The narratives they offer through culture are therefore some of the clearest expressions of how they see their role in a wartime country. This year, Moscow has hosted two major government-backed awards ceremonies one for books, one for films. In both cases, the organisers played it safe, repeating familiar themes, many of them rooted in Soviet-era cultural and wartime mythology. Prizes went largely to people within the same orbit in most cases, the families of well-known Soviet-era cultural icons.
William Burns had travelled halfway around the world to speak with Vladimir Putin, but in the end he had to make do with a phone call. It was November 2021, and US intelligence agencies had been picking up signals in the preceding weeks that Putin could be planning to invade Ukraine. President Joe Biden dispatched Burns, his CIA director, to warn Putin that the economic and political consequences if he did so would be disastrous.
Wadephul said speaking in Latvia that what was seen during the peace talks in UAE is "Russia's stubborn insistence on the crucial territorial issue." "And if there is no flexibility here, I fear that the negotiations may still take a long time or may not be successful at this stage," he said. He added, "Our commitment to diplomacy does not weaken our determination to support Ukraine."
Russia has been steadily expanding its global nuclear footprint through its state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom and its subsidiaries. Russia provides financing or technological support and exports complete nuclear-power-plant solutions from building infrastructure to supplying the core component, the Nuclear Steam Supply System, which drives power generation.
"agreement is a long-overdue step toward dismantling one of the Kremlin's most powerful economic weapons. Every cubic meter of Russian gas kept flowing into Europe has helped finance the missiles that strike Ukrainian cities. This Regulation, if implemented without loopholes, brings Europe closer to honouring its promise to end this deadly dependency."
The United States' top diplomat Marco Rubio traveled to Eastern Europe on Sunday for talks with the conservative leaders of Hungary and Slovakia, both of whom are aligned with US President Donald Trump. The visit comes a day after Rubio, who is also Trump's national security advisor, urged Europeans to defend Western civilization in a speech at the Munich Security Conference.
According to the cybersecurity group InformNapalm, hackers from the Fenix analytical cyber centre monitored Russian military personnel around the clock from mid-2025 to February 2026, accessing drone monitoring systems and intercepting operational chats. The intelligence was passed directly to Ukraine's Defence Forces, helping counter waves of drone attacks and contributing to strikes on Russian command posts and launch sites. Read more related news:
They threw everything they had at us [until] there were no more chairs to hurl at each other, Vucic recounted in a magazine interview 20 years later. Dinamo supporters then stampeded the pitch, where their team jumped into the fray, assaulting police officers, and the game was officially called off before it began.
