Sunday 12 July 2026 The decision by Georgia’s Kulevi oil refinery and terminal to cease processing Russian crude oil is ostensibly a commercial one. Company executives have explained that abandoning Russian feedstock will allow the refinery to regain access to lucrative European markets, where sanctions and tightening regulations have increasingly excluded petroleum products derived from Russian oil. Yet in the Caucasus, where economics and geopolitics have rarely been separa

Sunday 12 July 2026 Russia has often imagined herself as a civilisation apart, neither wholly European nor entirely Asian, but a great power destined to chart her own course. Throughout her history, however, periods of apparent strength have alternated with moments of profound strategic weakness. The war in Ukraine has accelerated forces that were already gathering beneath the surface: demographic decline, economic stagnation, technological isolation, institutional corruption

Friday 10 July 2026 The NATO summit held in Ankara this week may ultimately be remembered less for dramatic declarations than for confirming a profound transformation already under way. Throughout the Cold War and the decades that followed, NATO rested upon a relatively simple geopolitical foundation: overwhelming American military predominance combined with European economic power. The Ankara summit suggested that this formula is evolving into something more complex. The Uni

Friday 10 July 2026 Few western observers have spent as much time studying Vladimir Putin, or have paid as high a personal price for doing so, as Bill Browder. Once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, Browder transformed from enthusiastic capitalist into Putin’s most persistent international critic after the imprisonment and death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow prison in 2009. Since then, Browder has devoted his life to exposing corruption within t

Friday 10 July 2026 For much of the twentieth century, western democracies liked to think of themselves as the political antithesis of oligarchy. Governments were chosen through competitive elections, public institutions were constrained by law and power was presumed to derive ultimately from the electorate rather than from inherited wealth or private fortunes. Yet in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, this distinction has become increasingly difficult to sustai