm until 2017, years after Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea.

• Announcing: Paid Journalism Internships for Ukrainians in Kyiv
  
  Our friends at Sich Media Foundation are sponsoring paid, mentored summer journalism internships for Ukrainians at four top media outlets in Kyiv. War veterans are welcome, too. If you or someone you know would be interested, please visit and share this page. The application deadline is 26 April, so move fast!

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But beset by arrogance and a dalliance with Moscow, he lost in a landslide to a conservative who ran on sovereignty, borders, and national identity. As news of his defeat broke, Budapest chanted, “Russians go home.”

Five lessons from the Fall of Orbán.

ODESA—“Ruszkik, haza!”—“Russians, go home!”

The chant rose in Hungarian from Budapest on the night of 12 April, as a 16-year regime that had captured the state, bent the media, and invited the American vice president to save it conceded defeat.

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Viktor Orbán had every advantage a sitting prime minister could have. He had reshaped Hungary in his image, placed loyalists throughout the administrative bodies of the state, and taken such control of the media that his opponent and former protégé, Péter Magyar, was never once invited onto state television during the entire campaign.

Voters eventually desert those who offer only grievance, vanity, and decay.

Orbán had the backing of the most powerful country on earth—so much backing that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally flew to Budapest in the final days to throw their weight behind Fidesz.

It was not enough. And that is the story.

Orbán did not lose to a left-wing insurgency, or to a foreign conspiracy, or to the exhaustion of conservative ideas. There are five lessons to learn from his fall.

If you speak the language of civilizational defense but shrug at Russian imperialism, your message eventually collapses under its own contradiction.

1 | Movements die when they stop renewing themselves.

Orbán did not lose because the public suddenly became allergic to his message of sovereignty, borders, national identity, or cultural conservatism. Hungarians still clearly support these values—after all, his opponent Péter Magyar, leader of the Tisza party, ran on all of those things as well. Orbán lost because an overwhelming number of voters concluded that his system had become closed, arrogant, and exhausted.

For both MAGA and Europe’s right-wing parties, the warning is obvious. A party cannot live forever on the charisma of one man, on old grudges, or on the memory of earlier victories. If it does not cultivate new leaders, new language, and new energy, it eventually becomes a museum that still calls itself a movement.

Politicians, beware: Both in the US and in Europe, a large majority of people see Russia as an enemy.

2 | Corruption is not a side issue. It is fatal.

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Today’s newsletter is free for all. Please consider supporting our efforts: Let’s stay strong through to the victory!

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1 | Leo Versus Tyrants. But Who Are the Tyrants?

“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters,” said Pope Leo XIV, holding his ground this week in Cameroon during his Africa tour.

With the focus on Trump—much of which Trump brought upon himself—everyone seemed to miss Putin, who clearly is among the warmongers whose actions Leo routinely condemns.

“The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.” —Pope Leo XIV

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Soundtrack: This reel features “Now in the Fading Light of Day,” the opening hymn of Compline—the nighttime prayer that 'shuts out' the devil—recorded at Mount Saviour Monastery in New York. I attended a silent retreat there years ago with some rowdy friends from Philadelphia—a cop, boxer, pro baseball player, doctor, dentist, and a few others, one of them since departed in a bad way. The neighborhood priest, from the Oratory church in the Ukrainian sector of Philly, had rounded us up to attend, to steer our souls.

That retreat gave us a real grounding in the virtue of pursuing what matters. And every night, after a day in silence on our own, we would gather with the monks in the chapel on a bluff over a river in upstate New York.

Each night, amid a few candles and with a guitar, the monks would chant the song you hear in the video, and it always reminded me of the night-before-battle song “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” from The Hobbit, and it’s equally courage-inducing. I feel that hymn often here in Ukraine, especially during missile attacks in Kyiv and during trips through the beautiful war-torn fields of Donbas amid the thunder of artillery and explosions of drones. That retreat at Mount Saviour was part of the forge that prepared me for war, and the Compline hymn was akin to the dwarves, hobbits, and Gandalf singing “Misty Mountains Cold.”

Bonus: Here is a video of the soundtrack in the video above in its original element, at Mount Saviour in New York State:

2 | The Strait of Hormuz: the Real Story

We talk about this critical Middle Eastern oil chokepoint every day lately. But do you know its history? And that the poet John Milton used Hormuz to capture the opulence of Satan's throne in Paradise Lost? It’s always been an access point for unbelievable riches:

“If the world were a golden ring, Hormuz would be its jewel.”

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3 | Jews and Christians Come Under Attack in Europe in One Deadly Day

Did you see this news from Europe this week?

Illegal immigrant terrorists attacked BOTH a Jewish community center AND a Christian church in the same city.

Why is the West silent against this murderous terror?

Do you know what happened? Russia bombed the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on 16 April, hitting the Jewish center and a Baptist church and, we are told, killing a pastor.

In order to get the attention of people in the West, we try to frame the story in a truthful way they might understand: Russians are indeed illegal immigrants into Ukraine, and they are the worst sort: armed with tanks, drones, missiles, and bullets.

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4 | Sir Jacob: Ukraine’s Given Us Time. We’ve Wasted It.

Fact is: Ukraine is saving Europe—or giving Europe a chance to hold on.

But has Europe wasted the chance?

“They were in fact sheltered. But they had ceased to remember it.” —Tolkien

These words of Tolkien from The Fellowship of the Ring describe today’s situation well. Europeans are, despite their other problems, living a dream, while Ukrainians protect them from reality:

“There in that pleasant corner of the world [the Shire] they plied their well-ordered business of living. And they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved.

“—until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk.

“They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were in fact sheltered. But they had ceased to remember it.”

The Fellowship of the Ring, Prologue, §1 ('Concerning Hobbits')

The UK’s Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Tory MP and government minister, gives great credit to Ukraine on the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast with Camilla Tominey.

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5 | Are Jews Safer in Ukraine Than in the Rest of Europe?

April 14 was Yom HaShoah, Israel’s day of Holocaust commemoration. In Kyiv, President Zelensky signed legislation making antisemitism a crime.

Ukraine’s Jewish history is full of great feats but also of heinous suffering. Since the 2014 Revolution, Ukraine has become one of the safest countries in Europe for Jews — except when Russians are bombing.

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And as a bonus, here is a look at some of the Jewish history of Ukraine. Did you know Israel’s national anthem was written by a man from just outside of Lviv?

UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

Ukraine is steadily turning itself into the most battle-tested defence workshop on the European continent.

• Announcing: Paid journalism internships for Ukrainians in Kyiv
  
  Our friends at Sich Media Foundation are sponsoring paid, mentored summer journalism internships for Ukrainians at four top media outlets in Kyiv. War veterans are welcome, too. If you or someone you know would be interested, please visit and share this page. The application deadline is 26 April, so move fast!

• Increasing Scale
  
  Air3F has moved its heavy bomber drone Mangush into serial production.
  
  Built on a 15-inch multirotor frame, the platform is designed for logistics and precision payload release, with a single-drop capacity of up to 9 kg or two 3.5 kg payloads, flight endurance of up to 35 minutes, range of 15 km, altitude ceiling of 1,500 meters, and top speed of 110 km/h—at a listed price of 91,000 hryvnias (about $2,150).

• Kyiv Puts More Steel on Display Than Brussels Puts Into Policy
  
  Ukraine’s foreign ministry used a new defence exhibition not for ceremonial self-congratulation, but to send a blunt message: Ukraine is no longer merely consuming weapons, it is increasingly producing them at scale. Officials say Ukraine now manufactures more than half of the arms used on the battlefield and employs over 400,000 people in its defence industry. The updated display added a wide range of systems, from Neptune cruise missiles and Magura V7 naval drones to interceptor drones, ground robots, and loitering munitions, but the standout was the newly unveiled Sichen deep-strike drone, reportedly built for strikes out to 1,400 kilometres with a 40-kilogram warhead and claimed accuracy within 20 metres.

• A City in War Finds Another Kind of Horror

  
  In a highly unusual event despite four years of war, a gunman killed six people in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district on Saturday, first shooting civilians in the street and then barricading himself inside a supermarket with hostages before special police units stormed the building and killed him after negotiations failed.
  
  Ukrainian authorities say the case is being investigated as terrorism, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said one of the dead was a hostage, while also noting that the attacker was born in Russia and had lived for a long time in the Donetsk region. That does not automatically answer every question about motive, but it certainly makes the story darker in a country already living under years of war, sabotage fears, and social strain.

• China’s War Machine Says Thank You for the Research

  
  A sharp piece in The Spectator makes the uncomfortable point that China’s military rise is not being powered only by espionage or theft, but by Western greed, institutional laziness, and the old delusion that commerce somehow neutralizes hostile ambition.
  
  The pattern runs from alleged chip-smuggling schemes and tailor-made export-control workarounds to Pentagon-linked cloud systems maintained by China-based engineers, British semiconductor know-how drifting east, and universities on both sides of the Atlantic co-authoring research with institutions tied to Beijing’s armed forces.
  
  Some of this may cross legal lines; much of it does not need to. That is precisely the scandal. The front door has been left open because too many executives, academics, and politicians still treat China as a market first and a strategic adversary second. The result is as absurd as it is dangerous: the West is effectively financing, training, and technologically enabling the power that most openly intends to surpass it.

• Your Majesty, Your Emergency

  
  Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi accidentally greeted Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf as “Your Emergency” instead of “Your Majesty” during the monarch’s visit to the city on April 17, a small diplomatic mishap that, in a region used to missile alerts and geopolitical melodrama, at least had the courtesy to be funny.
  
  Sadovyi later leaned into the mistake on X, joking that everyone was free to make memes, while the king reportedly took it in stride during his walk through Lviv.
  

• Pyongyang Sees Chaos and Smells Opportunity

  
  North Korea fired more ballistic missiles into the sea on Sunday, April 19, marking its fourth missile launch this month and seventh this year, with South Korea saying the missiles were launched from near Sinpo and flew about 140 kilometers.

• Russia’s Black Sea Hub Keeps Springing Leaks

  
  Ukraine says the SBU’s Alpha unit carried out a coordinated strike in occupied Crimea that hit the large landing ships Yamal and Azov, an additional warship of still unspecified type, and possibly a Project 21980 Grachonok anti-sabotage boat, while also damaging the Dolphin communications antenna block, the MR-10M1 Mys-M1 radar, and fuel tanks at the Yugtorsan oil depot.
  
  Kyiv’s message is straightforward: Crimea is not some untouchable rear area but a military platform to be steadily degraded until it stops functioning like one.

• Belarus Starts Trouble at the Border Again

  
  Kyiv says Belarus is building roads toward the Ukrainian border and setting up artillery positions near the frontier, with Zelensky warning that Russia is once again trying to drag Minsk more directly into the war. Ukraine has already signaled to Belarus that it is ready to respond, which is the sort of message that becomes necessary when your neighbor keeps flirting with “not participating” while conveniently hosting the infrastructure of intimidation.
  
  Belarus, after all, already served as a launchpad for the 2022 invasion and still remains one of Moscow’s most useful auxiliaries. For now, this looks less like proof of an imminent new offensive than another exercise in pressure, distraction, and psychological warfare, but Europe would be foolish to dismiss it merely because Minsk dictator Lukashenko prefers ambiguity to open commitment.

• Deborah Fairlamb on the IPO That Made Everyone Suddenly Notice Kyiv

  
  In a new interview with Defender Media, Green Flag Venture’s Founding Partner Deborah Fairlamb, an American in Kyiv, is betting that Ukrainian mil-tech company Swarmer’s strong U.S. market debut is more than a flashy one-off: In her view, it shattered a psychological barrier for Ukrainian defense tech, showed that Ukrainian talent plus Western capital is a potent combination, and forced investors to pay attention to a sector many had conveniently overlooked.
  
  Green Flag, a Ukraine- and US- based venture capital fund, says its first fund closed at just under $20 million. It is now planning several more investments by June and is preparing a second fund targeting about $60 million, with Ukraine still central but a wider aperture across the Nordics, Baltics, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The fund is backing firms like MaXon and BabAI because the demand is real. But Fairlamb argues the West still misunderstands the lesson of Ukraine’s war, acting as if one clever drone can replace doctrine, training, layered air defence, and serious battlefield integration.

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In this three-part series, Dr. Cemil Kerimoglu explains the schism now tearing through Eastern Orthodoxy—and what it reveals about the stripping away of Russia's European veneer.

ZURICH—A claim has been circulating in certain right-wing circles in the West that Ukraine is “banning Christianity” by restricting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP). This claim is not merely wrong—it is spectacularly, dangerously wrong. It reveals a profound ignorance of what the Russian Orthodox Church has become and what it truly represents.

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Ukraine has not banned Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which received its Tomos of Autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople in 2019, continues to operate freely as an independent, self-governing Church in full communion with the broader Eastern Orthodox world.

An official document from Russia’s foreign intelligence agency branded Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as the “Antichrist in a cassock.”

What Ukraine has moved to restrict is not Orthodox Christianity in any meaningful spiritual sense, but an institution that has long functioned as a fifth column of Russian state power within Ukrainian society and representing a world outlook that is deeply inimical to European civilization as a whole—especially in the context of an ongoing invasion that Russian officials and clerics themselves openly call a “Holy War.”

What is emerging in Russia is not Orthodox Christianity as the world has known it, but a uniquely Russian religion, animated by apocalyptic hatred of the West.

To understand why restricting the Moscow Patriarchate’s branch in Ukraine is not banning Christianity, one must understand what Russian Orthodox Christianity is becoming.

Russian Orthodoxy is in the process of separating itself from the broader Eastern Orthodox realm—a separation as intense as the Great Schism of 1054 that divided Western Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy. What is emerging in Russia is not Orthodox Christianity as the world has known it, but a uniquely Russian religion: a world outlook animated by apocalyptic hatred of the West, one that merely wears the vestments of Orthodoxy while hollowing out its substance.

Thus, banning this Russian entity in Ukraine is not banning Christianity. It is defending Christianity—and European Civilization—from a force that seeks to destroy both.

While Russia may accuse Ukraine of schism, it is, in fact, Russia that is gradually separating itself from the broader Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Constantinople’s 2019 granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine marked a pivotal moment not only in the ecclesiastical landscape but also in the broader historical and cultural trajectory of Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s refusal to recognize this autocephaly has led to a schism with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This rift is more than a mere ecclesiastical disagreement; it is yet another manifestation of a significant shift in Russia’s relationship with European culture—a process that can be understood through the lens of Oswald Spengler’s concept of Pseudomorphosis.

Pseudomorphosis, a term coined by Spengler, refers to the phenomenon in which an emerging culture is overlaid by the forms of an older, more dominant culture, stifling the young culture’s organic development. In the context of Russia, this process began with the Church reforms initiated by Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century.

These reforms aimed to align Russian-Muscovite Orthodox practices and canonical texts with those of Greek Orthodoxy, an effort that was met with significant resistance. Those who opposed the reforms, clinging to the original Muscovite practices, became known as the “Old Believers.” Significantly, Ukrainian clerics and theologians were at the forefront of these reforms, playing a crucial role in integrating Muscovite Orthodoxy with Greek traditions.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I has emerged as the most prominent ecclesiastical voice opposing Russia’s weaponization of Orthodoxy.

Nikon’s religious reforms, followed by Peter the Great’s more sweeping attempted social Westernization of Russian society, imposed a European veneer that never fully settled. This situation is reminiscent of the introduction of Greek-Byzantine Christianity into the Germanic world by the Carolingian rulers in the 8th and 9th centuries—most emphatically by Charlemagne, who can be viewed as the historical counterpart of Peter the Great.

Just as the newly introduced norms of Graeco-Roman Christianity sat uneasily upon the Germanic people, leading to continuous tension between Latin-Germanic Christianity and Byzantine Christianity, so too did Nikon’s and Peter the Great’s reforms create a persistent dissonance within Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian society as a whole.

The Gothic architecture and the development of Scholasticism that followed in the West were manifestations of this newly liberated Faustian spirit, reflecting a uniquely Western world-feeling with Germanized Christianity.

The Great Schism of 1054, which formally divided Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, was more than a dispute over rituals or doctrinal differences. It was the culmination of a deeper cultural divide, a counterposition of two different world-feelings—what Spengler would describe as the emergence of the Faustian spirit in Western Europe, breaking free from the Pseudomorphosis imposed by Byzantine Christianity.

The Gothic architecture and the development of Scholasticism that followed in the West were manifestations of this newly liberated Faustian spirit, reflecting a uniquely Western world-feeling with Germanized Christianity.

[Editor's note: Spengler’s “Faustian spirit” names the defining impulse of Western Europe after 1000 AD—a restless striving toward infinite space, reflected in Gothic architecture. He contrasts it with the classical soul’s sculptural, bounded forms and the Byzantine soul’s world-cave, lit by divine light against surrounding darkness. Spengler (1880-1936) was a German philosopher of history.]

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Similarly, the schism within Eastern Orthodoxy today, catalyzed by the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church, could foreshadow a significant transformation within Russian Orthodoxy. While Russia may accuse Ukraine of schism, it is, in fact, Russia that is gradually separating itself from the broader Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As Ukraine moves closer to Europe, reaffirming its connection to the Greek Orthodox tradition, Russia is on the path to developing a distinct form of Christianity, one that is uniquely Russian and resonates more deeply with its cultural essence.

Russian leaders, Bartholomew said, should “fear the Day of Judgment, if indeed they believe.

No figure has articulated the depth of this emerging schism more forcefully than Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, who since 1991 has held the position traditionally regarded as “first among equals” among the world's Orthodox patriarchs. Since the granting of Ukrainian autocephaly in 2019, Bartholomew has emerged as the most prominent ecclesiastical voice opposing Russia’s weaponization of Orthodoxy.

Moscow declared itself in schism with Constantinople in 2018 after Bartholomew recognized the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. As the events in the following years would manifest, this was not merely a jurisdictional quarrel.

Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, who has always been closely allied with Vladimir Putin, provided a religious justification for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “holy war.” Bartholomew, for his part, has repeatedly denounced this characterization with unmistakable clarity: Russia’s war on Ukraine, he has insisted, is “not a holy and blessed war, as some claim. It’s an evil war, an unholy war.”

In early 2026, this conflict between Moscow and Constantinople escalated significantly.

The Russian intelligence service’s use of the language of demonology reveals the fusion between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Read more

The case is small. What it reveals about Europe's strategic confusion is not.

ODESA—Last December, Chay Bowes, a notorious Irish pro-Russian propagandist living in Moscow, shared on X an image of Ukraine’s elite Azov Brigade wielding torches. He called Ukraine “a bigger threat to Europe than Russia will ever be.”

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Into the fray stepped Tim Schramm, a German far-right politician who, unlike his party, supports Ukraine so much that he spent nearly a year fighting Russian invaders on Ukrainian soil. Back home in Germany, Schramm reposted Bowes’ image with a counter: Germany, he wrote, could learn a lot from Azov.

And here is where his trouble began.

In the heart of Europe, a man defending Ukraine gets punished for refusing to accept the Kremlin’s lies.

For the German state, Schramm’s post defending Ukraine was criminal. An unknown person had reported Schramm to the police and upon returning from a humanitarian trip to Ukraine, he received a summons—and soon after, a conviction.

What was the problem? Schramm had, by quoting Bowes’s original post in his rebuttal, shared the Azov Brigade’s symbol, visible in a shoulder patch of a Ukrainian soldier. The Azov emblem resembles the German “Wolfsangel” (“Wolf’s hook”), a symbol that is banned in Germany if used in the context of the Third Reich. In fact, the Wolfsangel has a longer, deeper history in many cultures and even today in Germany is permitted in traditional ways, as a boundary marker and as the emblem of a famed hound-breeding club.

But none of that mattered. Someone wanted to cause trouble for Schramm, an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. Already, high-ranking officials in the Alternative für Deutschland party had tried to expel him. But Schramm stuck to his guns, staying in his party in hopes of changing its Ukraine stance:

“Russia is doing exactly what many on the right accuse the globalists of doing, only worse,” Schramm told us. “All under the guise of anti-fascism.”

For Europe, it is more comfortable going after an individual that was actually sitting in the trenches than confronting the regime that put him there.

It was not enough for Schramm to be attacked by pro-Russians in Germany. The allegedly pro-Ukraine German state also piled on.

Schramm was not even able to defend himself in court: The German legal system, in a preview of coming attractions for the United Kingdom which is considering dispensing with some jury trials, allows sentences to be delivered in a “fast-track” way, whereby a judge simply issues a sentence based on the prosecutor's demand. This is exactly what happened here: The prosecutor demanded that Schramm be sentenced, and the judge handed out a fine of €1,200.

Too much of Europe still prefers the comfort of symbolic hygiene to the burden of concrete and brave action in defense of freedom.

This might seem like a small price to pay, but the larger implication is that since Schramm is now legally convicted of a crime, he stands to lose his job, his position as an elected member of the city council of his hometown of Wuppertal, and he is now registered in the “Bundeszentralregister” (“Federal Centralized Register”) as a convicted felon. This is a clear case of political persecution. Why? A look into the case files reveals something interesting.

Germany’s Strategic Confusion

Germany has managed to become the perfect symbol of its own strategic confusion: a state so eager to police memory and speech that it risks criminalizing solidarity with the people now fighting the very kind of evil Europe once vowed never to appease again.

German officials might feel like fighting fascism. In reality, they are rewarding Russian fascist propaganda.

When the police received the report, they investigated Schramm’s X post and correctly identified that he had (a) simply commented on a current political issue, (b) shared an image of a current military unit of an ally and aid recipient of Germany, and (c) made no reference to Nazism. The police reported these findings to the prosecutor, suggesting no need for further action.

Yet the prosecutor argued that because of Schramm’s position as a right-wing politician and because “people holding burning torches is reminiscent of the Third Reich,” he must have meant his post in a way that glorifies Nazism and had to be convicted accordingly. And thanks to German efficiency, the conviction was swiftly carried out. It’s doubtful the same would have happened if Schramm was a member of, say, the Greens.

To be clear, Germany’s ban on unconstitutional symbols exists for good historical reasons. Section 86a of the Criminal Code criminalizes the use of symbols of unconstitutional or terrorist organizations. But German law is not supposed to operate like a childishly literal pattern-recognition machine. The Bundestag’s own legal service noted last year that context matters, that the law must be interpreted restrictively, and that there is no punishable use where the symbol appears in unmistakable opposition to the ideology in question or for purposes such as civic education, art, scholarship, or “reporting on current events or history.” In other words: German law itself recognizes that meaning is not reducible to geometry.

That matters here, because Azov in 2026 is not some frozen relic from 2014, nor is it identical to the caricature endlessly circulated by Russian propagandists. The unit was born in crisis—founded in May 2014 as a volunteer militia when Ukraine’s military was barely functional and Russia was threatening to strangle the newly free society. Anyone willing to fight was welcomed, and this drew some unsavory elements. But that is not the whole story, and it is certainly not the current one.

Ukraine has paid in blood for Europe’s strategic education.

Even Western institutions that spent years keeping Azov at arm’s length have revised their assessment. In June 2024, the U.S. State Department under Biden said the 12th Azov Brigade had “passed Leahy vetting,” which means they passed human rights screening and were eligible for U.S. military assistance.

Reuters reported that Washington concluded there was no evidence of human-rights violations by the brigade and that “Russian disinformation has actively worked to discredit” it by conflating the current formation with an older militia.

German analysts Christian Mölling and András Rácz went further, writing for ZDF that today’s Azov “does not have much in common” with its far-right predecessor. They called it “one of the most experienced and efficient combat units of Ukraine.” AP likewise described Azov as one of Ukraine’s most effective and popular fighting units, while noting that its current members reject accusations of extremism.

Lord Ashcroft, the British Conservative peer and philanthropist, traveled to the front to meet Azov’s commanders twice—in 2024 and again in 2025. His conclusion was unambiguous: Azov is among the most formidable fighting forces in the world. He noted pointedly that one of its most celebrated fighters is Jewish—a fact that, he wrote, flatly ridicules Moscow’s claim that Azov’s ranks are filled with Nazis.

Moscow, seeking to discredit Ukraine, calls Azov terrorists and neo-Nazis; Russian courts handed long prison terms to captured Azov fighters in March 2025. Meanwhile, in the heart of Europe, a man defending Ukraine gets punished for refusing to accept the Kremlin’s lies.

So what exactly is Germany doing when it fines a Ukraine volunteer for posting an image from an Azov ceremony in the context of a live war?

For a smug bureaucrat, comfortably sitting in his Western European courthouse, sheltered from the reality of war, it may feel like fighting fascism. In reality, it is rewarding propaganda.

The deeper problem is not just legal but civilizational. Too much of Europe still prefers the comfort of symbolic hygiene to the burden of concrete and brave political action in defense of freedom. Europe knows how to be anxious, procedural, and self-protective. Europe knows how to hold seminars on democratic resilience. Europe knows how to turn every hard question into an administrative one.

For Europe, it is more comfortable going after an individual that was actually sitting in the trenches than confronting the regime that put him there.

Ukrainians have spent more than a decade fighting a war that Europe preferred, for years, to misunderstand. They fought when many Europeans still believed Minsk formulas and gas deals could tame Moscow. They fought when Western capitals worried more about “escalation” than occupation. They fought when Russian lies about “denazification” seeped into respectable discourse through the back door of caution and nuance.

To tell a Ukraine veteran that Germany can distinguish perfectly well between context and propaganda, except when the context is Ukraine and the propaganda is Russian, is an insult not only to him, but to the country that has paid in blood for Europe’s strategic education.

The question is not whether Azov’s history is complicated. It is. The question is whether Europe is serious enough to face the evil in front of it instead of ritualistically shadow-boxing with ghosts while Russia wages an actual war on its doorstep.

The German bureaucrats did the work that Russian propagandists had long tried to do: make Schramm pay for his steadfast defense of Ukraine.

Prosecutions like this are not just absurd. They are cowardly.

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UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

• DEVELOPING: Major Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine beginning
  
  Odesa, 17:30 - Ukrainian airspace monitors are currently reporting that a major aerial attack on Ukraine is starting. Over 1,000 Shahed-type drones have been launched from various points in the Russian Federation, which would mark a new record of drones launched on one day. Hundreds are already in Ukrainian airspace, while more continue to pour in, and Ukrainian defenders on the ground are actively intercepting them.
  
  In addition, six TU-95 bombers have fired missiles from their launch areas, and we are awaiting their entrance into Ukrainian airspace. Finally, there is a heightened risk of strikes both from Kalibr cruise missiles from the Russian Black Sea fleet, as well as from ballistic missiles from launch points across the Russian Federation. Either way, the coming evening, night, and possibly next day are shaping up to be another night of terror in Ukraine.

• Kyiv Criminalizes Antisemitism While Western Europe Hosts It
  
  President Zelensky signed Law No. 2037-IX on 14 April, turning antisemitic acts in Ukraine from something merely condemned into something explicitly prosecutable, with penalties ranging from fines and restrictions on liberty to prison terms of up to eight years in the most serious cases.
  
  The law reportedly tightens punishment when violence, threats, official abuse, organized groups, or grave consequences are involved, and completes a process that began with Ukraine’s 2021 antisemitism law and a parliamentary vote in 2022. The contrast is striking: while much of Europe drowns antisemitism in euphemisms, protest aesthetics, and institutional cowardice, Kyiv has chosen the less fashionable but more serious path of attaching moral boundaries to criminal consequences.

• Iran’s War Machine Just Got an Upgrade From China
  
  Leaked Iranian military documents suggest the IRGC quietly bought control of a Chinese-built satellite in late 2024 and then used it in March to surveil U.S. bases across the Middle East before and after missile and drone strikes, including sites in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and Iraq.
  
  The system reportedly gave Tehran access to roughly half-metre imagery, a dramatic leap over Iran’s own far weaker satellite capabilities, while Chinese-linked ground infrastructure allowed operations to continue through overseas stations that are far harder to disrupt.

• The Blockade takes Shape
  
  The U.S. has now moved from coercion to something far closer to economic strangulation: Within roughly 36 hours, American forces effectively shut down nearly all maritime trade to and from Iran, targeting the lifeline of an economy that depends overwhelmingly on sea-based exports. At least six ships have already been turned back, with more than 10,000 troops and a sizable naval force enforcing the blockade across Iranian ports.
  
  And yet, in parallel, Washington is still talking about renewed peace negotiations in Pakistan, with Trump signaling optimism while demanding a long-term halt to Iran’s nuclear program and removal of enriched material.

• Moscow Targets the People Cleaning Up Ukraine
  
  Russia-linked hackers compromised more than 170 email accounts belonging to Ukrainian prosecutors and investigators, part of a broader campaign that hit at least 284 inboxes across Ukraine and several countries in the region.
  
  The targets included officials working on corruption cases, collaborator investigations, and seized Russian-linked assets. Moscow is not only trying to break Ukraine at the front, but also to penetrate the institutions meant to hold the country together. While Europe still talks about cyber resilience in sterile bureaucratic language, Russia is treating email as what it really is in modern war: an intelligence goldmine, a pressure point, and another battlefield.

• Turkey Talks Like an Empire, Governs Like a Grievance
  
  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sharply escalated his rhetoric against Israel, accusing it of atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon and even hinting that Turkey could one day take military action, invoking Ankara’s past interventions in places like Libya and Karabakh.
  
  The exchange has quickly turned into a full diplomatic brawl: an Israeli minister fired back by calling Erdogan a delusional tyrant with imperial fantasies, and the feud is now being further fueled by Turkey’s indictment of Netanyahu and other Israeli officials over the 2025 Gaza flotilla interception. Erdogan, facing a collapsing economy and a tired political model at home, once again reaches for civilizational theatrics abroad, wrapping old Ottoman swagger in the language of moral outrage.

• China May Turn Solar Into the Next Chokepoint
  
  China is weighing restrictions on exports of advanced solar manufacturing equipment to the United States after initial consultations with equipment suppliers, a move that could hit American factory plans just as Washington tries to rebuild domestic production.
  
  China produces more than 80% of the world’s solar panel components and is home to the top 10 suppliers of solar-cell manufacturing equipment, giving Beijing leverage not just over cheap panels, but over the machinery needed to make them. The discussions appear to focus in part on high-end heterojunction, or HJT, equipment used for more efficient panels, and they come as Tesla pursues a major push for U.S.-based solar manufacturing.

• America’s Nuclear Brain Trust Continues to Die—or Vanish
  
  A 48-year-old Albuquerque contractor named Steven Garcia, reportedly tied to the Kansas City National Security Campus, has resurfaced in the news months after vanishing on August 28, 2025, when he was last seen leaving home on foot with a handgun. He is now considered the 10th leading national security, directed energy, or nuclear scientist to have vanished or been killed in the past months in the USA.

• Japan Quits Pacifist Theater and Opens the Arsenal
  
  Japan is preparing its biggest arms-export opening since World War II, with new rules expected as soon as this month and early deals likely to include used frigates for the Philippines, potentially followed by missile-defence systems. Interest is already coming from Warsaw to Manila as allies grow nervous about overstretched U.S. weapons supply, two active wars draining inventories, and the strategic whiplash of relying too heavily on Washington alone.
  
  Japanese firms such as Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric are hiring, expanding facilities, and building export teams, while Tokyo’s broader goal is clear enough: turn a long-suppressed industrial base into a serious pillar of allied rearmament. Russia has already condemned Japan for a new partnership between Japanese firm Terra Drone and Ukraine’s Amazing Drones.

• Auschwitz Remembers What the West Prefers to Forget
  
  Thousands gathered at Auschwitz, Poland, for the annual March of the Living on 14 April, with 50 Holocaust survivors joining the walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau for Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, including some who travelled from Israel despite the disruption caused by the US-Iran war. Organizers used the moment not only to honor the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany, but to issue a dark warning: antisemitism is no museum piece.
  
  One speaker pointed to the post–October 7 surge in anti-Jewish violence, while survivors of recent antisemitic attacks, including the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in Australia, were also present. The uncomfortable truth is that Europe loves commemorating dead Jews far more than defending living ones, and every solemn march now carries an accusation as much as a memory.

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CARPATHIAN MOUNTAINS, UKRAINE—Just when Russia’s grip on the Western conservative imagination starts to crack—right on cue, something shiny appears, and the moment slips away unused. It has happened again and again since February 2022. It is happening right now.

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The latest distraction: the American president’s war with the American pope, plus President Trump posting an image of himself as Jesus. Don’t get sucked in.

Here is what actually matters this week: Viktor Orbán lost. And that loss is an earthquake, cracking open one hell of a chance—if Europe can do the thing to which it is most allergic: act.

Now Europe has a chance to seize the moment—before Russia opens the next doll.

MAGA romanticized Orbán’s Hungary. European populists adored the Budapest ballyhoo. And Orbán leveraged that admiration to give cover to every pro-Russia instinct in the Western conservative movement. The implicit argument was poisonous but compelling: you can be based, trad, anti-globalist and soft on Putin. Orbán was the proof of concept.

That proof of concept is gone. Because Hungarians—who are still based, still trad, still against unfettered migration—made something clear: whatever else one wants to debate, Russia is evil and must be kept out of Europe, including Ukraine.

Sending European troops to Lviv would shift control of the global geopolitical conversation away from Trump for a moment.

Peter Magyar, literally Peter the Hungarian, may or may not be a reliable friend to Ukraine. That is, right now, beside the point—though he did signal on 13 April that Ukraine must be defended. What the Hungarian election says is this: Even one of the most self-consciously traditional countries in Europe looked at Orbán’s Russia alignment and said no. Russia is no redoubt of virtue. It is the enemy of freedom and tradition.

Sławomir Cenckiewicz, chief of Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s National Security Bureau, cut through the Orbán mourning on the European right with precision:

“[Orbán] was Poland’s ally only in the showdown with the cosmopolitans and centralists in the EU, as well as on migration. That was important, but not enough—and the recently revealed recordings of conversations between the Hungarian prime minister and foreign minister with Putin and Lavrov are an exemplification of all this. The relativization of this [Orban’s submission to Russia] on Poland’s anti-Russian right was a mistake, to put it mildly.”

That is the Hungarian lesson. Orbán was never the ally the European right imagined. The recordings confirmed what the energy policy, the Three Seas sabotage, the NATO foot-dragging, and the Ukraine hatred had already shown.

The most achievable, most signal-rich move available to Europe: publicly announce 40 non-combatant European troops to Lviv to assess air defense vulnerabilities.

Now Europe has a chance to seize the moment—before Russia opens the next doll.

Bulgaria votes April 19—five days from now. A pro-Russian result there would absorb much of the oxygen Magyar’s win just created. Bulgaria is more EU-dependent and, for now, a smaller player, but Russia would seize the optics—and a Sofia veto on Ukraine could become the new Budapest bone spur. The window between these two elections is the narrowest and most important diplomatic corridor in months. Europe must put something in it.

The most achievable, most signal-rich move available to Europe: publicly announce 40 non-combatant European troops to Lviv to assess air defense vulnerabilities. Symbolic in scale. Serious in signal. It shows Russia’s red lines are paper tigers. It uses the Hungarian energy before it dissipates.

Sending just a few European troops to Lviv would shift control of the global geopolitical conversation away from Trump for a moment. Europe can say, “hey, we are going to stop talking—no one was listening, not even ourselves. Instead, we’re going to one-up Trump and actually do something.”

Trump does things and gets key results swiftly while the rest of the West talks for years on end: Bye Maduro, bye Ayatollah. Now of course the aftermath and followup are messy and in need of refinement, and so into this breach Europe can say: We, too, are going to do something but in a smarter way: Forty soldiers to Lviv. Send the message. Open possibilities. You don’t have to “fix it all” at once, American style. Be like Ukrainians: piece by piece, malo po-malu, little by little.

The JD Vance Chance

And on the American side of the ledger, there is another opening. Catholic convert JD Vance—who still will not condemn Putin’s war on Europe’s largest Christian nation—spent last week delivering two juicy, major failures.

Trump set Vance up for both failures: The president sent his vice president on impossible negotiations in Pakistan regarding Iran, and days later Trump sent Vance to campaign for Orbán. Perhaps POTUS knew these were hopeless errands. Trump has now tied Vance to losers, which may matter enormously in a Rubio vs. Vance 2028 primary—which will matter for the free world: Rubio’s statecraft versus Vance’s blundering.

Step further away from the papal tiger and Trump Jesus picture noise and you’ll see something more significant: In recent weeks Trump has turned his guns on the pro-Russian voices within MAGA—Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens—for various reasons, including their opposition to his Iran intervention. Trump positioned himself as the reasonable one, condemning Candace for bizarrely insisting the French First Lady is a man.

Jones, Carlson, Owens, and their pals are the same people who have lied to America about Ukraine for years, claiming Russia is what Ukraine actually is: a based, faithful, freedom-defending nation.

So, widen this rift. Show that the problem with Tucker and Candace is not only that they oppose Trump’s Iran intervention—it’s that they support what Beijing and Moscow support, always.

Ignore the ‘Papal’ Tiger. Two Things to Do

Seize the chance in America: make clear that the pro-Russian voices in MAGA aren’t just wrong on Ukraine—they’re wrong on everything, because they take their cues from the enemy.

Seize the chance in Europe: Send non-combatant troops to Lviv now.

The window is open. Orbán is gone. Vance and the pro-Russians in MAGA are tied to losers. The Bulgarian elections are in five days.

The Pope said he’s not afraid of Trump. He can manage that situation. Everyone else: focus and act on saving Europe and Ukraine from Russia.

UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

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Hungary has voted Viktor Orbán out of power after 16 years—and the Kremlin just lost its most dependable ally inside the European Union.

But if you're expecting a clean geopolitical pivot, the incoming prime minister has a few things he'd like you to know first.

Voters in Hungary have delivered a resounding defeat to Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party, ending his 16-year hold on power. Though polls had long pointed to victory for the opposition Tisza party, many remained worried. This was an election in which both Moscow and Washington tried to intervene to tilt the balance in favor of Orbán, but both came up short.

Orbán, who conceded defeat, had recently described himself as a mouse serving Putin’s lion.

Indeed, Orbán’s fall is more than a domestic upset. His defeat removes the Kremlin’s most reliable friend inside the European Union.

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Corruption itself is a tool of statecraft for Russia.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó was revealed in recently leaked transcripts to have privately briefed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during key EU meetings, including a December 2023 summit on Ukraine’s accession. The leaks suggest Hungary shared sensitive EU discussions with Moscow and even offered to pass along internal EU documents. Orbán had also reportedly told Vladimir Putin he was ready to help him “in any way” and compared himself to a mouse serving a lion.

In a May 2025 piece for The National Interest, I argued that “Beijing and Moscow have no issue with Orbán looting the country and turning Hungary into the EU’s most corrupt state,” in part because corruption itself is a tool of statecraft for Russia. By fostering weak institutions, entrenched graft, and energy dependence—particularly through reliance on Russian gas—Moscow can keep neighboring states politically pliable and economically constrained.

Magyar, Hungary’s new PM, has opposed fast-tracking Ukraine’s EU membership and rejected sending weapons to Kyiv.

Simon Ostrovsky, a PBS Special Correspondent commenting on Orbán’s rule, wrote on X on 11 April, “Romania—once the poor man of Europe—has overtaken Hungary in almost every metric after 16 years of Orban.”

The recently announced opposition winner, Péter Magyar, whose name literally means “Peter the Hungarian,” campaigned on a promise to clean up corruption and dismantle this system. However, his position on Ukraine remains unclear, leaving open the question of whether a post-Orbán government would fundamentally shift Hungary’s position regarding Russia’s ongoing invasion of its eastern neighbor.

Hungary’s new PM on Russia: “If necessary, we will negotiate, but we won’t become friends.”

Read more

Our Voices of the Fight weekly Q&A returns next week.

KYIV—Russia has banned Catholicism, Evangelicalism, and Ukrainian Orthodoxy in every Ukrainian territory it occupies. It has killed 49 Ukrainian priests and pastors—most of them tortured first. It just put a drone into a monastery complex that has stood for four centuries in the heart of Lviv.

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That’s the story much of the American press missed. They called the 24 March air raid “a rare daytime attack,” when the real headline was “Russia bombs one of Europe’s most Catholic cities.”

Emotional connections matter more than security arguments.

I joined Jonathan Fink of the Oxford, UK-based Silicon Curtain podcast this week to make the case why now is the time for Europe to turn talk into action by sending non-combatant troops to Lviv. You can watch here—and read the takeaways below:

We also got into the MAGA psychology on Ukraine. Emotional connections matter more than security arguments—that’s the key. MAGA backed the Iran intervention because the Iranian people had recently been visibly massacred in the streets. And when two American airmen went down, America deployed 155 aircraft to bring them home—Americans will not count the cost for something they truly care about.

So the key is to get them to care.

Ukrainians are dying for their freedom too. But it’s harder for far-away Americans to understand Ukraine’s resistance. Many Americans don’t realize that what Iranians attempted in January, Ukrainians already did in 2014—and have been paying for it in blood ever since. Because Kyiv’s streets are relatively safe and definitely free, compared to Tehran and even to, say, Los Angeles or Minneapolis, the scale of what Ukrainians have endured to stay free doesn’t register for much of MAGA in the way that Iran does.

The key: Show Americans a people that has been dying for its freedom for twelve years and is not only still on its feet but is now helping the West and the Middle East defend against Iran. Show how Ukrainians today are some of the most devout and traditional but also tolerant Christians in Europe—even amid Russian bombings and persecutions of their churches. Build the emotional ties.

The Iranian and Ukrainian people have more in common than most people realize. So do the regimes in Moscow and Tehran trying to destroy them. And maybe the best way to wake up America is for Europe to act first—send those non-combatant troops to Lviv now.

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If you missed our earlier email today, we sent our monthly report, available in full to dues-paying members of our Information War Club. Our regular daily piece of journalism returns tomorrow—but as always here is your Daily Notebook:

UFN Daily Notebook—
What else we’re watching today:

• Qassem Is Dead, Hezbollah Isn’t
  
  Israel says it has killed Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem in a strike, marking the latest high-level decapitation in a campaign that has already removed multiple senior figures from the group’s leadership structure. Qassem, who took over after earlier assassinations, reshaped Hezbollah’s command chain, represented both continuity and coordination for the Iran-backed organization.
  
  Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to penetrate and target Hezbollah’s leadership, yet the group has so far absorbed those losses and continued operations, even as Lebanon is being drawn deeper into the Middle East war.

• Trump Wants to Punish NATO
  
  The Trump administration is now openly toying with a form of alliance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: shifting U.S. troops away from NATO countries seen as insufficiently supportive during the Iran war and rewarding friendlier governments with a bigger American military presence. Spain, Germany, Italy, and France are all portrayed as having frustrated U.S. operations in one way or another, while countries such as Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Greece are emerging as potential beneficiaries of Washington’s new hierarchy of political usefulness.
  
  

• Zelensky Wonders Why Washington Still Trusts Putin
  
  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is now making a sharper version of an argument Kyiv has been hinting at for weeks: that Russia is not merely benefiting from the Iran war as a geopolitical distraction, but is actively helping Tehran while Washington remains reluctant to confront that fact head-on.
  
  Speaking with Alastair Campbell on the UK’s The Rest is Politics podcast, Zelensky said the US was basically ignoring compelling evidence that Moscow has provided Iran with intelligence relevant to strikes on U.S. bases and energy infrastructure. Kyiv is trying to persuade Western audiences that Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Middle East war are no longer parallel stories: They are interconnected theaters in which Russia, Iran, and their partners learn from each other, support each other and exploit every opportunity to stretch Western attention and resources.

• Ukraine Enters the Hormuz Talks
  
  Ukraine is no longer just asking partners for security support, it is increasingly working to sell security expertise back to them. Kyiv has now joined consultations on the future operation of the Strait of Hormuz, with Zelensky explicitly offering Ukraine’s Black Sea experience as relevant know-how for keeping one of the world’s most sensitive maritime chokepoints functioning.
  
  The logic is straightforward: After years of defending shipping routes, restoring maritime access under fire, and adapting to Russian drone and missile threats in the Black Sea, Ukraine is positioning itself as a country with practical lessons others suddenly need.

• Ceasefire or Not, Nobody Is Racing Back Into Hormuz Just Yet
  
  The ceasefire may have calmed markets, but it has not restored confidence in the world’s most sensitive energy chokepoint. Shipping analysts say there is no “mass exodus” of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz because the basic risk calculus has barely changed: Iran still controls access conditions, major operators remain cautious, and safety guarantees are nowhere near robust enough for a full commercial return. Roughly 2,000 ships and 20,000 seafarers have been stranded in the Gulf since the war began, while actual transits remain far below the prewar norm of around 135 ships a day.

• Ukraine Keeps Severing Russia’s Oil Arteries
  
  Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign is continuing to work its way through the infrastructure behind Russia’s oil exports, and the latest reported hit on the Krymskaya oil pumping station on 9 April in Krasnodar Krai fits that pattern neatly.
  
  Coming after recent attacks on major oil infrastructure at Primorsk, Ust-Luga and Novorossiysk, the strike suggests Ukraine is sustaining a deliberate effort to make Russia’s export system less predictable, less resilient, and more expensive to defend.

• Orbán Backs Israel in Public, Offers Help to Iran in Private
  
  A newly revealed September 2024 call adds another uncomfortable layer in the increasingly clear portrait of Viktor Orbán's foreign policy: While presenting Hungary as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters and receiving open backing from the Trump camp, Budapest was also offering intelligence cooperation to Iran in the aftermath of the Hezbollah pager attack.
  
  According to the transcript, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó reassured Tehran that Hungary had no role in the attack but went further, telling his Iranian counterpart that Hungarian services had already made contact and would share all relevant information from their investigation. Orbán faces his strongest electoral challenge yet on Sunday 12 April, after 16 years in power.

  
  

• Cuba Runs on Oil, the Oil Keeps Vanishing, and Emergency Deliveries Are Not a Strategy
  
  Cuba’s latest Russian oil delivery may have bought Havana a few more days, but it did not change the underlying story: the island remains trapped in a structural energy crisis built on extreme oil dependence, weak domestic production, and collapsing external supply.
  
  The late-March shipment of roughly 700,000 barrels is expected to cover only about 7 to 10 days of demand even under rationing, after Venezuela’s last shipment arrived in December 2025 and Mexico’s final delivery came in January 2026. Cuba’s vulnerability is unusually severe because petroleum still accounts for about 87% of its energy consumption, far above the regional average and well above nearby Caribbean states that have diversified into gas, coal, or renewables.

• With a Ceasefire in Place, Europe Suddenly Becomes Bold
  
  European leaders are moving quickly to insert themselves into the fragile post-ceasefire phase in the Middle East. The UK’s prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, seen by many as waffling and slow-moving during the heat of the war, is preparing a Middle East visit aimed at stabilizing the situation and reinforcing diplomatic channels, while warning against any illusion that the conflict is close to resolution.

• 33,000 Kills in One Month, and Now the Real Problem Is the Faster Shaheds
  
  Ukraine’s small air-defense revolution is accelerating fast. In March alone, interceptor drones reportedly downed more than 33,000 incoming Russian UAVs, roughly double the previous month’s figure, turning what was once an improvised workaround into an increasingly central layer of national air defense.
  
  But success is already creating the next problem: Russia is scaling up jet-powered Shahed variants, forcing Ukraine to move quickly toward faster interceptors, better terminal guidance, and more reliable performance in bad weather and contested conditions.
  
  That is why the latest push matters. Kyiv is not just celebrating a record month; it is trying to industrialize the next generation of drone interception through procurement planning, training, testing infrastructure, AI-enabled target detection, and a growing cluster of around 100 manufacturers.

• A New Underground Factory in Ukraine, Another Production Line in Croatia
  
  General Cherry is partnering with Croatia’s Orqa to launch joint component production inside Ukraine, including construction of a large underground factory, while also opening serial production in Croatia to develop new drone technologies in parallel.
  
  Ukraine is trying to localize more of the supply chain at home, reduce dependence on foreign components, and pull allied manufacturers directly into wartime production under its “Build in Ukraine” model. Orqa’s role matters here because it already supplies drone components across more than 50 countries and says its products are made without Chinese parts. Taken together, this looks less like a single business deal and more like a template for how Ukraine and Europe may start building a more resilient, politically safer, and operationally relevant drone industry together.

• Carrying Mines, Ammo, and the Wounded—Meet the Nurse Robot
  
  Ukraine’s unmanned ground vehicle sector keeps moving in the most useful direction possible: away from flashy demos and toward battlefield practicality. Ratel Robotics has started production of its new tracked Nurse TB UGV (pictured above), a compact platform built for the jobs infantry units actually need done under fire: Hauling ammunition and water, laying up to six TM62 anti-tank mines, and evacuating wounded soldiers without exposing more troops.
  
  The robot weighs 120 kg, carries up to 150 kg, operates out to 7 km without a relay, 10 km with one, and up to 20 km via fibre-optic link. It also includes a “follow me” mode that lets it automatically trail a soldier using onboard vision and tracking algorithms.

  
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• Speaking of rescue robots, watch here our latest animation: A true story of never leaving anyone behind, even if you have to make a bicycle fly to do it.

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