Kyiv may replace Lenin’s empty plinth with Ivan Mazepa.
The plinth has stood empty since Maidan crowds toppled Lenin in 2013. Zelenskyy proposed Mazepa, a Cossack leader who broke with Moscow and fought for Ukrainian independence, The Guardian. 1/
Russia depicted Mazepa as a traitor for centuries.
Zelenskyy: Where Lenin fell, Mazepa will stand firm. The goal was to make Ukrainians view their own history through the eyes of others. 2/
Kryvda [Kyiv culture-history professor]: Ukraine is going through unfinished decolonization.
The USSR absorbed national cultures and tried to make one Soviet nation. Russia still says Ukrainians and Russians are one people.
Browder: Putin does not care much about what Russians think.
He has sent 1.5 million men to death or disability and destroyed the economy. The Kremlin’s claim that Russia is fighting the entire West is aimed more at Western countries than at Russians. 1/
Browder: Putin has reached a stalemate in Ukraine. Russia is no longer making progress.
Ukraine is inflicting real economic pain by striking oil refineries, military depots, shadow-fleet ships and other targets. 2/
Browder: My fear is that Putin will test NATO to see whether it actually works, possibly expecting the US not to honor Article 5.
Without the US, the response would come from a coalition of willing countries rather than NATO as a whole. 3/
Russia is losing this war, and still refuses to end it. Every plan Putin built to win has collapsed, yet he keeps fighting.
The 2026 deficit blew past $73 billion in six months, overshooting the Kremlin's full-year plan — Gabuev, Prokopenko and Stanovaya, Foreign Affairs. 1/
Putin set three paths to win. Plan A used Trump to force a deal on Kyiv, Plan B waited for Trump to drop Ukraine, and Plan C won on the battlefield.
In his June interview Putin no longer mentioned Trump, whom he once counted on after their warm Alaska summit. Plan A is dead. 2/
Trump did cut Ukraine off. He stopped free US weapons in March 2025 and zeroed out financial aid by July.
Europe replaced the money and kept Ukraine making drones and missiles on EU soil. Washington still shares intelligence and blacklisted Rosneft and Lukoil. Plan B failed. 3/
Historian Sarah Paine: This is the Russian business model. Say your business is doing well. One of Putin's security-service enforcers comes to your house and says: I want a monthly payment from you.
That's a mafia shakedown, going back in Russian history forever. 1/
Paine: Putin's own circle owns the refineries Ukraine keeps striking, destroying Russian wealth. Putin wants Donbas, he wants Crimea. For what?
Russians need a legal system that lets them build wealth and live decent lives at home, not more territory. 2X
Chinese military researchers used outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models to train their own defence AI. More than 80 Chinese papers and patents document it.
Washington restricts Beijing's access to advanced chips. These documents show the shortcut around it — Reuters. 1/
The method is model distillation. Researchers feed the outputs of a powerful model into a smaller one, then run it locally without the compute to build a frontier system from scratch.
The Washington-based Jamestown Foundation compiled the research and shared it with Reuters. 2/
Researchers in PLA Unit 96941, a military intelligence and cyber-warfare unit in Beijing, used OpenAI's GPT-3.5 to summarize sensitive source code.
They trained a domestic model on those summaries so it runs inside Chinese military networks, away from foreign servers. 3/
Sikorski: In January 2022, Russia made a brief military move into Kazakhstan to interfere in its succession. I believe China told Russia: get out right now, or we'll cut off trade. Russia obeyed.
It can't prosecute this war without trade with China. 1/
Sikorski: China could actually force Russia to end the war. My guess is the war suits China just fine.
Russia sells China gold, and grows more dependent on it every year. What's not to like about that? 2/
Sikorski: Like Weimar Germany, and Tsarist Russia in World War One, Putin's Russia is running out of the resources to keep fighting. I think he probably has enough for another year or so. 3X