The fact that the Russian state has instrumentalized Victory Day for its own political purposes, including justifying the war in Ukraine, begs an important question—why does this seem to be working? If the parallels the Kremlin draws between the Great Patriotic War and current events prove convincing to people, there must be a reason.

The two-day congress of the Platforma network in Brussels brought together hundreds of anti-war activists, some of whom are still active in Russia. On stage hung the theme of the gathering: “Standing Together for Ukraine and for Freedom.” Around 300 people gathered under it, including Russian activists, Ukrainian human rights campaigners, and delegates from the EU and beyond.

The real winners of the German election are the hard-right leader Alice Weidel and her White House friends, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. Whatever Friedrich Merz’s plans are, he must expect barrage fire from the Weidel-White House connection. Looking back at the election campaign, it looks like he’s actually inviting it.

By now renewing aid to Ukraine, it has thrown away its leverage for the smallest of concessions rather than trying to extract something more meaningful. The Americans may now find that they have locked themselves into supporting a proposal that it is thoroughly one-sided and incapable of producing the result they want, namely an end to the war.

The confiscation of Russian funds in not only legally dubious, it is risky for Canada. The freezing of Russian assets at the start of the war demonstrated just how quickly finances could be weaponized. If countries can be coerced by having assets they have invested in other countries frozen, then, perhaps, they shouldn’t invest their assets in those countries.

The Trump peace plan goes some way towards squaring the circle by providing some guarantees to both sides, albeit far fewer than both would like. As such it is a reasonable compromise and a good starting point for further talks. There will be some hard diplomatic work ahead, but at least the long process of negotiation is finally about to start.

This long-read offers a different explanation for the hard-right surge in Germany. It shows that German unification in 1990, signalling the triumph of liberal democracy and the onset of neoliberal globalization, unleashed a new form of nationalism—Deutschmark nationalism—which, after mutating into export nationalism for a while, became the ideological seed for the AfD.

In an historic victory for grassroots resistance, an Italian court has set a precedent by recognizing moral grounds for defying state violence. On December 12, 2024 a Bologna court ruled that members of Làbas, a social centre in Italy’s most left-wing city, acted out of “particular social and moral value” when they resisted a violent eviction by militarized police in 2017.

Russia has now fired an experimental hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile at a Ukrainian industrial facility in the city of Dnipro. This raises questions about the West’s policy of incremental escalation in Ukraine, specifically what goals it is meant to achieve, whether those goals are actually achievable, and whether the cost of pursuing those goals may be so high as to render them unwise.

While Zelensky continues to talk of restoring all of Ukraine’s lost territory he has begun to wake up to the reality that this is impossible by military means. Unable to shift dynamics in his favour, he is hoping instead to shift the political dynamics by refocusing the Ukrainian war effort away from defending its own territory and towards striking the territory of the Russian Federation.