By Larry Johnson, Substack, 9/24/26

Sounds like Professor Pape is trying to impose his pet theory onto a conflict that he only has a superficial understanding of. – Natylie

Thanks to Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism who flagged a recent interview that Professor Robert Pape did with Mario Nawfal. During the interview, Pape argued that Vladimir Putin is caught in an “escalation trap.” In his telling, Russia launched a preventive war in February 2022 to seize Kyiv and roughly 60 percent of Ukraine. That plan collapsed, and the fallback, betting that NATO would break, is now producing the European counterbalancing coalition Moscow most feared. It is a tidy theory. It also rests on a premise about Russian intentions that the record does not support, and once that premise goes, the trap goes with it.

What the force tells you about the objective

Start with arithmetic, the kind any planner of military operations does before anything else. Russia invaded with roughly 150,000 to 190,000 troops, including separatist forces. The standard rule of thumb for occupying a hostile population, from James Quinlivan’s RAND work, is about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. For a country of more than 40 million, even occupying 60 percent of the territory would require several hundred thousand troops, several times what Russia sent. Moscow’s General Staff can do this arithmetic. A force that size is a coercive instrument, not an occupation army.

The pattern of the operation fits coercion. Russian forces approached Kyiv from the north but never attempted to assault or encircle a city of three million. The pressure was aimed at the government, not at taking the capital block by block. Talks began within days, in Belarus on February 28, and moved to Istanbul in March. Pape’s supporters point to the airborne assault on Hostomel as proof of a plan to seize the capital. But a failed coup de main against an airfield is not evidence of an intent to occupy 60 percent of a country.

Istanbul: the objective was achieved

The strongest evidence against Pape is that the coercion worked. By the end of March 2022, meetings in Belarus and Turkey, together with video conferences, had produced the Istanbul Communiqué, a framework for a settlement. Ukraine accepted permanent neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and its allies, with Russia also as a guarantor. Russia, for its part, agreed to a process to settle the Crimea dispute diplomatically.

That was the core of what Moscow wanted, and the Ukrainian side confirmed it. David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, later said Russia was prepared to end the war if Ukraine accepted Finland-style neutrality and committed not to join NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed to me, Judge Napolitano and Mario Nawfal directly that the talks produced a tentative agreement, and that its terms were brought to the table by the Ukrainian delegation, not imposed by Moscow.

As a gesture of goodwill, Moscow withdrew its forces from north of Kyiv. Western commentary treats that as a retreat forced by battlefield failure. It is at least as consistent with the claim that the pressure had served its purpose.

How the deal died

Then the politics changed. Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kyiv on April 9, 2022, and according to Arakhamia told the Ukrainians not to sign anything with Russia and to “just fight.” Two days earlier, Lavrov had already complained publicly that Ukraine’s new draft departed sharply from the key provisions agreed at Istanbul on March 29. Washington and London had decided Russia was weaker than they had thought and that it could be bled. Ukraine walked away.

This is the point Pape’s framework cannot absorb. If Russia’s goal was a neutral Ukraine obtained through negotiation, the war did not go on because Moscow’s plan failed. It went on because Russia’s adversaries rejected the settlement.

No plan B, but a fast pivot and a new army

With hindsight, Russia clearly had not prepared a plan B for Ukraine walking away. That was a real planning failure. But the Russian military adjusted quickly. It concentrated on the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea, and the fall of Mariupol in May gave it the first major result of that phase.

The bigger adjustment came in September 2022. After a large number of contract soldiers left the army in August and the Kharkiv counteroffensive exposed how thin Russian lines were, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. That was the start, not the end, of Russia’s response. From that point Moscow set about building a much larger army, as the Russian officers I have interviewed have described in detail, including Gen. Apti Alaudinov, Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky, Gen. Andrei Gurulev and Col. Eduard Basurin.

The mobilization was followed by a sustained recruitment campaign and an expanded annual draft. By Medvedev’s count, more than 452,000 men signed military contracts in 2023. Roughly 450,000 followed in 2024, and more than 422,000 in 2025. Year after year, Russia has added at least 350,000 new soldiers. Putin’s decrees tell the same story: authorized military strength rose from about 1.15 million in 2022 to 1.32 million in December 2023, then to 1.5 million effective December 2024. By 2026, according to my sources, Russia’s army had reached that 1.5 million active-duty figure.

That is not the behavior of a state that expected a quick war and is now improvising its way out of a trap. It is the behavior of a state that decided in the autumn of 2022 to fight a long war, and built the force to do it.

Why the timeline matters

The goals never changed. Putin announced them on February 24, 2022: the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. What changed after Istanbul was the method, from coercion toward a negotiated settlement to attrition. Moscow has never attached a timeline to that effort.

Pape’s trap depends on the assumption that Russia needed a quick victory and is now stuck with worse and worse options. An attrition strategy with no deadline, backed by an army that has grown every year since 2022, is not a trap. It is a choice. Moscow’s theory of victory since late 2022 has been to exhaust Ukraine’s manpower and the West’s willingness to supply it, not to break NATO by a specific date. Four and a half years later, Russian forces are still advancing, and Ukraine’s reserve and mobilization problems are structural, not temporary.

Pape’s answer is European counterbalancing, backed by an EU economy he puts at about eight times Russia’s. That ratio only holds at market exchange rates, which badly understate what Russia’s economy can actually produce. On purchasing power parity, the measure that matters in a war of production, Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world: about $6.9 trillion in 2024 by the World Bank’s count, behind only China, the United States and India, and ahead of Japan and Germany. The EU as a bloc is still larger, but on that basis the gap is roughly half of Pape’s figure.

GDP understates Russia’s position in another way. Russia has a resource base that Europe cannot match, from oil, gas and coal to metals and fertilizer, and a defense-industrial base that Europe has let wither for thirty years.

Artillery shells, the basic currency of this war, show what that means in practice. Russia produced an estimated 400,000 122mm and 152mm artillery rounds in 2022. By 2025, estimates put its annual output at about 4.2 million. A 2026 Estonian intelligence report goes further, estimating that Russian factories produced about seven million artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds in 2025. On top of that, Russia has received millions of rounds from North Korea.

Europe started from almost nothing. At the beginning of 2024, according to Rheinmetall’s own internal estimate, all Western European manufacturers together could produce about 550,000 shells a year. NATO’s own assessment was that Russia produced as much ammunition in the first three months of 2024 as the entire alliance did in a year. The EU pledged to reach a capacity of two million 155mm shells a year by the end of 2025, a target, not proven output. Even adding US production, which is aiming for about 100,000 rounds a month in 2026, allied programs might yield about three million shells this year, still less than Russia’s estimated output in 2025.

That is the real measure of the balance Pape is counting on. A bloc whose economy is several times Russia’s is still being outproduced in the one commodity that decides an attrition war. Balance-of-power theory may be right that Europe will eventually arm itself. It says nothing about whether that happens in time to change the outcome in Ukraine.

Russia sent a force too small to occupy most of Ukraine, negotiated within days, and reached a framework agreement within five weeks. When the West persuaded Kyiv to walk away, Russia shifted to an open-ended war of attrition and spent four years building an army to fight it. That is not a state trapped by the failure of a plan to conquer 60 percent of a country. It is a state that tried coercion first, adapted when it failed, and is fighting on its own timeline.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack

10/11/26:

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced an immediate “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine on October 11, 2026, claiming both sides had agreed to stop targeting each other’s energy infrastructure.

There is no concrete evidence that a functional energy truce is in effect, and both official statements and field events contradict the claim.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that the announcement “came as news” to him, though he noted Ukraine would be ready to comply if Russia officially agreed to a reciprocal halt and clarified the terms. Combatants have continued hitting energy-related targets on both sides despite the announcement. For instance, Russian forces launched large waves of drone and missile strikes into Ukraine, while Ukrainian forces have maintained long-range strikes against Russian oil infrastructure and refineries (such as facilities in Syzran).

While the Kremlin has previously expressed general openness to the concept of pausing energy strikes, Russian officials have tied any agreement to broader demands, including the lifting of Western sanctions on Russian seaborne energy exports. Independent think tanks and analysts describe the proposed arrangement as largely symbolic or non-existent in practice.

President Trump made a similar claim in September 2026 that both nations had agreed to halt energy attacks, which also broke down immediately as strikes persisted.

As for the diesel deal, there is a growing chorus of expert opinion in favor of the view that the deal will do relatively little to boost diesel production, and it is the shortage of production, not the hiccups of war distribution, that is the major factor behind rising prices.

See Matt Randolph on Forbes: The Art Of The Tiny Deal: Trump’s Diesel Deal With Putin Does Nothing (Randolph), and Larry Johnson on Sonar21: The Other Hormuz Shocks: LNG and Helium. Economic effects of the Persian Gulf cutoff, from first-order to tertiary (Johnson).

10/10/26:

The main challenge to and opportunities for the US-Russia diesel agreement announced by President Trump yesterday center on: the reactions of Ukraine and Europe, damaged Russian refinery infrastructure, severe legislative and political backlash, and domestic market scale limitations.

Zelenskiy has already howled his disapproval, as one would expect, and he has confirmed that he will continue the renewed Ukrainian onslaught on Russian refineries that had picked up again from October 1 (unless Russia agrees to stop its strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure). This, of course, raises the question as to where all this Russian diesel that is destined for the US is going to come from in the event that there is insufficient Russian refining capacity. Russia recently halted diesel exports because it wanted to protect – to continue to be able to supply at reasonable prices – Russia’s domestic market. If Russia is unable to boost its refining capacity very significantly it runs the risk that it will not be able to supply the US, after all, or that it may have to allow domestic prices to rise significantly, or that it will have to send more crude to countries like India for refining there, and this too would likely have a negative impact on prices. If could also simply send crude oil to the US, since Russian oil is more favorable for refining into diesel and aviation fuel than much of US shale oil, but I understand that US refineries are already working close to capacity, fed from, among other things, more oil from Venezuela.

The total amount of diesel that the deal envisages being sent to the US is 4.8 million metric tons, according to CNBC. The Atlantic Council says this is not enough to resolve global fuel shortages. Bloomberg has issued a calculation that puts the total amount being talked about at 13.5 million metric tons.

Ukraine will likely find support for its intransigence from Europe, but that support will be increasingly insincere, given that Europe is also short of diesel and needs to see a boost to global diesel availability and is coming dangerously close to the end of the possibility of Europe continuing to shoot itself in the foot by adopting policies that merely increase its fuel difficulties (such as planning to terminate all imports of Russian fuel, even LNG, by January). Why has it been doing this? Because it thought that that was what the US wanted it to do, because it has desperately wanted to see the US return in a full-blooded way to the battlefields of Ukraine, because Europe has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars supporting Ukraine and buying its weapons from US arms manufacturers and because this generation of European leaders are phenomenally brainwashed, inexperienced and stupid.

If Ukraine and Europe together plan on continuing to destroy Russian oil refineries (and we have to remember that it has not just been Ukraine doing this by itself, but Ukraine aided and abetted, significantly, by NATO, including US satellite intelligence and navigational support), then that will likely force the US – incredibly – to reenter the war on Russia’s side (!) or, in another TACO, to give in, again, to Zelenskiy and the Europeans.

This thought is as striking as an idea proposed by Professor Geoffrey Roberts to the effect that Ukraine may now consider that it’s best future ally will be Russia! This view has some merit in as far as, in additon to Trump’s most recent turn against Zelenskiy, the road for Ukraine into NATO is now blocked – everyone agrees – and the prospects for its passage into the EU look very shaky, while emerging problems in the relationship that Ukraine has with some neighboring countries such as Poland and Romania may also begin to reignite cultural affinities between Ukraine and Russia. These latter were always there, of course, especially so far as eastern Ukraine is concerned. I have less confidence to think there could ever be a reconciliation between Russia and western Ukraine, given the neo-Nazi and monist nationalist conceptions (backed by the US in 2014, leading to the coup d’etat that year). But one has to recall that the population is only half the size it once was and that half of the remaining population is made up of pensioners or near-pensioners.

But, back to the US and Russia, perhaps the US doesn’t need to reenter the war on Russia’s side. Perhaps it just has to do nothing – or, rather, more “nothing” than the “nothing” it has recently been doing – given that under Russian general Surovikin’s leadership in charge of the bombing of Dnieper bridges, together with ever more sustain Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports, energy facilities, warehouse, weapons production facilities, etc., Russia will simply win the war. Benefitting from an additional $4 billion dollars of revenue from diesel sales to the US, Russia will have plenty of motivation to do whatever needs to be done.

There is the little matter of the temporary general license issued by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control directly clashes with the newly enacted Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which was designed to cut off revenue sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine., My understanding is that this merely gives Trump the capability of imposing Graham’s “bone-crushing” sanctions, but does not require him so to do. But there will be backlash from neocon lawmakers from the substantial warmongering elements of both parties – including members of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus – that have condemned the pivot as a reversal of pressure on Moscow, though the administration relies on executive waiver and licensing authorities to bypass immediate statutory blocks. It appears that Russia has already been granted a six-month waiver from US sanctions. The Treasury Department confirms that the Office of Foreign Assets Control had issued General License 135, authorizing the purchasae, shipment, and importation of Russian-origin diesel into United States and global markets through April 7, 2027. Russia is lifting its own ban on diesel exports with immediate effect.

The main opportunities.

The immediate influx of 300,000 tonnes of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tonnes in November, is aimed directly at reducing soaring global fuel prices. President Trump highlighted that bringing down diesel costs is an explicit priority to lower operating expenses for American farmers, truckers, and ranchers. The sudden deal is heavily leveraged by the Republican Party to ease voter frustration over the high cost of living just weeks before the critical November midterm elections.

Beyond energy flows, the Kremlin has noted that the phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin devoted “significant attention to the prospects of resolving the Ukrainian crisis”. The deal coincided with active talks involving U.S. envoys to negotiate an end to the war. The opening of energy dialogue acts as a doorway to address other highly sensitive international flashpoints, including the current situation surrounding Iran and broader bilateral state relations.

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Authorities in Irkutsk oblast claimed an “all-clear” after nearly 5,000 laboratory tests found no dangerous pathogens following the death of lab employee

Russia Matters, 10/9/26

Authorities in Irkutsk oblast claimed an “all-clear” after nearly 5,000 laboratory tests found no dangerous pathogens following the death of Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old employee of the Anti-Plague Institute in this Siberian province. Officials said she died from community-acquired pneumonia, was vaccinated against the infections she studied and was not involved in a laboratory accident. Monitoring of contacts has ended, after approximately 200 people were initially quarantined. Authorities said no plague cases or wider outbreak were identified, although the exact cause of death had not been definitively established. This follows from reporting by Bloomberg, Meduza and The Moscow Times.

By Ted Snider, The American Conservative, 9/2/26

One day, the war in Ukraine will be over. When that day finally arrives, Ukraine may find itself transforming from the country that everyone fought over to the country that nobody wants to be burdened with. Ukraine has been caught in a tug of war, pulled between two sides that covet it: the United States and its European and Canadian allies to the west and Russia to the east. But after the war, Ukraine may find itself alone, abandoned by and disappointed in the West and with bitter memories of and animosity against the east.

In 2014, Ukrainian nationalists came to the conclusion that elections could no longer be trusted to deliver their monist vision of Ukraine in which the language, culture, and religion of the country’s ethnic Russian citizens had to be erased. So, for the first time in Ukraine’s history, they reversed an election with a coup. The central goal of that coup was to end Ukraine’s multivector foreign policy that balanced relations with Europe and Russia.

Reorienting toward the West meant economic cooperation with Europe and membership in the European Union. That political and economic goal was twinned with the security goal of membership in NATO. Membership in both was promised to Ukraine, and the West encouraged Ukraine to go on fighting Russia after its 2022 invasion, rather than negotiating a peace, in defense of its right to pursue those memberships. The war, the U.S. State Department explained at the beginning of the invasion, is “bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.” It is about “core principles,” specifically, 

the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives have been destroyed in pursuit of those promises and goals. When the war finally ends, Ukrainians will have to rebuild their lives and rebuild their country. But the odds are good that their country will not be in the EU nor in NATO. If Ukraine faces west, they will find themselves abandoned and alone.

Russia long ago dropped its objection to Ukraine joining the EU, yet the path has not truly been cleared because the EU has refused to drop its own objections. Though most European leaders say they “strongly support” Kiev’s accession to the European Union, numerous problems including Ukrainian corruption and the country’s democratic deficit have thrown up roadblocks to membership.

Dreams of fast-tracking Ukraine’s EU membership have been dashed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demands for membership by 2027 have been revised to more realistic targets like 2035. Proposed compromises like “membership light” or “reverse enlargement” have gone nowhere. France and Germany have blocked them, and the plans never had the support of most member states.

Relations between Ukraine and Poland continue to deteriorate over Ukraine’s insistence on honoring its ultranationalist element, whose lineage traces back to groups that participated in the mass killing of Poles in the Second World War. Hungary, even after the ouster of its populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, continues to block Ukraine’s accession over its treatment of Hungarian minorities.

Promises of NATO membership lie even more shattered. “Irreversible paths” and bridges have been promised to Ukraine, but walking the path has been prohibited and the bridge has never been built. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump have both denied Ukraine membership in NATO. Biden said that “the likelihood that Ukraine is going to join NATO in the near term is not very likely” and that “Ukraine isn’t ready for NATO membership.” Trump said there would be “no going into NATO by Ukraine.” Ukraine’s European friends have said the same. Germany’s then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the question of Ukraine’s NATO membership is “not even on the agenda.” Point number seven of Trump’s 28-point peace plan states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.” 

Zelensky long ago said “it must be acknowledged” that Ukraine “cannot enter” the “supposedly open” NATO door and that, though “publicly, the doors remain open,” in reality, Ukraine is “not going to be a NATO member.” 

At the end of the war, Ukraine will be left to face a West that has grown reluctant to fund its economic reconstruction and that declines to extend an invitation to join its political and security unions. Ukraine, at that point, may turn to an unlikely option: Russia.

It will not be easy or smooth. But Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork, has recently suggested that, after the war,

the best friend that Ukraine is going to have is Russia and the Russian people. That is where Ukraine’s ultimate future lies: in reconstructing its relationship with Russia. While immensely difficult, it represents the only viable long-term path for the Ukrainian people.

Russia has continued to frame the Ukrainian people as a brotherly nation and not a people to be devastated or destroyed. Acknowledging that fact is not to excuse Russia’s invasion nor the devastation it has caused. It is to suggest that Russia’s goal may have been to stop Ukraine from being used as a military bridgehead on Russia’s border and that, to do this, Russia focused on the Ukrainian armed forces and not the Ukrainian people.

Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, tells the unexpected story that, during direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, “to the astonishment of the Europeans present” the Russian and Ukrainian delegates “started to make jokes and to get along. Because essentially, they understood each other better—far better—than either of them understood the Europeans.” 

Any turn to the east will take time. But Ukraine’s natural future may lie in repaired relations with Russia. That may be necessitated by closed doors to the west and smoothed by shared language and family ties as well as commonalities of religion, culture, and history with Russia.

Two factors could determine if this reconstructed relationship is possible. The first is the trajectory of the war. Ukraine and Russia are unlikely to mend relations if “the war is fought to a finish, involving Ukrainian societal as well as military collapse, including large-scale civilian casualties,” Roberts told The American Conservative. But relations between the two countries could recover if “a negotiated settlement saves Ukraine’s statehood, provides for its future security, and supports its postwar reconstruction.” That recovery could be hastened and strengthened if Russia becomes a primary partner in reconstruction and if future trade relations are built into a settlement. 

The second factor is who leads Ukraine after the war. After nourishing the people of Ukraine throughout the war with maximalist promises of recovering all of its territory and gaining membership in NATO, Zelensky may find it difficult to sign a peace deal that accomplishes none of that and, moreover, allows the possibility of warmer relations with Russia in the future.

But polls suggest that Zelensky may not be the leader after Ukraine is able to hold presidential elections. And both his two main rivals, Valeriy Zaluzhny and Kyrylo Budanov, may be more likely to negotiate such a peace. Budanov has said recently that he is “ready for any step that will end the war,” and in office he maintained dialogue with Igor Kostyukov, the head of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency.

At the end of the war, a devastated Ukraine will need somewhere to turn. With the long-promised door to the west closed, the badly-frayed but natural connection to Russia may be the only viable direction in which Ukraine can turn.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 9/4/26

On Thursday [9/3], Russia analyst Anton Barbashin asked on X: “Do some journalists really have access to people from the Russian president’s inner circle? Why would such sources share sensitive information with the foreign press? Is this always manipulation?”

The answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second is that the people with the best access are generally the people least inclined to shout it from the rooftops.

There are a handful of journalists at Kommersant, RIA, Vedomosti, RBC and the major state broadcasters who genuinely know people in and around Putin’s inner circle and while nobody leaves them unattended with the filing cabinets, they know enough to recognise what’s really going on around the place.

Alexei Venediktov is an interesting case because, despite being designated a foreign agent, as Barbashin is too, incidentally, the former Echo of Moscow boss quite obviously still speaks to people at the top, but the difference is that the arm holding him at arm’s length has become considerably longer. So is the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, who has become less a correspondent than a recurring character in Moscow’s political pantomime (and, to be fair to him, he seems perfectly aware of the part he is playing).

Then there are the journalists who remain inside the tent and, here Kommersant’s Andrey Kolesnikov is a good example, as his reports are often ironic and surprisingly sharp, but he knows where the limits lie. Thus, what he doesn’t do is claim that Putin privately told the Security Council Russia will be invading Armenia next Thursday, or write about the private lives of officials.

Which brings us to the Western press. When the FT, Economist, Bloomberg, New York Times or Wall Street Journal announces that somebody in Putin’s immediate circle has anonymously revealed what the Russian president secretly thinks, scepticism is generally the most advisable reaction.

People familiar with Moscow’s media world can often make a reasonable guess at who these mysterious interlocutors are and some may indeed be “close to the Kremlin”, though in approximately the sense that a man drinking in a pub near Clarence House is close to the King.

They know people who know people, but knowing a man who knows a man who once spoke to a man isn’t quite the same thing as sitting beside Putin, and they also evidently haven’t heard my erstwhile Irish editor’s maxim of “believe a quarter of what you hear, and half of what you see.”

Yet something miraculous happens during the journey west, as the further information travels from the Kremlin, the closer its source seems to get to Putin.

Since 2022, most Western organisations have closed or drastically reduced their Moscow operations, meaning that the correspondent who might once have met somebody over coffee or beer inside the Garden Ring is now sitting in Berlin, London, Riga, Tbilisi or New York, and operating online.

And here Barbashin’s second question becomes much more interesting, because let’s suppose you really were close enough to Putin to know the secrets routinely attributed to anonymous sources, well, why, in Russia in 2026, would you secretly transmit them to a foreign newspaper?

The paradox is therefore rather delicious, in that the more sensitive the supposed revelation, the more senior the source must be in order to know it, which naturally means his decision to leak it becomes even more puzzling.

There is, however, another explanation for some anonymous briefings, and it’s considerably less romantic. Sometimes the Kremlin wants the information published, but when it does, it hardly needs a trembling conspirator smuggling secrets through Checkpoint Charlie.

The Presidential Administration contains Alexei Gromov, Andrei Tsybulin, Sergei Kiriyenko and Alexander Smirnov alongside Dmitry Peskov, and they haven’t spent decades dealing with journalists without discovering how journalists work.

Reuters has often been an important conduit for anonymous signalling of this sort, with CNN and AP sometimes occupying similar territory.

Whether Reuters retains precisely the same position is now worth watching. Its Moscow bureau leadership is changing this week, with Kommersant suggesting that outgoing bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge’s departure followed dissatisfaction that his Russia coverage was too objective for contemporary British tastes.

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Russia Matters, 9/21/26

Ukrainians find domestic corruption more damaging than Russian bombs: A corruption scandal involving Serhiy Kropyva, an official linked to Ukraine’s  ousted prosecutor general, has intensified Ukrainians’ anger during wartime, according to NYT. Anti-corruption investigators allegedly recorded Kropyva discussing kickbacks for protecting a phone-scam network. The revelations reportedly helped topple Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, but also deepened distrust in institutions. The scandal is damaging because Ukraine faces severe wartime funding shortages, connecting corruption to battlefield resilience and national survival, according to NYT. A 2025 summer Kyiv poll found that a majority of Ukrainians considered corruption more damaging to the country than Russian bombings.