Russia

Overnight, the news of Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles on Russian soil has been sinking in. Reports suggest that Kyiv is planning to use US-made ATACMS missiles for the first time in the coming days. We won’t know for sure until after the attack has taken place though – speaking at a press conference last night, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the news but said ‘strikes are not carried out with words. Such things are not announced. The missiles will speak for themselves.’ The White House was reportedly persuaded to grant Ukraine permission to use the missiles following the news that approximately 10,000 North Korean troops have been sent by Pyongyang to train and fight alongside Putin’s army.

Warring parties often strike deals. Exchanges of prisoners, ceasefires to deliver aid, covert talks between intelligence services – and eventually, hopefully, peace. But since Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops across the Russian border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, there have been no peace negotiations and no sign of meaningful compromise from either Moscow or Kyiv. But now, after nearly three years of horrendous casualties and destruction in Ukraine, preliminary talks are underway, according to the Financial Times, for a deal in which both sides would agree to stop or reduce attacks on energy installations. While it might seem a bizarre development, it’s now in Moscow’s interest as much as in Kyiv’s to end the continuous targeting of power plants.

As if the Russian political barometer hasn’t fallen low enough, news comes that it has yet to reach the bottom of the glass. Official symbolism is a reliable indicator of trends, and an announcement by Georgi Filimonov this week marks a new low. Filimonov, recently appointed as governor of Vologda province, plans to erect a life-sized statue of dictator Joseph Stalin in the provincial capital. Not to denounce him but to ‘commemorate’ him.  Probably, Putin always had an admiration for Stalin Decades have passed since Nikita Khrushchëv spread the word in the Soviet Union that Stalin was a despot and a mass killer. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin expanded the story to cover the millions who died at his hands.

The political pundits like to tell us that general election polls don’t matter until after Labor Day. That, they say, is when the average American actually starts paying attention to what is happening in the election and so you can get a better understanding of which way the electorate is leaning. The only problem with that traditional wisdom is that it’s hard to put much stock into polls when so many are returning drastically different results.Take the Morning Consult poll that dropped this morning that shows Harris surging with a lead in six of the seven battleground states. The poll has her up eight points in Wisconsin, four in Pennsylvania and Nevada and three in Michigan. To be frank, no one serious believes these numbers.

An emotional scene unfolded at Joint Base Andrews last night, with the surprise return of a number of American hostages after a prisoner swap with Russia and Belarus. Among those returned were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, Radio Free Europe correspondent Alsu Kurmasheva and former US Marine Paul Whelan. The returned hostages were greeted by their families, along with President Biden and Vice President Harris. Harris exchanged what are technically her first remarks with the press since becoming the presumptive nominee: “This is an extraordinary day and I’m very thankful for our president.