The emperor is all but draped in paper

When Prigozhin’s Wagner troops began their sprint towards Moscow on Friday/Saturday, they were 25.000, 5.000 of them being a vanguard. Vladimir Putin is said to have a security apparatus of hundreds of thousands of men. But yesterday, we witnessed boys with weapons and police officers in Moscow. Not security forces. Perhaps they were unseen. Perhaps they were not, because it’s a sham, a paper machier construction.

Sustainable war or Pandora’s Box in Russia?

Ukraine has proved to be a very tough opponent for Russia. The Ukrainians have been able to kill and injure hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. They’ve also proved to be adept at using the Russian propaganda toolkit against the Russians themselves. It might be that Vladimir Putin opened the Pandora’s Box with this war: a sustainable war he cannot end and cannot limit.

Russian cyberwar in the dark forest?

Russia has been turned into a dictatorship in two weeks. No journalists are allowed to mention the word “war” in combination with “Ukraine”, resulting in several journalists or news agencies shutting down their activity or agreeing to self-censorship. Many foreign journalists are thus going home for fear of their reporting being in conflict with these hard measures.