Russia

Today's headlines: Singapore premier on official visit to China, the first since the pandemic; Taliban block a march of women activists in Kabul for women's right to study; Myanmar's coup leader moves against 'acts of terrorism' by armed groups fighting against the army; First 'controlled' demonstration in Hong Kong; In five months more than 25,000 Russians reached the USA across the Mexican border.

The Chinese launch the new 5+1 format for dialogue with the former Soviet republics in the region. The focus on communication campaigns in Kyrgyzstan. The risk of being dragged into the geopolitical competition between the West and the China-Russia duo.

We are incapable of learning from history, otherwise there would be wars. But while one wonders how to finally succeed in bringing the fires to an end, one can still find inspiration in a distant date, when in 1686 the war between the reign of the Czar of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom of Reczpospolita was ended.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I supports the creation of a new ecclesiastical jurisdiction on Lithuanian soil. It will give autonomy to the Lithuanian Orthodox who no longer want to depend on the Moscow Patriarchate. Analogy with the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church founded in 2018. A response to Patriarch Kirill's support for the Putin war against Ukraine.

Russia’s leader highlights the building of the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline by 2030, but China keeps it out of the final declaration. While willing to buy more Russian gas at discounted prices, Beijing also wants to keep its traditional suppliers. The Chinese are already in talks with the Turkmens for another pipeline.

Some Cossack groups claim their own entity independent of Moscow. The risk of disintegration is one of the effects of the Russian war on Ukraine. The first attempts at a Cossack state after the Bolshevik revolution. Difficult to determine how many people belong to the community.

The team that participated in the European Championships consisted only of refugees from Chechnya. They fled with their families at the time of the Putin war against Chechen separatists. It is now normal in sports for national teams to be multi-ethnic. Moscow attacks.

For years he denied being the founder and commander of the "Wagner Company," which he now glorifies as the "best army in the world." His biography - from prison to catering to today's railings against the rest of the Kremlin elite - is a synthesis of late and post-Soviet history.

Russia and the United States are the main movers. Real parliamentary opposition is unlikely to emerge. Moscow claims rights over Russian-speaking regions in northern Kazakhstan. Ethnic hostility actually favours the stability of Tokaev's power.

The Ukrainian authorities had ordered the expulsion of monks loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. Kiev wants the Moscow jurisdiction to step aside. The 'Lavra' is the oldest monastic institution of Russian Orthodoxy. Its fate tied to the outcome of the bloody Russian invasion.

The minority in the country counts 4.7 million individuals: in 2010 there were 5.3 million. Also declining in the original regions. Ethnic Russians in Tatarstan are growing. Use was made of the pandemic to readjust statistics less liked by the Kremlin. Government: next data will be secret.

In an incautious shift, Soviet women, once the vanguard of world feminism, have morphed into today’s “heroic mothers”, worthy of prizes awarded by Putin in the Kremlin. However, the myth of the mother has become a casualty of the war, that of the Russian woman who takes care of the whole family and all the people, taking on the burden of suffering and humiliation, like Solzhenitsyn's Matryona, soul of the entire village of the persecuted.