Sartre explained Jewish destiny through the anti-Semite. Levinas objected that Judaism is not a result of anti-Semitism. Both rejected liberal abstraction, for opposite reasons. The same fork reappeared in 2022: in Putin's rhetoric of denazifying Ukraine and in an open letter from Ukrainian Jews to Israel.
A former Russian diplomat leaves Russia over the war with a newborn son and ends up on twelve-hour factory shifts in Galilee. A smartwatch full of English words gets him into a doctoral program. Now he asks why Russians abroad still face their troubles alone, and proposes a way out.
In June 2025, Donald Trump hailed a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda, but the M23 rebels never signed it and kept fighting. His Gaza plan was approved without the Palestinians, and the truce between Thailand and Cambodia collapsed by December. What do these failures mean for a peace deal in Ukraine?
Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled Putin's war, most of them young, educated and politically active. Yet in 2022, Russians filed only about 18,400 asylum claims in Europe, and fewer than a third were granted. Many ended up in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Israel instead.
Mali, a former French colony, has turned away from Paris and toward Moscow. Russian instructors, many of them Wagner veterans of the war in Ukraine, now help its army fight insurgents. In return, Moscow is eyeing Mali's gold, uranium and lithium. Is this sovereignty or a new dependence?
Garry Kasparov sees Trump's second term as the Putinization of America, with Elon Musk as its leading oligarch. Alexander Dugin welcomes the same changes and calls Trump Putin's ideological twin. Both agree that Trump's America is starting to look like Putin's Russia. They differ only on whether that is a disaster.
In March 2023, a Hamas delegation visited Moscow, and months later Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Russia and Iran arm Hamas and other militants, while Iranian drones fly for Russia in Ukraine. Every flare-up in Gaza lifts oil prices, filling the war chests of Moscow and Tehran.
In recent months, Europe has seen a coup plot in Romania, a blast at a Spanish defense factory and sabotage on a German frigate. All have been linked to Russian intelligence. While fighting openly in Ukraine, Moscow wages a quieter war against Europe through sabotage, cyberattacks, bribery and propaganda.
In 2022, many in the Russian opposition believed that Ukraine's victory would quickly bring down Putin's regime. Three years later, the Russian economy has survived sanctions, and the West avoids a direct clash with a nuclear power. Would a bad peace be better than endless losses?
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Israel's newspapers covered the war in four languages and in four different ways. Hebrew papers condemned Russia with caution, English ones spoke of a barbaric invasion, and Arabic ones barely noticed the war. Russian-language outlets were free of Kremlin propaganda.