Thursday 12 February 2026 Odesa is a city built to face the sea, not to fear the sky. Yet, night after night in recent days, she has been forced into a routine of alarms, detonations, shattered glass and, afterwards, the slow realisation that the basics of civilised life have been switched off again. The most recent strikes have not been aimed at troop concentrations or artillery emplacements. They have been aimed at the sinews of ordinary existence—electricity substations, e

Thursday 12 February 2026 There are moments in international sport when the line between politics and humanity is drawn so tightly that it begins to strangle the very ideals it was designed to protect. The reported decision of the International Olympic Committee to disqualify Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych over the design of his helmet — allegedly in breach of Rule 50 of the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Charter — risks becoming such a moment. He

Thursday 12 February 2026 The debate about using frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s war effort has moved from abstract principle to concrete institutional engineering. What began in 2022 as a rapid sanctions reflex — immobilising Russian Central Bank and oligarch assets — has, by early 2026, evolved into a multi-layered project to turn those immobilised funds into a durable source of military and budgetary support for Kyiv, while preserving at least a semblance of fid

Thursday 12 February 2026 A recent study claims that the United Kingdom and the United States are becoming more corrupt. To assess this assertion the first task is to ask what, precisely, has been measured. Corruption is not a single act. It ranges from the cash-in-an-envelope bribery that many people imagine, through to the more lawful, varnished forms of influence that thrive in wealthy democracies: opaque political finance, lucrative employment after public office, procure

Thursday 12 February 2026 The Russian state’s latest move against Telegram is best understood not as a single switch being flipped, but as the Kremlin’s preferred method of digital coercion: a tightening spiral of technical disruption, legal pressure and narrative framing, designed to make an indispensable platform feel unreliable until its users drift, resentfully, into something the state can monitor more comprehensively. In early February 2026, Russian users began reportin