I was enjoying a typical Milanese afternoon with prosecco and (relevant to the story) non-Russian company. When completely unprompted, a fellow Gen Z participant said: “I wish I could go to Moscow, I really respect Russian values. They have traditional values, not like the West”. Needless to say, this derailed the conversation and made me think 2 things: first, that being a houseplant is underrated; and second, whether Russia’s “traditional values” brand amounts to anything m

Over the course of its war of independence against Russian aggression, Ukraine has defied all odds. In Vladimir Putin’s vision , Russian tanks were meant to enter Kyiv within days, “liberating” the population from their democratically elected president Volodymyr Zelensky, who, in 2019, had based his campaign , among other things, on finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict that Russia had sparked in the Donbas five years earlier . Yet, for all his willingness to negotia

In recent months, the so-called “Russian Hybrid Warfare” has become increasingly popular in the headlines of newspapers and in the speeches of European leaders, mostly due to the growing number of NATO airspace violations by Russia. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that, when it comes to Russia, “we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either.” Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of British intelligence, reflected that it “may be right [to say] we’re alrea