Serbia’s Jadar region is home to one of Europe’s largest untapped lithium deposits, and President Alexander Vučić recently inked a series of deals with the European Union “granting the EU and European carmakers exclusive access to Serbian lithium and paving the way for the construction of one of the largest lithium mines on the continent.”

Like the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, the West’s distribution to Ukraine of Russia’s $300 billion in assets will not be enough to prevent eventual defeat. The Ukraine war will almost certainly be resolved within the next 12 months—on the ground, not with bank accounts. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, time may run out for Ukraine even before Europe can buy some more of it.

The Ukrainian attack on Kursk is a considerable gamble, driven perhaps by a sense that Ukraine’s weak military position left few other options other than a slow, grinding retreat. If it does induce the Russian government to negotiate, then it will have succeeded. But it could also end up extending the war rather than bringing it to a quicker end.

It may appear that European unity on Ukraine is crumbling. This would be a false conclusion. Hungary and Slovakia are very much outliers. Elsewhere in Europe, political leaders remain utterly committed to the Ukrainian cause, and perhaps rather oblivious to the military realities, continuing to talk of supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”

What does windfall spending on NATO do for Canada’s national security? As the militarization of the North proceeds against an inflated eastern threat, eroding Canadian sovereignty through Cold War aerospace programs such as NORAD, it remains difficult to portray Canada’s increasingly assertive global deployments as a matter of national defence.

With the Conservatives headed into disintegration or irrelevance, the incoming Labour government may prove the penultimate stage in the collapse of the UK political establishment. The brightness of its success in fashioning Starmer’s Labour into its instrument is the gaseous brilliance of the supernova, the efflorescence that precedes a star’s death.

The Ukraine war is proving that the world is an interconnected place, as events there are influencing the balance of power elsewhere, including the Far-East. Western sanctions against Russia have, for instance, brought Russia and China closer together. Now, Russia is spreading its influence in the Pacific region, striking a further blow to US interests.

In his latest letter from a Russian prison, Boris Kagarlitsky addresses why, in 2024, we should continue to find Lenin interesting. The letter was translated from the original Russian version by Renfrey Clarke. Clarke also translated Kagarlitsky’s latest book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, available now for pre-order from Pluto Press.

It would appear that requiring foreign-funded organizations to register with the government is acceptable as long as it is Western states doing the requiring. But when the tables are turned, and it is Western-funded institutions that are being obliged to register, suddenly foreign agent laws turn out to be threats to democracy that are incompatible with fundamental values.

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, by sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky. As well as bringing Russian and Western thinkers into dialogue, Kagarlitsky draws upon his experiences as a Russian dissident since the latter days of the Soviet Union in this encyclopaedic analysis of leftist strategy.