The showdown between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 shocked the entire world. But instead of analyzing its political impact, let’s focus on the details of manners, gestures, which may seem less important than the issues at stake, but reveal more about the underlying basic stance. The first thing that stands out is the behavior of two arrogant and self-assured U.S. politicians treating the leader of Ukraine — who was under imm

The second line of the Ukrainian national anthem — “Fate/luck still smiles on us, fellow Ukrainians” — sadly no longer holds. Much worse, we should extend this retreat of luck to Europe itself: Fate/luck no longer smiles on us, fellow Europeans. The situation is now so serious that the same old points should be repeated again and again—perhaps they will find more resonance today now that the crisis has broken out openly. To anyone who follows our media, it is more than obvious how U.S. Presiden

I must admit that I occasionally enjoy podcasts explaining the secrets behind well-known magic tricks (the three-shell game, mentalism, levitation, etc.). After reading recent news from Russia, I’ve come to the conclusion that these tricks offer a clue to how Russian propaganda has achieved what seems impossible to common sense: claiming that the Russian attack on Ukraine is an act of self-defense. The standard explanation for magic tricks is that they usually rely on at least two different stra

To understand recent fears about the possible escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine into a nuclear conflict, we must revisit its beginnings, where the groundwork for this crisis was laid. Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, articulated the wager underpinning Russia’s aggression in early 2023: “I believe that NATO would not directly interference in the conflict even in this scenario,” Medvedev said, referring to the possibility of Rus

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, publicly appealed to those who had voted for both her and Trump. She wanted to know what motivated such an apparently inconsistent choice, and the predominant answer she heard was that she and Trump seemed more sincere, whereas Vice President Kamala Harris came off as too calculating. It was a fruitful exercise, and we can ask the same of leftists who supp