On the evening of 18 August, Mykhailo Fedorov did something that would have been difficult to imagine only weeks earlier: the former Ukrainian defence minister publicly challenged Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the future of Ukrainian democracy.

In a nine-minute video address, Fedorov called for Ukraine to develop a “legal, safe and realistic” mechanism for holding elections even if the war continues. Ukraine, he argued, could not allow the Kremlin to determine indefinitely when Ukrainians were permitted to choose their government. “Democracy is not a peacetime luxury,” he said. It was part of what Ukraine was fighting for.

His argument was striking not merely because of what he was demanding, but because of who was making the demand. Fedorov had been one of Zelenskyy’s closest political allies, a minister whose career had been built around technological modernisation rather than conventional party politics. Until his dismissal on 15 July, he was inside the government. Now he was openly questioning the way the Ukrainian state was being run, accusing it of a “systemic governance crisis” and warning that corruption and political loyalty were undermining the war effort.

The timing was hardly incidental. The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, had just approved Yevhen Khmara as Fedorov’s successor at the Defence Ministry, effectively closing the door on his return to the post. For more than a month, supporters had been protesting against his dismissal. Now Fedorov was no longer simply demanding his job back. He was posing a much bigger question.

What happens if the war lasts another year? Two? Three?

Ukraine cannot allow Vladimir Putin to decide when Ukrainians can exercise their democratic rights. But nor can it simply hold a normal election in a country under martial law, with Russian missiles still falling, soldiers fighting at the front, millions of Ukrainians displaced or living abroad, and millions more living under Russian occupation.

That is the extraordinary political dilemma Fedorov has now forced into the open.

2. Who is Mykhailo Fedorov?

To understand why Fedorov’s dismissal caused such an extraordinary reaction, it helps to understand just how unusual a figure he was in Ukrainian politics in the first place.

I was, like most, if not all of my Ukrainian friends, profoundly shocked when Fedorov was dismissed. This was no ordinary politician being shuffled out of a cabinet post. In fact, he did not come from a conventional political background at all. He was a 35-year-old technological whiz kid who had helped transform the Ukrainian state long before he ever took charge of its defence.

Fedorov became Ukraine’s first Minister of Digital Transformation in 2019, while also serving as Deputy Prime Minister. His great project was to drag the Ukrainian bureaucracy into the 21st century, turning an often ponderous post-Soviet state into something far more accessible, efficient and, at times, astonishingly futuristic.

The most visible expression of that project is Diia. I have the app on my own phone. I downloaded it before travelling to Ukraine by night train from Warsaw to Kyiv in June, after being prompted to do so for the journey. I assumed that Diia was something foreigners needed in order to take trains in Ukraine. In fact, the requirement applies to night trains generally, including for Ukrainians.

Diia is effectively the entire Ukrainian state in your pocket.

You can use it for digital identity documents, taxes, fines and a bewildering array of government services. You can register a business, apply for benefits, deal with property and administrative matters, and even get married or divorced. Even medical prescriptions can be handled through the app, with prescriptions sent digitally to Diia and then accessed by pharmacies. It is the sort of thing that makes the idea of a government app sound almost comically mundane until you actually use it.

That was Fedorov’s particular genius. He understood technology not as an ornament to government, but as a way of fundamentally changing how the state works.

And then he took that philosophy to war.

When Zelenskyy appointed him defence minister in January 2026, Fedorov brought the same obsession with data, technology and efficiency into the military sphere. Ukraine’s growing reliance on drones, mid-range and long-range strikes, intelligence-driven targeting and attacks on Russian logistics was not simply a matter of acquiring more weapons. It represented a different way of thinking about warfare, with those mid-range capabilities proving crucial to the wider campaign.

That transformation made Fedorov one of the most consequential and, increasingly, most popular figures in the Ukrainian government. Which is why, when Zelenskyy abruptly got rid of him in July, I wasn’t alone in wondering: what the hell had just happened?

3. From digital government to digital warfare

Fedorov’s move from digital government to defence was not simply a change of ministry. It was an attempt to apply the same data-driven philosophy to the battlefield.

His approach was increasingly focused on the operational depth behind the front line - identifying and destroying the systems that allowed Russian forces to keep fighting. Ukraine expanded its use of drones and mid-range and long-range strikes, targeting ammunition, logistics, command infrastructure and supply routes rather than simply concentrating on Russian troops at the immediate front. The mid-range campaign was particularly important, shifting the war into the operational domain and allowing Ukrainian forces to attack Russian assets tens of kilometres behind the front.

The strategy reached deep into occupied Crimea. Fedorov described the campaign as a “logistics lockdown”, while Ukraine sharply increased its use of middle-strike drones capable of hitting targets at considerable range. Bridges, railways and other supply routes feeding Russian forces on the peninsula became targets. The objective was not simply to destroy individual pieces of equipment, but to progressively choke the infrastructure that made Russia’s military presence in Crimea possible.

There was a particular logic to this. Ukraine has been systematically attacking the infrastructure connecting Crimea to Russia - roads, railway bridges, highways and other transport links from the north - while increasingly targeting the maritime routes across the Sea of Azov. In July, Ukrainian forces struck more than 100 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in little more than a week, including ferries and tankers carrying fuel and other supplies. Several ferries serving the Kerch crossing were also struck. The campaign has severely disrupted maritime traffic and compounded the already acute fuel shortages on the peninsula.

Yet there is a very deliberate distinction in the way Ukraine is conducting this campaign. A Ukrainian company commander said in July that Ukrainian forces had not yet struck the Kerch Strait Bridge because Russian forces were using traffic crossing it as a “human shield”. The same commander said Ukraine was strategically cutting Crimea off and urging residents to leave the peninsula.

That makes the Kerch crossing more than simply another piece of infrastructure. It remains an avenue of retreat - for civilians, Russian tourists and Russian colonists, and potentially for Russian military personnel. The consequences of the wider isolation campaign are already visible: kilometres-long queues of people trying to leave, severe fuel shortages, disruption to electricity and water supplies and an increasingly unliveable situation on the peninsula.

This is where the ancient principle of “death ground”, described by Sun Tzu, becomes relevant. The military logic is well established: a force with an avenue of retreat can withdraw; a force that has been completely cornered may instead fight with the desperation of men who believe they have nothing left to lose. Ukraine therefore appears to be pursuing a very deliberate distinction: choke the peninsula; don’t corner everyone inside it.

The logic may sound counter-intuitive to the layman: why would you leave an enemy an escape route when your objective is to isolate him? But this is well-established military doctrine. A route out remains a route out. Russian civilians can leave, tourists can go home and even Russian military personnel retain the possibility of retreat. Ukraine can make Crimea progressively less viable as a Russian military platform without deliberately turning the peninsula into a sealed trap.

Then there was Starlink.

Fedorov had a personal rapport with Elon Musk, and after Russian forces began using Starlink-equipped drones, he petitioned Musk and SpaceX to cut them off. SpaceX subsequently restricted unauthorised Russian access, while Ukraine introduced a whitelist system under which only verified terminals could operate. In practical terms, Fedorov had helped cut the Russian military off from Starlink while preserving the system for authorised Ukrainian users.

And then came Telegram.

Within days of the Starlink restrictions, Russia’s communications regulator began throttling Telegram, a platform that had become deeply embedded in the Russian military’s communications architecture despite never being an official military system. The two developments landed almost simultaneously. Russian forces suddenly faced disruption to two major communications systems on which they had come to rely, creating serious problems for battlefield communications and command and control.

It was a knockout blow to Russian battlefield communications. This was Fedorov’s particular conception of modern warfare: not simply matching Russia weapon for weapon, but finding technological ways to make the Russian war machine progressively less effective.

It is a philosophy that sits naturally alongside the work of Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, known colloquially as the ‘Birds’, and holder of Ukraine’s highest state honour, the title Hero of Ukraine. In one of a series of interviews with journalists in recent weeks, an excerpt of which Brovdi published on his own Instagram account, he described the objective of the Crimea campaign in his typically dry, understated fashion: to make Crimea “uninteresting” to Putin.

It is a remarkably understated description of what amounts to a sustained attempt to choke off one of Russia’s most important military and strategic prizes. But Crimea is different from the other Ukrainian territories Russia claims. Most Russians could not care less about Kherson or Zaporizhzhia. They have little emotional attachment to the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk seized after the full-scale invasion. Crimea is different. It occupies a particular place in the Russian imagination - one that it has held for generations - and its annexation in 2014 was presented to the Russian public as one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest national achievements. This is territory with a symbolic resonance that the other occupied oblasts simply do not possess.

And now look at the absolute state of it.

In Robert Magyar Brovdi’s typically dry, understated formulation, the objective is simply to make Crimea “uninteresting” to Putin.

And it captures something of the thinking Fedorov brought into the Defence Ministry: make the enemy’s infrastructure, logistics and technological advantages progressively less useful, rather than simply trying to beat Russia at its own game.

Because at the end of the day, a bigger Soviet army will always defeat a smaller Soviet army. The whole point of Fedorov’s approach was to make sure Ukraine wasn’t fighting Russia on those terms.

4. The dismissal

But that raises the obvious question: if Fedorov was helping Ukraine fight precisely the kind of technologically asymmetric war it needed to fight, why was he removed from the job?

The answer, at least officially, was a clash with the military leadership. But this was about considerably more than two men simply disliking one another. It was a clash of military cultures – Fedorov’s data-driven, technology-heavy approach against what his supporters regarded as an older, more centralised and Soviet-influenced way of conducting the war.

Fedorov had in fact been lobbying Zelenskyy to remove Syrskyi. At a press conference immediately after his dismissal, he said he had proposed replacing the commander-in-chief, arguing that the Defence Ministry’s initiatives were repeatedly being blocked. He said that after Zelenskyy rejected the proposal, he had accepted the president’s decision and tried to work with Syrskyi, only to find that the same problems persisted.

Syrskyi, meanwhile, had long been deeply unpopular with sections of the Ukrainian military. His conduct of the extraordinarily bloody battle for Bakhmut earned him the nickname “the Butcher”, or “the Butcher of Bakhmut”, among his detractors. The criticism was not merely about battlefield statistics. Some Ukrainian soldiers felt that Syrskyi treated manpower as expendable – an old-school military culture in which achieving the objective could take precedence over the lives being spent to achieve it. One Ukrainian veteran who had served since 2014 put it more bluntly. “This man sent me to die as if I were meat,” he told Al Jazeera.

On 15 July, after barely six months as defence minister, Zelenskyy dismissed Fedorov. The president had chosen to keep Syrskyi in place rather than back his defence minister.

If this was a case of “back me or sack me”, Zelenskyy had apparently made his choice.

Then came the really strange part.

Syrskyi was subsequently removed as Commander-in-Chief too, with Zelenskyy replacing him on 21 July with General Mykhailo Drapatyi, after days of protests demanding Syrskyi’s removal and Fedorov’s reinstatement.

So how does any of this make sense?

It would appear to defy all logic. Fedorov had spent months arguing that Syrskyi was the obstacle to his reforms; Zelenskyy removed Fedorov, only to remove Syrskyi himself days later.

Zelenskyy did not appear to want to lose Fedorov altogether. He offered him what he described as a “prominent position in the government”, focused on strengthening Ukraine’s technological sector. According to reporting by the Kyiv Independent, the proposals included making Fedorov Deputy Prime Minister for military innovations or putting him in charge of Ukroboronprom, Ukraine’s state-owned defence conglomerate.

Fedorov rejected them. He wanted to return to the Defence Ministry.

That refusal was significant. It suggested that this was no longer simply a dispute over a cabinet reshuffle or a ministerial portfolio. Fedorov believed that the Defence Ministry was where he could have the greatest impact on the war, and he was unwilling to accept a consolation prize elsewhere in government.

Meanwhile, the reasons for his dismissal remained opaque. Zelenskyy had not publicly offered a detailed explanation beyond the conflict with Syrskyi, while Fedorov subsequently described their dispute not as a personal feud but as “a difference in vision of how the war should be fought.”

And then something happened that would have been remarkable almost anywhere, let alone in a country under full-scale Russian attack: Ukrainians took to the streets to demand that their government reverse the decision.

The protests would continue for weeks.

5. Democracy in a country at war

The protests were only the beginning.

For more than a month, Ukrainians had been taking to the streets demanding Fedorov’s reinstatement. Then, on 18 August, Fedorov changed the argument entirely.

In a ten-minute video address, he called for Ukraine to find a “legal, safe and realistic mechanism” for holding elections even if the war continued. He did not propose an immediate election date. He did not pretend that organising a national vote under present conditions would be easy. Quite the opposite: he explicitly acknowledged the extraordinary difficulties involved.

But his argument was that complexity does not mean impossibility.

And this is where the debate becomes considerably more interesting than the rather lazy question of whether Zelenskyy should simply call an election tomorrow.

Ukraine is under martial law. Under Ukrainian law, national elections cannot be held while martial law remains in force. Parliament has repeatedly extended martial law, most recently through 31 October. Zelenskyy’s normal presidential term expired in May 2024, but Ukrainian law provides for the president and other state institutions to continue exercising their powers until a new president can be elected after martial law ends.

That legal framework is not some convenient invention of Zelenskyy’s administration. It exists precisely because Ukraine is at war.

And the practical obstacles are enormous.

How do you hold a meaningful national election when more than a thousand kilometres of the country remain an active battlefield? How do you protect polling stations from Russian missile and drone attacks? How do you allow soldiers fighting at the front to vote? How do you organise voting for millions of Ukrainians living abroad? How do you allow people in frontline communities to participate safely? How do you verify the integrity of a result when millions of Ukrainians have been displaced and entire communities have been occupied or destroyed?

And then there is the question that I think is too often missing from this debate.

What about the Ukrainians who are still living under Russian occupation?

Millions of Ukrainian citizens remain in territories controlled by Russia. Many have been subjected to Russian passportisation and the systematic imposition of Russian political, educational and cultural structures. Some have been forcibly displaced. Others remain in their homes under an occupation that has attempted to sever their connection with the Ukrainian state.

If Ukraine holds an election without them, there is an obvious moral catastrophe at the heart of the exercise: the people who have suffered most directly from the Russian occupation would be among those least able to exercise their democratic rights.

And Ukraine does not want to abandon them.

There is an irony here that I find impossible to ignore. One of the great Russian slogans of the so-called SVO, or in English SMO – “Special Military Operation” – is “своих не бросаем” (svoikh ne brosayem), “we don’t abandon our own”. It has become almost grotesquely ironic given the frequency with which Russian commanders have left their own soldiers behind in the мясорубка (myasorubka), the “meat grinder” of the battlefield.

Ukraine actually does mean it.

The Ukrainians living under occupation are their own. So are the soldiers at the front. So are the refugees scattered across Europe. So are the internally displaced people whose homes have been destroyed. A democratic Ukraine cannot simply shrug and say that some of its citizens are inconvenient to include in a wartime election.

That is the dilemma Fedorov is forcing into the open.

He argues that Ukraine cannot allow Russia to determine when Ukrainians are permitted to exercise their democratic rights. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” he said. And there is a powerful argument behind that: if Ukraine’s entire democratic process can only resume when Vladimir Putin permits the war to end, then Russia has acquired precisely the power over Ukrainian democracy that Ukraine is fighting to deny it.

But the counterargument is equally serious.

An election held under bombardment, with millions of citizens displaced or occupied, soldiers scattered across a front hundreds of kilometres long and Russian intelligence actively seeking to manipulate the political process could itself become a weapon against Ukraine.

That is why Fedorov’s formulation matters. He is not simply saying “hold elections now.” He is asking Ukraine to work out how elections could be held legally, safely and credibly if the war continues for years.

And that is a much harder question.

6. The corruption question

But Fedorov’s argument did not stop with elections.

The more serious accusation running through his address was that Ukraine was suffering from a “systemic crisis of governance” – a government increasingly more concerned with loyalty than competence, and with decisions being made behind closed doors that ordinary Ukrainians were expected simply to accept.

That criticism landed at an especially awkward moment for Zelenskyy.

On the very day Fedorov was making his address, Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities were conducting a series of raids involving senior figures in and around the presidential administration. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, SAPO, were investigating an alleged criminal organisation involving MPs and high-ranking officials. Among those whose property was searched was Iryna Mudra, a deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office.

Within hours, Zelenskyy had dismissed her.

The case concerned an alleged scheme involving millions of dollars being laundered through a state-owned bank to provide bail for a former energy minister. Those implicated have denied wrongdoing, and Mudra said she was co-operating with investigators.

The timing was extraordinary.

Here was Fedorov, only hours earlier, accusing the government of corruption, incompetence and a culture of personal loyalty. And almost simultaneously, anti-corruption investigators were raiding the homes and offices of people close to the president.

This is not to suggest that Fedorov had somehow predicted the raids, or that every allegation against Zelenskyy’s associates has been proved. It is, however, precisely the sort of coincidence that makes a political argument catch fire.

And Fedorov’s political standing had already changed dramatically.

A Rating Group poll conducted on 20–21 July found that trust in Fedorov had risen from just 35% before the protests to 65%, putting him second only to former Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, on 70%. Zelenskyy stood at 59%. By early August, another Rating Group poll still put Fedorov’s trust rating at 58%, while a separate Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey conducted between 16 and 31 July put him at 63%, compared with 56% for Zelenskyy.

Those numbers matter because Fedorov is no longer simply a disgruntled former minister.

He is becoming a political force.

And that changes the nature of everything he says.

When a politician with a 63 or 65 per cent trust rating accuses a government of systemic failure, calls for elections and says that democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia, it is no longer possible to dismiss the intervention as the sour grapes of a man who has just lost his job.

There is a potential presidential candidate standing in front of us.

Fedorov has not actually said that he wants to be president. He has not announced a political party. He has not formally declared a candidacy.

But Ukrainian politics has suddenly acquired a new and potentially formidable actor – one who helped create Zelenskyy’s political movement in the first place, who understands the machinery of government from the inside, and who now appears increasingly willing to challenge the man whose political career he once helped build.

7. The argument against Fedorov

There is, of course, a powerful argument on the other side.

Ukraine is not an ordinary democracy operating under difficult circumstances. It is a democracy fighting for its existence. Russia is not a passive observer of Ukrainian politics; it is an active belligerent with every incentive to exploit an election campaign, manipulate information, finance political actors, sow division and attack the electoral process itself. Indeed, Russia has been doing precisely these things for decades.

An election would also expose some of Ukraine’s deepest wartime vulnerabilities.

Millions of Ukrainians are outside the country. Millions more are internally displaced.

Some parts of the country are occupied. Soldiers are scattered across the front. Infrastructure is being destroyed by Russian missiles and drones. Polling stations would themselves become potential targets.

And then there is the political question.

A presidential election in the middle of a war would inevitably become a referendum on the conduct of the war. That might be healthy in a normal democracy. In wartime, it could become extraordinarily dangerous.

Every disagreement over military strategy, territorial concessions, mobilisation, negotiations or foreign aid could become an electoral weapon. Political factions would have powerful incentives to accuse one another of treason. Russia would have an obvious incentive to amplify the most divisive voices.

Oleksandr Merezhko, the head of the Verkhovna Rada’s foreign policy committee and a member of Zelenskyy’s party, put the argument bluntly: the only winner of a wartime Ukrainian election would be Vladimir Putin, because Russia would exploit the country’s vulnerability during the campaign.

There is another consideration that should not be dismissed simply because it is politically inconvenient.

What happens if the election produces a result that nobody accepts?

A democratic election is only democratic if the electorate trusts the process and accepts the result. Ukraine would have to establish an electoral system capable of commanding that trust under conditions in which almost every aspect of normal civic life has been disrupted.

That is an extraordinarily high bar.

But there is also a historical point worth making here, because the idea that democracies must invariably hold elections on their normal timetable during a major international war is simply not borne out by history.

Britain provides perhaps the clearest example. The last general election before the Second World War was held on 14 November 1935. The next was not held until 5 July 1945 – almost nine years and eight months later. The election that would ordinarily have taken place in 1940 was postponed, with Parliament repeatedly passing legislation extending its own life for the duration of the war. Britain had also postponed elections during the First World War, through successive Acts extending the life of Parliament.

Britain did not cease to be a democracy because of this. It made a conscious decision that, under extraordinary wartime conditions, maintaining a functioning parliamentary government was preferable to attempting to hold an election while the country was fighting for its survival.

Britain was not alone. New Zealand’s 1938 Parliament was due to expire in 1941, but wartime legislation postponed the election – first by a year and then until the war situation improved. An election was eventually held in 1943, giving the incumbent Parliament a six-year life.

Canada likewise extended the life of its Parliament during the First World War, with the general election eventually taking place in December 1917 rather than 1916.

These were not authoritarian regimes or fledgling democracies, like Ukraine. They were established parliamentary democracies making an explicit judgement that, during an existential international war, political continuity could be more important than adhering rigidly to the normal electoral timetable.

There is, however, an important distinction between those examples and Ukraine.

In Britain, New Zealand and Canada, elections could legally have been held during the war. They simply weren’t. In Ukraine, the prohibition is built into the country’s longstanding legal regime governing martial law: the Law on the Legal Regime of Martial Law explicitly prohibits presidential, parliamentary and local elections while martial law is in force. That law dates back to 2000 – more than two decades before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

And the historical circumstances in which that framework was created make the irony even greater.

Ukraine’s Constitution was adopted in 1996. The martial-law legislation containing the explicit election prohibition followed in 2000. This was post-Soviet Ukraine in a very different Europe – a country that had inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union and then voluntarily surrendered it. In return, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum provided security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain, with the signatories reaffirming respect for Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and existing borders.

Yes;

One of those guaranteurs was Russia.

Russia then violated those commitments not once but twice: first by starting the war in Donbas and seizing Crimea in 2014, and then by launching its full-scale invasion in 2022.

A full-scale war with Russia was not some scenario around which independent Ukraine was designing its democratic institutions. It was, for all practical purposes, almost unthinkable. Yet the lawmakers of that era had nevertheless built an emergency mechanism into the Ukrainian state: if martial law ever became necessary, normal electoral timetables would give way to the continuity of the state.

More than two decades later, that provision is being tested in circumstances its authors could scarcely have imagined.

Nobody seriously argues that Britain somehow ceased to be a democracy because it postponed its elections during the Second World War. Nor does anyone seriously suggest the same about New Zealand or Canada. Democracies have postponed elections during existential wars before.

So there is nothing inherently undemocratic about postponing an election during a war.

But none of this actually answers Fedorov’s fundamental question.

It answers why Ukraine cannot simply hold a normal election tomorrow.

Fedorov isn’t really asking for that.

He is asking what happens if the war lasts another year. Or two years. Or three.

At what point does an exceptional legal arrangement, created to protect the Ukrainian state during an emergency, begin to create a different danger of its own?

That is the uncomfortable question.

Because Ukraine is fighting Russia precisely because it wants to remain a free, democratic European state. Democracy is not an ornament that can simply be packed away until the war is over. It is one of the things the war is being fought to preserve.

And that leaves Ukraine with a dilemma for which there is no easy answer.

It cannot allow Vladimir Putin to dictate when Ukrainians can vote.

But neither can it allow Vladimir Putin to determine the conditions under which they vote.

8. What happens next?

For now, Fedorov has lost the immediate battle.

The Verkhovna Rada has approved Yevhen Khmara as the permanent defence minister, with 312 deputies voting in favour – comfortably above the 226 votes required. The decision effectively closes the door on Fedorov returning to the ministry, at least for the time being.

But it does not close the political can of worms that Fedorov has opened.

Indeed, it may have done the opposite.

Fedorov has gone from being a relatively obscure technocrat inside the Zelenskyy administration to one of the most recognisable and popular political figures in Ukraine. He has an extraordinary political pedigree for somebody who was never really a conventional politician in the first place. He helped build Zelenskyy’s 2019 presidential campaign. He transformed the country’s approach to digital government. He became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation. He then took those technological instincts into the Defence Ministry and helped push Ukraine towards a radically more modern conception of warfare.

And now he is openly challenging the political system that he once helped construct.

That makes the question of what Fedorov does next almost impossible to avoid.

He has rejected Zelenskyy’s offers of another senior government position. He has insisted that he wants to return to the Defence Ministry. He has now called for a mechanism allowing elections to take place during a prolonged war. And, according to reporting from the Kyiv Independent, he is considering travelling to the United States as soon as next week, potentially opening another international dimension to his increasingly independent political profile.

It would be premature to declare him a presidential candidate.

But it would be equally foolish to pretend that the possibility is irrelevant.

Fedorov is only 35. He has an unusually strong reputation among younger Ukrainians, a record of technological innovation, considerable name recognition and – crucially – an image that is still relatively unburdened by the traditional baggage of Ukrainian politics.

He also has something else that is considerably harder to manufacture: a story.

The young technocrat who helped drag the Ukrainian state into the digital age became the minister responsible for dragging its military into the age of drones, artificial intelligence, data and networked warfare. He fell out with the military establishment, was dismissed by the president he had once helped bring to power, and then watched the commander whose removal he had advocated being dismissed himself days later.

Now he is standing outside the government, telling Ukrainians that the country cannot allow either Russia or its own political establishment to determine indefinitely when they get to choose their leaders.

That is a potentially formidable political narrative.

But Fedorov also faces enormous risks.

The popularity generated by opposition is not necessarily the same thing as the support required to govern. Calling for elections is one thing; designing a system that can actually conduct them fairly and safely is another. And challenging Zelenskyy during wartime carries an obvious danger: he could be portrayed as weakening national unity at precisely the moment when Ukraine needs it most.

There is also the question of whether the protests that began over his dismissal can evolve into something larger than a personal campaign for his reinstatement.

For now, they remain fundamentally about Fedorov. But the longer the dispute continues, the more it has begun to encompass broader questions about how Ukraine is governed, how the war is prosecuted, how corruption is confronted and how democracy functions during an existential conflict.

And that is why I think Fedorov’s intervention matters even if he never runs for president.

He has forced a question into the Ukrainian political conversation that was probably going to have to be confronted sooner or later anyway:

What does democracy look like when a war has no obvious end date?

That is a much bigger question than the fate of one 35-year-old former defence minister.

9. The question Ukraine cannot avoid

And perhaps that is where this extraordinary episode leaves us.

Fedorov has lost his job. He has lost the immediate battle to return to the Defence Ministry. Zelenskyy has moved on, the protests have failed to reverse the decision, and Yevhen Khmara now occupies the office Fedorov wanted back.

But the political consequences of his dismissal are rather harder to contain.

What began as a dispute between a young technocrat and the military establishment has become a much broader argument about the direction of the Ukrainian state. Fedorov has gone from being one of the people running the system to one of the people questioning it – and, perhaps more importantly, questioning how long some of its exceptional wartime arrangements can remain exceptional.

That is a dangerous place for any government to find itself.

It is also an entirely legitimate question for Ukrainians to be asking.

There is a temptation, particularly from outside Ukraine, to treat the election question as a binary one: either Zelenskyy holds an election and proves his democratic credentials, or he doesn’t and somehow ceases to be a democrat.

Reality is rather less tidy.

Ukraine is trying to conduct something approaching normal constitutional government while fighting a war that is anything but normal. It has to preserve institutions that were designed for peacetime while adapting them to circumstances for which they were never seriously intended. And it has to do all of that while an enemy is actively trying to exploit every fracture it can find.

Fedorov has made that contradiction impossible to ignore.

Whether that ultimately makes him a future president is anybody’s guess. He has not said that he wants the job. He may never seek it. He may instead disappear back into the technological world in which he made his name. His proposed trip to Washington, and his continuing work on defence technology, suggest that his future may not even be confined to conventional Ukrainian politics.

But the fact that we can now plausibly ask the question is significant in itself.

Six weeks ago, Fedorov was a government minister.

Now he is a potential political heavyweight, a critic of the president he once helped elect, and the man who has forced a conversation about what happens when a temporary wartime arrangement begins to collide with the uncertain prospect of a very long war.

Perhaps his timing is wrong.

Perhaps his proposed mechanism is unworkable.

Perhaps the Ukrainian public will ultimately decide that the risks of an election outweigh the benefits until the guns fall silent.

But those are questions for Ukrainians to argue about – loudly, fiercely and democratically.

And perhaps that is the most important thing to emerge from all of this.

For all the arguments about when an election can be held, who should stand in it and what Vladimir Putin might do with it, there is something rather revealing about the fact that Ukrainians are arguing about these questions at all.

They are not fighting merely for territory.

They are fighting over what kind of country will exist when this is over.

Fedorov has not answered that question.

He has, however, placed some political dynamite on the table.

And now Ukraine has to decide what to do with it.

The phrase, often used to describe the extremes of the Castilian climate, has always been more about enduring uncomfortable summers than explaining them. Yet as much of Spain once again endured prolonged heat, dry conditions and strong winds, the “three months of hell” took on a more literal meaning. Across several autonomous communities, those conditions combined to create the perfect environment for fast-moving wildfires.

This summer’s fires have become more than a succession of local emergencies.

Across Spain, they have dominated television bulletins, newspaper front pages and political debate as firefighters, military personnel and emergency services battled multiple major blazes in different parts of the country. Thousands of people have been forced from their homes, communities have been placed on alert, and vast swathes of countryside have been reduced to ash.

The destruction has been measured in lives lost, communities disrupted and landscapes transformed. It has also prompted one of Spain’s largest coordinated emergency responses in recent years, bringing together regional fire services, the Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME), Civil Guard officers, volunteers and aerial resources in a prolonged effort to contain multiple major incidents unfolding simultaneously.

As the crisis deepened, it became increasingly apparent that Spain was not confronting it alone.

France, too, was battling significant wildfires. Across Europe, aircraft and personnel were being deployed across borders through the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism, using systems that most Europeans scarcely notice until moments like these.

The story of this wildfire season therefore begins in Spain.

It does not end there.

How Spain reached this point

When the first major wildfires broke out, they were reported in much the same way as countless others before them.

Every summer brings fires somewhere in Spain. Most are contained quickly. Others briefly dominate regional headlines before disappearing as attention shifts elsewhere.

This year, however, it soon became clear that these were not isolated incidents.

As firefighters brought one blaze under control, another erupted hundreds of kilometres away. Communities that had been watching events unfold on television suddenly found themselves under evacuation orders of their own. Regional emergency services were stretched across multiple autonomous communities as aircraft, ground crews and military personnel were repeatedly redeployed to wherever conditions deteriorated fastest.

Within days, what had begun as a series of separate emergencies had become a national crisis.

That changing perception was reflected in Spain’s media coverage. Early reports understandably focused on individual fires — where they were burning, which roads had closed and how many homes had been evacuated. As the week progressed, however, the reporting itself began to change. Television bulletins and newspaper front pages increasingly treated the fires not as separate events but as different fronts in the same unfolding national emergency.

The reasons soon became apparent.

Successive days of intense heat, exceptionally dry vegetation and periods of strong, shifting winds created conditions in which even relatively small ignitions could develop into fast-moving wildfires. Rugged terrain complicated firefighting efforts, while simultaneous outbreaks forced emergency planners to make difficult decisions about where limited resources could be deployed most effectively.

By then, Spain’s response had expanded well beyond regional fire services alone.

The Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME) had been deployed alongside firefighters from the affected autonomous communities. Civil Guard officers assisted with evacuations, road closures and public safety, while aerial resources worked whenever smoke, wind and visibility allowed them to operate effectively.

The human cost was becoming increasingly apparent as well.

Residents watched homes threatened, farmers saw agricultural land destroyed, holidaymakers abandoned campsites and rural accommodation, while entire communities found themselves living with uncertainty from one day to the next. For many people, the experience of the fires was measured not only in hectares burned but in repeated warnings, disrupted routines and the simple anxiety of waiting to discover whether changing winds would carry flames closer to home.

By the end of the week, one conclusion had become difficult to avoid.

Spain was not witnessing a single extraordinary wildfire.

It was confronting a succession of major fires unfolding almost simultaneously across different parts of the country, exposing the sheer complexity of managing multiple large-scale emergencies at once.

Fighting the fires

By the time Spain’s largest wildfires were at their most intense, extinguishing them had become far more than a matter of firefighters arriving with hoses.

Modern wildfires are fought as complex, multi-agency operations involving hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of personnel working simultaneously on the ground and in the air. Responsibility is shared between regional fire services, emergency coordinators, police, military units and civil protection authorities, each performing distinct but closely coordinated roles.

As the scale of the emergency became apparent, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sought to reassure the public while acknowledging the enormity of the challenge. Visiting affected communities, he emphasised that the government’s priorities had shifted beyond simply containing the flames.

“Our priority is to save lives and defend populated areas.”

It was a deceptively simple statement, but one that reflected the reality confronting emergency commanders across the country. During extreme wildfire events there comes a point when extinguishing the fire is no longer the immediate objective. The priority instead becomes protecting communities, defending critical infrastructure and ensuring people can be evacuated safely before conditions deteriorate further.

For most Spaniards following events on television, however, the most visible symbol of that effort was the aircraft.

Canadair water bombers skimmed reservoirs before climbing back towards towering columns of smoke. Helicopters shuttled continuously between rivers, lakes and advancing fire fronts, their crews flying sortie after sortie whenever visibility and wind conditions allowed.

The images were dramatic, but experienced wildfire commanders are quick to caution that aircraft rarely extinguish major fires on their own. Their purpose is to slow the advance of the flames, cool critical areas and create opportunities for crews on the ground to establish containment lines. Without firefighters following behind, even the most spectacular aerial drops offer only temporary relief.

To the casual observer, the aircraft appeared to be doing most of the work. In reality, they were only one part of a much larger operation. Wildfires are won – or lost – on the ground.

Those firefighters often found themselves confronting conditions that changed by the hour.

Wind shifts could transform a seemingly manageable fire into an entirely different beast within minutes. Steep terrain restricted vehicle access, while dense woodland and years of accumulated vegetation provided enormous quantities of fuel. Rather than attacking flames where they stood, crews were frequently forced to anticipate where the fire would be hours later, sacrificing ground in one location to prevent catastrophe somewhere else.

One firefighter captured that reality in a single sentence.

“No matter what you do, you can’t put it out.”

It was not a statement of defeat but of changing priorities. Fires of this intensity can become so powerful that the immediate objective is no longer to extinguish them, but to steer them away from communities, protect lives and wait for conditions to become more favourable.

Alongside the regional fire services, the UME once again assumed a central role.

Created in 2005 following a series of national emergencies, the military unit has become one of Spain’s most recognisable disaster-response organisations. Its personnel brought specialist engineering equipment, logistical support, communications capability and additional manpower to reinforce regional services already stretched across several autonomous communities.

That understated assessment perhaps says more than any dramatic language could. Modern wildfires are no longer single fronts advancing across open countryside. They become multiple, fast-moving incidents, each demanding personnel, equipment and constant reassessment as conditions evolve.

The Ministry of Defence offered another striking description, explaining that UME personnel were fighting “house by house” as they worked through the night to prevent flames reaching homes and populated areas. It was an evocative phrase, conjuring images of military combat but in fact more of painstaking, methodical work to defend individual streets and neighbourhoods from advancing fire.

The Civil Guard’s responsibilities were no less critical, even if they attracted less public attention.

While firefighters confronted the flames, Civil Guard officers and local police enforced road closures, coordinated evacuations, protected abandoned properties and ensured emergency routes remained open. Entire communities sometimes had to leave with only a few hours’ notice as changing winds altered a fire’s trajectory. For many residents, their first direct encounter with the emergency came not through smoke on the horizon but through a knock on the door telling them it was time to leave.

Behind every televised image lay an even larger operation invisible to most viewers.

Regional emergency coordination centres worked continuously, analysing weather forecasts, satellite imagery, thermal mapping, wind models and reports from crews on the ground. Every decision carried consequences elsewhere. Aircraft committed to one fire could not simultaneously support another. Reinforcements sent to Aragón or Castile y León inevitably reduced flexibility should conditions suddenly deteriorate in Catalonia, Valencia, Extremadura or Andalucía.

As the crisis deepened, separate fires increasingly had to be viewed not as isolated incidents but as components of a wider emergency. In one notable example, the Madrid and Ávila fires were ultimately placed under unified command, illustrating how quickly modern wildfires can outgrow administrative boundaries and require entirely new operational structures.

Throughout the crisis, officials repeatedly appealed for public cooperation.

Road closures frustrated motorists. Evacuation orders disrupted holidays, businesses and daily routines. Yet emergency coordinators consistently emphasised that these restrictions formed an essential part of the firefighting strategy itself. Every civilian kept safely away from an active fire zone reduced the risk of further rescues and allowed emergency services to concentrate on protecting lives and property.

Sánchez also used his public appearances to recognise those carrying out that work. He thanked the BRIF (Wildfire Reinforcement Brigades), the UME, firefighters, the Civil Guard, National Police, Civil Protection volunteers and the countless emergency workers operating around the clock. Just as notably, he thanked journalists, arguing that accurate reporting had itself become part of the emergency response by helping the public distinguish official guidance from rumour and misinformation.

For Spain’s emergency services, the wildfire crisis became a test not simply of courage or endurance, but of coordination.

No single organisation could have confronted emergencies on this scale alone. It was the integration of regional fire services, military support, police, volunteers, aerial assets and emergency planners – each performing a different role within the same operation – that enabled Spain to respond to one of the most demanding wildfire emergencies in recent years.

Understanding the fires

It is tempting to think of wildfire as a simple equation. A spark ignites dry vegetation. The flames spread until firefighters extinguish them or the fuel runs out.

Reality is considerably more complicated.

No two wildfires behave in exactly the same way. Temperature matters, but so do humidity, wind speed, wind direction, topography, vegetation, soil moisture and the amount of combustible material that has accumulated over months – or even years. Alter just one of those variables and a fire can behave in an entirely different way.

That is one reason why experienced firefighters are often reluctant to predict exactly how a blaze will develop. They can identify the conditions under which a fire is likely to intensify, but nature rarely follows a script.

This summer, many of those variables aligned at precisely the wrong moment.

Large parts of Spain endured prolonged periods of extreme heat. Vegetation that might ordinarily have retained some moisture became increasingly desiccated. Forest floors, scrubland and grassland provided vast quantities of fuel waiting for a single ignition source. Once fires became established, strong and often unpredictable winds repeatedly accelerated their spread, carrying burning embers far beyond the main fire front and igniting entirely new outbreaks.

That ability to generate fresh fires is one of the characteristics that makes modern wildfires so difficult to contain.

Many people imagine a wildfire as a single advancing wall of flames. In reality, large fires frequently attack from several directions at once. Burning branches, pine cones and other debris can be lifted into the air by powerful convection currents before falling hundreds of metres – and sometimes considerably further – ahead of the main blaze. Firefighters refer to these as spot fires. Each one has the potential to become another rapidly expanding front demanding additional crews and equipment.

The terrain itself often compounds the problem.

Much of inland Spain is mountainous. Fires naturally travel uphill because flames preheat the vegetation above them before direct contact is ever made. Steep valleys can funnel wind, while changing gradients create highly localised weather conditions that are almost impossible to predict with complete accuracy. A fire that appears manageable from one ridge may behave very differently once it crosses into the next valley.

Then there is the fuel.

For decades, changes in agriculture, rural depopulation and the abandonment of traditional land management have altered large parts of Spain’s landscape. Areas once regularly grazed by livestock or cleared for firewood have gradually become denser. Shrubs and undergrowth accumulate year after year, creating continuous corridors of vegetation through which fire can spread with remarkable speed.

Increasingly, however, the geography of Spain’s wildfire risk is beginning to change.

Traditionally, the country’s most destructive fires were associated with the hot, dry landscapes of the Mediterranean coast and the interior. Yet in recent years, regions long regarded as comparatively immune have also experienced devastating wildfire seasons.

In October 2017, vast fires swept through Asturias and Galicia after an extraordinary combination of prolonged drought, unusually high temperatures, low humidity and strong southerly winds associated with the remnants of Hurricane Ophelia. Smoke drifted far beyond the fire zones, blanketing much of Asturias, including its two principal cities, Gijón and Oviedo, as well as large parts of the surrounding region. Emergency services urged residents to remain indoors because of the deteriorating air quality.

Asturias and Galicia both form part of what Spaniards call España Verde – Green Spain – the lush Atlantic strip stretching along the country’s northern coast. It is a region defined by rainfall, green hillsides and temperate weather rather than prolonged drought. That such scenes unfolded there, in mid-October rather than the height of summer, demonstrated that the traditional geography – and seasonality – of wildfire risk could no longer be taken for granted.

The pattern extends beyond Spain’s borders. Northern Portugal, which shares the same Atlantic climate and landscapes as neighbouring Galicia, has also experienced increasingly destructive wildfire seasons in recent years.

One factor repeatedly highlighted by forest scientists is the widespread planting of eucalyptus across parts of Galicia and northern Portugal during the twentieth century.

Introduced primarily to supply the paper and timber industries, eucalyptus grows quickly and is economically valuable. It is also highly controversial. The trees consume significant quantities of water and contain volatile oils that burn readily once ignited, while extensive plantations can create continuous corridors of combustible vegetation. Researchers generally stress that eucalyptus alone is not responsible for catastrophic fires. Rather, it combines with rural depopulation, abandoned agricultural land, accumulated undergrowth, prolonged drought and increasingly extreme weather to create landscapes in which fires can spread with exceptional speed and intensity.

The result is that parts of Atlantic Iberia once regarded as comparatively resistant to wildfire are now confronting many of the same challenges traditionally associated with the hotter and drier regions of southern Europe.

None of this means that every wildfire is inevitable, nor that every fire is driven by climate change alone.

Some begin accidentally. Others are started deliberately. Electrical faults, agricultural machinery, discarded cigarettes and lightning strikes can all provide the initial spark. The cause of a fire and the conditions that allow it to become a major disaster are related, but they are not the same thing.

That distinction is important.

The question is often not why a fire started, but why it became so difficult to stop.

Guillermo Rein, Professor of Fire Science in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, believes that distinction is often overlooked.

“Europe is not experiencing an unprecedented number of wildfires. What is uncommon is the current number of destructive wildfires: fires that spread rapidly, overwhelm fire brigades and force communities to evacuate. The connection with this summer’s repeated heatwaves is strong.”

It is an important distinction. The concern is not simply that more fires are occurring, but that an increasing proportion develop into the kind of large, fast-moving incidents capable of overwhelming even well-prepared emergency services.

Increasingly, researchers argue that climate change is altering the answer. Rising average temperatures, more frequent heatwaves, longer periods without significant rainfall and changing weather patterns are creating conditions in which fires burn faster, spread further and become more intense than they once did. Fire seasons are also beginning earlier and lasting longer, reducing the opportunities for landscapes to recover between major events.

Pedro Sánchez alluded to that changing reality during the crisis, warning that climate change was producing wildfires that were becoming increasingly serious and intense.

Dr Theodore Keeping, a Research Associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and a wildfire and climate scientist with World Weather Attribution, argues that climate change and land management should not be viewed as competing explanations.

“The rapid shift in fire weather extremes we are seeing means more intense fires, that burn hotter and spread faster. Whilst vegetation management and emergency response play an important role in fire risk, the increasing frequency of fire weather extremes is the key reason why we have seen such severe wildfire impacts over southern Europe in the last few years.”

In other words, reducing fuel loads, improving forest management and investing in firefighting capacity all remain essential. But they are increasingly taking place against a backdrop of weather conditions that are becoming progressively more favourable to extreme fire behaviour.

Scientists, however, are careful with their language. They rarely argue that climate change caused a particular wildfire. Instead, they conclude that it makes the conditions in which wildfires thrive more frequent and more severe. In other words, it loads the dice.

That distinction matters because it shifts the conversation away from any single blaze and towards a broader pattern that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The fires that swept across Spain this summer were not unprecedented. Nor will they be the last.

Rather, it is their extent.

And the more pressing question is whether they are becoming the new normal.

France: A parallel emergency

As Spain battled multiple major wildfires, a parallel emergency was unfolding across the border in France. Near Bordeaux, flames tore through thousands of hectares of forest, forcing mass evacuations and overwhelming local resources. The crisis rapidly became national in scope, prompting the deployment of hundreds of firefighters, aircraft and military personnel from across the country.

President Emmanuel Macron described the emergency as France’s “worst since the Second World War”, a remarkable assessment that reflected both the scale of the disaster and the unprecedented mobilisation of firefighters and emergency services.

The similarities with Spain were striking.

Just as Pedro Sánchez had stressed that protecting lives and populated areas took precedence over extinguishing every blaze, Macron made clear that the immediate priority was safeguarding the public.

“Saving lives comes first.”

He also appealed for national unity.

“At this moment, we need to be united and in action. There are women and men risking everything to protect us, fighting the fire. All we must do is help them.”

Throughout the crisis, France mounted what Macron described as an “unprecedented mobilisation”, drawing together firefighters, civil protection units, aircraft, police, gendarmes and military personnel in one of the country’s largest peacetime emergency responses.

As in Spain, however, sheer numbers did not guarantee an easy victory.

Julien Marion, Director General of Civil Security and Crisis Management, warned that the danger did not disappear simply because the flames appeared to be under control.

That caution reflected a recurring theme across both countries. Large wildfires are not extinguished the moment the visible flames subside. Hidden hotspots, shifting winds and difficult terrain can allow apparently contained fires to reignite hours – or even days – later, forcing exhausted crews back into action.

For those on the front line, the scale of the emergency was unlike anything many had previously experienced.

One firefighter, speaking to Le Monde, simply stated wearily:

“I’ll admit, this fire scares me.”

It echoed a sentiment heard repeatedly in Spain, where firefighters described blazes that had become impossible to attack directly and instead focused on defending communities until conditions changed.

Taken together, the crises in Spain and France illustrated something larger than two neighbouring countries experiencing a difficult summer. They showed how extreme wildfire has become a shared challenge across western Europe, stretching emergency services, testing political leadership and exposing landscapes increasingly vulnerable to prolonged heat, drought and powerful winds.

From Spain to Europe

As fires intensified across Spain and France, it quickly became apparent that no single country could rely solely on its own resources. Firefighting aircraft, specialist crews and emergency personnel were being stretched across western Europe simultaneously, forcing governments to coordinate an increasingly international response.

That coordination has become one of the European Union’s quiet success stories.

European Commissioner for Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality Hadja Lahbib captured the philosophy behind it during this summer’s wildfire emergency.

“No country should ever have to face a disaster of this scale alone. That is exactly why Europe built a common response capacity: aircraft in the sky, firefighters on the ground, and more support standing ready the moment it is needed. To the people of France and Spain: Europe will stand with you until the fires are out.”

Those words describe the purpose of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism and its dedicated emergency reserve, rescEU.

Created after a succession of increasingly destructive wildfire seasons, rescEU allows member states to pool specialised resources that can be deployed wherever they are needed most. Rather than each country preparing only for its own emergencies, aircraft, helicopters, specialist firefighting teams and other assets are placed at the disposal of the wider European response when national capabilities begin to reach their limits.

This year’s operation was not merely larger than previous summers. It was the largest collective wildfire preparedness effort the European Union has ever assembled.

For the 2026 wildfire season, the EU pre-positioned almost 800 firefighters from 14 member states in high-risk regions, backed by a shared fleet of 22 firefighting aircraft and five helicopters ready to reinforce national emergency services as conditions deteriorated.

As fires intensified across Spain and France, the European Commission activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, coordinating the deployment of firefighting aircraft and personnel across national borders. Aircraft from countries less affected by the heatwave were dispatched to support those facing the greatest immediate threat, while specialist firefighters had already been strategically positioned in vulnerable areas before some of the worst fires had even begun.

It was a reminder that Europe’s wildfire response no longer starts when the first flames appear. Increasingly, it begins weeks beforehand.

Lahbib described that collective effort in equally practical terms.

“When fires threaten communities, Europe responds as one. Together with our fleet of firefighting planes and helicopters, and our pre-positioned firefighters across the continent, we are turning European solidarity into action. When every minute counts, being prepared saves lives, protects livelihoods and preserves our environment.”

The principle underpinning the system is remarkably simple.

Today’s helping hand may become tomorrow’s request for assistance.

As wildfire seasons become longer and increasingly overlap, countries that once expected to send aircraft abroad every summer may now find themselves needing those same aircraft at home only days later. The challenge is becoming one of timing as much as geography.

Even Europe’s growing network of cooperation has its limits.

Europe possesses only a finite number of specialised firefighting aircraft and highly trained crews. If Spain, France, Portugal, Italy and Greece all face extreme wildfire conditions simultaneously, difficult decisions inevitably follow over where those scarce resources should be deployed first. The system works because countries help one another, but it also depends on the hope that not every member state will require maximum assistance at exactly the same moment.

President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen paid tribute to those responding across the continent.

“Firefighters from across our continent share one mission: to protect people, homes and forests. This is European solidarity in action.”

Europe has not built rescEU because solidarity makes for an appealing political slogan. It has built it because no single country now possesses enough resources to deal with every major wildfire season on its own.

Spain could not face this summer’s fires alone. France could not face them alone. Increasingly, Europe cannot afford for any member state to face them alone.

That may ultimately be the defining lesson of Europe’s modern wildfire era. The continent’s response is becoming more integrated because the threat itself is becoming more widespread, more simultaneous and more complex than any one nation can manage in isolation.

A changing European wildfire landscape

This summer’s wildfire crisis has reinforced a growing reality: Europe’s traditional map of wildfire risk is changing.

For decades, the continent’s largest and most destructive wildfires were largely associated with Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece and southern Italy. While southern Europe remains at the heart of the wildfire season, the geographical reach of fire risk has steadily expanded.

In recent years, significant wildfires have affected countries including Germany, the Czech Republic, Sweden and even parts of the United Kingdom, regions that historically lay well beyond Europe’s traditional fire belt. This summer, as Spain and France battled major blazes, significant fires were also reported across parts of the western Balkans, while authorities monitored elevated fire danger extending far beyond the Mediterranean, including into northern Finland and parts of Scandinavia. Even regions that once regarded extreme wildfire as an exceptional event are increasingly preparing for the possibility that it could become a regular feature of summer.

The changing geography of wildfire is only part of the story.

Professor Rein said in comments to The Guardian that the most important shift is not necessarily the overall number of fires, but the number of destructive ones.

“Europe is not experiencing an unprecedented number of wildfires. What is uncommon is the current number of destructive wildfires: fires that spread rapidly, overwhelm fire brigades and force communities to evacuate. The connection with this summer’s repeated heatwaves is strong.”

That distinction is an important one.

Thousands of small wildfires occur across Europe every year and are extinguished before they attract widespread attention. The fires dominating headlines today are different. They spread more rapidly, burn with greater intensity and increasingly overwhelm even experienced emergency services.

Scientists remain careful about attributing individual wildfires to climate change alone. Every fire still requires an ignition source, whether natural or human. Weather is only one part of a much broader picture that also includes land management, vegetation, rural depopulation and decades of accumulated fuel, as mentioned already.

But many researchers argue that climate change is increasingly influencing the conditions in which those fires develop.

Dr Keeping wrote for World Weather Attribution that the continent is already experiencing a rapid increase in extreme fire weather.

“The rapid shift in fire weather extremes we are seeing means more intense fires, that burn hotter and spread faster. Whilst vegetation management and emergency response play an important role in fire risk, the increasing frequency of fire weather extremes is the key reason why we have seen such severe wildfire impacts over southern Europe in the last few years.”

The consequences extend well beyond the fireground itself.

Longer fire seasons place sustained pressure on emergency services. They increase the demand for specialist aircraft, stretch firefighting resources across multiple countries and make international cooperation through mechanisms such as rescEU increasingly indispensable. At the same time, governments face difficult decisions about land management, forest restoration, civil protection and how communities can adapt to living with a greater risk of extreme wildfire.

The challenge for Europe is therefore becoming broader than simply fighting fires more effectively.

It is about learning to live with a changing landscape.

That means investing not only in larger firefighting fleets and better emergency coordination, but also in prevention, early warning systems, forest management and more resilient communities. Success will increasingly depend on reducing the conditions that allow small fires to become national emergencies.

This summer demonstrated that Europe has significantly strengthened its collective ability to respond when disaster strikes.

It also suggested that the continent may need to call upon that response more often in the years ahead.

Conclusion

This too shall pass.

The fires currently burning across Europe will, in time, be extinguished. Firefighters will return home. Aircraft will return to their bases. Television cameras will move on to the next crisis. Across Spain, France and other affected countries, the long process of rebuilding will begin.

But as I put the finishing touches to this article in the small hours of 29 July, after dragging myself out of bed shortly after dawn to complete it, Europe is still only part way through another wildfire season. Lord only knows what August and September will bring.

For many communities, the consequences of this summer will endure long after the smoke has cleared. Burnt forests may take decades to recover. Farmers face damaged land and lost livestock. Businesses dependent on tourism must rebuild. Families who watched flames advance towards their homes will carry those memories for years to come.

There are, however, reasons for cautious optimism.

Europe enters the remainder of this fire season better prepared than at any point in its history. Cooperation between European Union member states has never been closer. Shared resources such as rescEU have transformed the continent’s ability to respond when multiple countries face simultaneous emergencies.

Spain, too, has learned some hard lessons.

The devastating DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos – Isolated Depression at High Levels) floods that struck Valencia in October 2024 claimed 222 lives and exposed serious shortcomings in the regional government’s emergency warning systems and civil protection. The political and judicial fallout continues to this day.

I remember sitting in my office on Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia s few afterwards when, without warning, every mobile phone in the office sounded simultaneously. A civil protection alert warned of the risk of flash flooding and urged people to return home immediately.

We all did exactly that. It was raining heavily as I walked the fifteen minutes back to my flat. But — within a couple of hours the rain had stopped. Thanks to Barcelona’s mild climate, my terrace soon dried, and I found myself back outside, writing articles such as this for Notes from Spain and studying for my Catalan language class.

Was the warning, with hindsight, overly cautious? Perhaps. But I’d rather receive the occasional false positive than witness horrors like the those that unfolded in Valencia. If that means some alerts ultimately prove unnecessary, it is a price well worth paying.

No emergency response can eliminate the threat posed by increasingly destructive wildfires. But Spain and its European neighbours are better equipped than ever before to confront it. Across the European Union, member states now share aircraft, firefighters and expertise on an unprecedented scale. Here in Spain, too, coordination between the national government and the autonomous communities has continued to improve, with regions increasingly deploying personnel and equipment across administrative boundaries when major fires demand a collective response. Combined with improved forecasting, earlier public warnings and faster civil protection alerts, those hard-earned lessons are already making a difference.

It all comes back to that old Spanish saying: nueve meses de invierno y tres meses de infierno – nine months of winter and three months of hell.

After this summer, it feels increasingly outdated.

Not because the hell has disappeared, but because it no longer lasts only three months. In Spain, the summer, and with it, the wildfire season is growing longer. And what was once regarded largely as a Mediterranean problem has become an increasingly European one.

Its warning still rings true.

It is simply the world around it that has changed. It no longer describes the Europe – or even the Spain – we live in today.

The biggest culture shock wasn’t arriving in Ukraine, really. It was coming back to Barcelona.

After almost five weeks in a country living under the constant threat of missiles and drones, it felt strangely surreal to return to a city where life simply carried on as though nothing had changed. Bars were full. Tourists moved in their throngs around the Gothic Quarter and the Sagrada Família. It was as though the biggest war on our shared continent since 1945 was unfolding somewhere impossibly distant, rather than just beyond the European Union’s eastern frontier – a train journey from Warsaw and a short flight back to Barcelona.

I’ve been back for several days now, and only now does it feel as though I’m really beginning to process those five weeks in Ukraine. While I was there, you simply got on with things. What else could you do?

It wasn’t fear in the conventional sense. Rather, I eventually realised I’d spent much of my time walking around in a constant state of low-level anxiety without ever consciously recognising it. The sleep deprivation? As someone who has lived with chronic insomnia for years, I’m almost accustomed to functioning on far less sleep than I should. The anxiety was subtler. It blended so seamlessly into the background that I scarcely noticed it until it was gone.

On Saturday, after yet another devastating Russian attack on Kyiv, I found myself spending much of the day checking in with friends across the city – people I’d met only a few weeks earlier, yet who had somehow become part of my daily life. Had they been caught up in the latest strikes? Were they safe? Had they managed to get any sleep?

I realised then that although I’d left Kyiv, Kyiv hadn’t left me.

After I wrote briefly about that feeling in a Substack note, the New Zealand war correspondent Thomas Mutch – who has spent years reporting from Ukraine, as well as conflicts including Syria and Gaza – replied with a sentence that has stayed with me:

“It is kind of crazy how quickly you get used to bombings.”

He was right.

That sentence captures something that, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, is surprisingly difficult to explain. Human beings adapt with remarkable speed. Air-raid alerts that initially send your pulse racing gradually become another part of the rhythm of the day. Telegram channels replace weather forecasts. Conversations over coffee are interrupted by notifications warning of incoming drones. You check where they’re headed, assess the risk, carry on with your conversation, then finish your coffee.

That shouldn’t be mistaken for complacency. Nor should it be mistaken for normality.

It’s adaptation.

And adaptation is one of the reasons Ukrainians have been able to endure more than four years of full-scale war.

Before I go any further, though, I should explain one or two aspects of my own situation.

I don’t normally write about my own personal circumstances because, frankly, they aren’t the story. Compared with what Ukrainians have endured over four and a half years of full-scale war, they pale into insignificance. I mention them here only because they help explain how I experienced my final weeks in Kyiv.

The greatest obstacle to making this trip was never the danger itself. I’m under no illusions about the risks, but they weren’t what kept delaying my departure. It was my chronic sleep disorder.

After years of struggling with insomnia, I’d finally managed to get things onto something approaching an even keel. Once that happened – and once a handful of practical obstacles also fell into place – I booked the first available train from Warsaw to Kyiv.

Shortly before I left, however, my doctor went on holiday. That meant I could only travel with a limited supply. My sleeping tablets ran out after little more than a week. About halfway through the trip, I became convinced I’d also run out of my anxiety meds too.

I tried everything I reasonably could to secure a refill. But this is a country at war. Psychiatric services are under immense pressure, appointments are difficult to obtain even if you’re prepared to pay top dollar, and both medications are far more tightly controlled than they are in Spain.

In the end, I simply had to make do.

As the days passed, my sleep deteriorated. By the beginning of July, I was exhausted.

On the evening of 1 July, after another succession of poor nights’ sleep, I made an executive decision that I wouldn’t ordinarily recommend to anyone. I self-medicated with alcohol in the hope of finally getting a decent night’s sleep. I knew perfectly well that alcohol generally worsens sleep quality rather than improves it, but after days of running on fumes I felt I’d run out of better options.

Late that evening, a Ukrainian friend sent me a message.

“It’s going to be a bad one tonight.”

I never saw it.

My phone was already on Do Not Disturb, and I was either asleep or trying to be. I hadn’t been following the news that evening either.

I was, in other words, blissfully unaware of what was about to hit us.

The attack that followed would be widely described as one of the largest aerial assaults of the full-scale war. Over the course of roughly eleven hours, Russia launched 537 aerial weapons – 477 drones and 60 missiles, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic weapons – in a sustained overnight bombardment. Even by the grim standards of this war, it was an extraordinary onslaught.

By the time I became properly aware of what was happening, I was, by my own admission, quite sozzled.

Even through the haze of exhaustion and alcohol, it was obvious that something exceptional was unfolding.

I remember lying awake, following events as reports gradually filtered through on my phone. The earliest updates already painted a grim picture. Even so, they came nowhere close to conveying the true scale of what was happening. Looking back, my perception of danger probably wasn’t quite what it should have been. Whether that was the alcohol, the exhaustion or simply the strange psychological adaptation that comes with spending weeks in a city under almost nightly airborne siege, I honestly couldn’t tell you.

Curiously, despite travelling to Ukraine precisely to document life in a country at war, I took very little video that night. The first major attack I witnessed earlier in my stay had come as a genuine shock. My journalistic instincts immediately kicked in and I instinctively reached for my phone. I’ve written about that night in my previous article. This time was different.

[The first massive air attack I witnessed, early hours of 16 June]

My part of Shevchenkivskyi District escaped comparatively lightly. The explosions sounded distant rather than immediate. That didn’t mean my corner of Kyiv escaped untouched.

Shortly after dawn, I looked out from my apartment and saw what appeared to be the unmistakable smoke trail of a missile that had been brought down nearby. I photographed it from my window. Whether it had been a ballistic missile or another type of missile, I can’t say with certainty. But whatever it was, it served as a stark reminder that even in one of the quieter districts that night, nowhere in Kyiv was ever truly safe.

Sometime afterwards, I finally went back to bed.

I only appreciated the full scale of what Kyiv had endured after I woke up later that day.

By then it had become clear that Russia had launched one of the largest aerial assaults of the full-scale war. Residential buildings had been struck, rescue workers were digging through shattered apartment blocks for survivors and, as always, they did so under the ever-present threat of so-called ‘double tap’ attacks – that old Russian classic, in which a second strike follows the first, targeting those attempting to save the wounded. By the end of the day, at least 31 people had been killed and more than 130 injured. As the casualty figures steadily climbed, so too did the scale of what Kyiv had endured become apparent to me. The early reports I’d followed during the night hadn’t come close to conveying it.

And then, as it always seems to in Kyiv, life quietly resumed.

I went for lunch in a Georgian restaurant.

People sat on terraces drinking coffee. Parents pushed prams. The Metro ran. The city carried on. Once again, I found myself struck by how quickly extraordinary circumstances become routine.

For Ukrainians, of course, this wasn’t remarkable at all. They’d been living with this reality for years. I was the outsider. I was the one still trying to reconcile the devastation of the previous night with the apparent normality of the following afternoon. It was another reminder that resilience should never be mistaken for normality. Carrying on isn’t the same as living without fear. It’s simply what people do when there is no alternative.

After lunch I wandered over to Soul Café, near Lvivska Square, where I lingered over several coffees before continuing a little further up the street to a lively craft beer bar.

The beer wasn’t what had brought me there.

Quite the opposite.

I was trying to avoid alcohol after the previous night. Instead, I ordered Coca-Cola after Coca-Cola. Incidentally, what is it with countries where people have a tendency to drink heavily and the soft drinks always seem to come in such tiny servings? Ireland does it. Britain does it. Give me Spain any day, where they’re refreshingly generous with the soft drinks.

By then I’d consumed enough caffeine and sugar to keep a small village awake.

Eventually I thought, feck it.

One local craft pilsner wouldn’t kill me.

I’d arrived early enough that the terrace was almost empty. For a while I had it entirely to myself. As the afternoon wore on, though, the place filled up quickly. At one point I nipped inside, leaving my half-finished beer to guard my table.

When I came back, my table had vanished.

Well, not literally.

Somebody else had commandeered it.

My beer had disappeared with it, and my attempts to reclaim my little corner of the terrace proved entirely unsuccessful.

Thank God for that.

Otherwise, the conversation that followed never would have happened.

With nowhere else to sit, I found myself standing at one of the tall communal tables beside an older Ukrainian gentleman.

I’ll call him Anatoly.

That isn’t his real name.

We didn’t share a common language. He spoke Ukrainian, Russian and German. I spoke English, Spanish and Portuguese, along with enough mangled phrases in other languages to get myself into trouble.

So we improvised.

I used ChatGPT’s translation.

He used Google Translate.

It worked astonishingly well.

Somehow, despite the technology standing between us, we ended up having one of the most fascinating conversations of my entire trip.

Before 2014, Anatoly had worked as both a journalist and a photojournalist in Donetsk. Then Russia’s aggression reached his home in the Donbas. He put down his camera, joined the Ukrainian military, donned his fatigues and spent the next decade and a bit defending his homeland.

Only recently, having turned sixty, had he finally become old enough to be discharged military service.

He didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

If anything, he regretted no longer being able to serve.

At one point he showed me his military identification.

Later he showed me his photography.

His Instagram account contained extraordinary photographs, but they were only a fraction of what he carried on his phone. Image after image appeared on the screen, documenting not only war but the country he’d spent years defending.

One thing, however, surprised me.

He described himself as “Russian”.

Not a ‘Russian speaker’, though he was very much speaking to me in Russian.

A “Russian”.

Yet few people I’ve ever met have expressed stronger feelings about the pride of being Ukrainian.

Patiently waiting for the translation apps to catch up with our conversation, he dismissed, in terms that left absolutely no room for misunderstanding, all the Kremlin’s rhetoric about the so-called ‘Russkiy Mir’, ‘protecting Russian speakers’ and ‘liberating’ eastern Ukraine.

Then he said something I’ll never forget.

“I’ve seen what Russian ‘liberation’ looks like.”

For a moment, neither translation app was necessary.

Those few words said everything.

I left the bar that evening with a new contact in my phone and the feeling that, once again, Ukraine had given me a story I never could have planned for.

The next few days settled back into something approaching normality. I caught up with friends, revisited favourite cafés, tried a few more restaurants and continued working on the stories I’d come to Ukraine to tell. Somewhere along the way, without ever consciously noticing it happening, Kyiv had begun to feel less like somewhere I was visiting and more like somewhere I was temporarily living.

Like a second home.

Then life intervened.

Something urgent came up back in Barcelona that required my attention, forcing me to bring my trip to an earlier end than I’d intended. I began making arrangements to leave.

Under different circumstances, I’d almost certainly have travelled back by rail, perhaps even taking the opportunity to leave via Lviv before continuing on to Poland. But that plan quickly ran into the realities of wartime Ukraine.

The Kyiv–Warsaw sleeper train is like gold dust.

Tickets go on sale weeks in advance and, in that direction especially, disappear almost immediately. I’d managed to secure a berth on the journey into Ukraine without too much difficulty by booking as soon as sales opened, but travelling the other way at short notice was another matter entirely. By the time I needed to leave, the train simply wasn’t an option.

The overnight bus to Warsaw would have to do.

That settled, I spent my remaining time in Kyiv much as I had the previous weeks — meeting friends, enjoying the city and quietly trying to make the most of the time I had left.

Then came my final night.

The attack began without warning.

Unlike the previous major assault a week earlier, it came out of the blue. I was expecting a relaxing evening and, after several exhausting days, I was quietly confident of finally getting a good night’s sleep.

Then the explosions started.

This was different.

The blasts were close enough to shake my building. Above them came the unmistakable buzz of drones, while the heavy, concussive thud of missile impacts echoed across my part of the city. Even before I reached for my phone, it was obvious that this was something altogether different.

I started checking the news.

That’s when I saw President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warning, issued a couple of hours earlier, that another major assault on Kyiv was imminent.

By the time I understood the scale of what was happening, I no longer felt comfortable attempting to reach the shelter.

Ordinarily, that would have been the obvious thing to do. But the constant presence of drones overhead changed the calculation completely. The shelter wasn’t especially close to my apartment, and the idea of walking through the streets while drones were passing overhead filled me with considerably more trepidation than remaining where I was.

It presented a grim dilemma.

I was staying in an ageing Soviet-era Khrushchevka. Had a ballistic or cruise missile struck the building directly, I’d almost certainly have been toast. But these are guided missiles. They are aimed at buildings, often civilian ones, not at random individuals walking along the street. The drones worried me more. Faced with those competing risks, I decided to stay put.

Instead, I retreated to the bathroom, putting two walls between myself and the outside, exactly as Ukrainians are taught to do.

I stayed there listening.

The explosions continued.

The building shook again.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me.

So did the journalist in me.

I stepped out onto the balcony.

Documenting moments like these was precisely why I’d come to Ukraine.

[Massive attack on my final nnight in Kyiv as filmed from my apartment]

Standing on the balcony, I could hear the attack unfolding across the city.

Swarms of drones flew overhead while, every so often, the distinctive, thunderous impact of a ballistic missile reverberated through the night. Unlike the previous major attack I’d experienced, these explosions didn’t feel distant. They felt frighteningly close. My building shuddered repeatedly, each blast punctuated by an uneasy silence before the next arrived.

I filmed what I could.

There wasn’t a great deal to see from where I was standing. The darkness concealed much of what was happening, and common sense dictated that I wasn’t about to spend any longer on the balcony than necessary. But the sounds alone told their own story.

It was only the following morning that the full picture emerged.

Russia had launched another large-scale overnight assault involving hundreds of drones and scores of missiles, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. Residential buildings had been struck across Kyiv and the surrounding region. Civilians had been murdered in their sleep. By the time the rescue operation was over, at least 21 people had been killed and dozens more injured. As rescue workers searched through the rubble for survivors, they once again did so under the threat of further ‘double tap’ attacks.

One detail, in particular, stood out.

Unlike many previous attacks, a significant number of the ballistic missiles had not been intercepted.

For weeks, President Volodymyr Zelensky had been urging Ukraine’s partners to provide more Patriot air-defence systems and interceptor missiles. Reading those appeals from the comfort of Barcelona would have been one thing.

Standing on a balcony in Kyiv, listening to those missiles getting through only a few streets away, was quite another.

In that moment, the discussion ceased to be about military hardware or diplomatic negotiations.

It became about apartment blocks.

It became about rescue workers.

It became about families asleep in their beds.

It became about whether another missile would get through.

By midday, it was time to leave my digs.

If I’d slept 45 minutes all night - day, truth told - I’d be surprised. I certainly couldn’t have slept much more than that.

I was tired, but not in the way I’d expected to be. Adrenaline has a habit of carrying you through the night. It was only once the immediate danger had passed that the exhaustion began to catch up with me.

As I finished packing and checked every pocket and compartment of my luggage one last time, something caught my eye.

An unopened packet of my anxiety medication.

I simply stood there staring at it.

Agog.

For weeks I’d been convinced I’d run out. I’d searched for it repeatedly before eventually accepting that it must have been gone. I’d even tried, without success, to obtain a replacement in Kyiv. And yet there it was.

It had been sitting in my luggage all along.

I took one.

Within half an hour, I felt more chilled than the Buddha himself.

It was such a dramatic change that it caught me completely by surprise.

Only then did I realise that I’d spent much of the previous few weeks walking around in a constant, low-level state of anxiety without ever consciously recognising it. I’d assumed almost all of it was simply a consequence of living in a city under regular missile and drone attack.

Clearly, that wasn’t the whole story.

I don’t normally write about my own personal situation, and I certainly don’t mention it here looking for sympathy.

Whatever I was experiencing faded into insignificance beside the reality faced every day by the people I’d met in Kyiv. My anxiety could be eased by finding a forgotten packet of medication. Theirs couldn’t. When I closed the apartment door behind me that morning, I was leaving. They were staying.

That thought stayed with me as I made my way across the city for one final lunch before beginning the journey home.

Before leaving for the station, there was one thing I still wanted to do.

I returned to Chary (Чари), the delightful modern Ukrainian restaurant just across from the Italian Embassy, for one final lunch. It would be my last proper meal in Ukraine.

I ordered three courses, including a plate of traditional varenyky – Ukrainian dumplings. Earlier in my stay I’d sampled some of Chary’s more inventive takes on the dish, but this time I opted for the classics, replete with smetana. It felt like an appropriate way to round off five unforgettable weeks in Ukraine.

I lingered over lunch a little longer than I normally would have.

I wasn’t quite ready to leave.

There was still so much I wanted to see.

I’d wanted to visit Odesa. I’d wanted to spend time in Lviv. I’d even entertained the slightly mad idea of travelling to Kharkiv. But by then my chronic insomnia had finally caught up with me, rendering such plans fanciful in the extreme.\

Still, I told myself, I’ll be back.

There was simply too much of Ukraine left to discover, too many friends I’d made whom I wanted to see again, and too many friends I never quite got to meet.

Something urgent back in Barcelona had forced me to bring this trip to an earlier end than I’d planned. With the Kyiv–Warsaw train no longer an option at such short notice, the overnight bus would have to do.

Given my chronic insomnia, that prospect didn’t exactly fill me with optimism.

I don’t sleep on buses.

I don’t sleep on planes.

I don’t sleep on ordinary trains.

Sleeper berths are another matter, but on public transport I generally avoid taking sleeping tablets. If they don’t work, you’re left in a thoroughly unpleasant groggy state in a place where you’d much rather be alert.

So I resigned myself to another long, sleepless journey.

[Video update live and direct from Kyiv’s central bus station. Sorry, but not sorry for consulting bullet points. I had less than 30 minutes to catch my bus, the numbers mattered, and no time for multiple takes. Not ideal, but there we are]

What happened next surprised me almost as much as finding that forgotten packet of anxiety medication.

The bus pulled out of Kyiv that evening and headed west towards Poland.

I settled into my seat expecting exactly what I always expect on buses, planes and ordinary trains.

A long, uncomfortable night with little or no sleep.

That’s simply how my body works.

So I resigned myself to staring out of the window for most of the journey.

Instead, something extraordinary happened.

[Our “Flixbus” to the Polish capital broke down not once, but twice on the Ukrainian side of the border]

I fell asleep.

Not for the whole journey, of course.

But if there was ever a night when my body simply decided it had had enough, this was it.

I woke as we crossed into Poland feeling something I hadn’t felt for quite some time.

Rested.

Not perfectly rested, admittedly, but certainly not the zombie I’d fully expected to be after everything that had happened over the previous twenty-four hours.

Considering the circumstances, it felt almost miraculous.

As Warsaw drew closer, my thoughts were already beginning to shift back towards Barcelona and the reason I’d been forced to leave Ukraine so suddenly.

Physically, I had left Kyiv behind.

Mentally, I wasn’t sure that I had.

Back in Barcelona, I found myself thinking about Ukraine far more than I’d expected.

Not constantly.

Just often.

A photograph would catch my eye. I’d think about a conversation I’d had over coffee, or remember an evening spent wandering through Podil or around Lvivska Square. Places that had been entirely unfamiliar five weeks earlier now felt oddly familiar.

It took me a little while to understand why.

When you’re in Kyiv, you don’t spend every waking moment thinking about the war. If you did, you’d drive yourself mad. You adapt. You get on with your day. You meet friends. You go for coffee. You grumble about the laughably inaccurate weather forecasts, which, according to almost everyone I spoke to, have been comically unreliable ever since the full-scale invasion. You laugh. Life has to continue.

It was only after I came home that I realised how mentally switched on I’d been the entire time.

Always listening.

Always aware.

Every sound sets you on edge.

Always conscious, somewhere in the back of my mind, that another air-raid alert could arrive at any moment.

That awareness had become so normal that I’d almost stopped noticing it.

Then came another major Russian attack.

I found myself doing something that would have seemed unimaginable only a few weeks earlier.

Checking in with friends in Kyiv.

It struck me then that, despite having returned to Barcelona, a part of me was still mentally there.

Perhaps that’s inevitable.

Five weeks is long enough to become attached to a place.

It’s certainly long enough to become attached to the people who live there.

I was only a visitor.

I had the luxury of boarding a bus, crossing the Polish border and flying home.

The people I met didn’t have that option.

The following morning they simply carried on, as they always do, living lives that can, at any moment, be interrupted by the sound of drones or incoming missiles.

More than anything else, that’s what I’ll remember.

Not simply the destruction.

Not the explosions.

Not even the sleepless nights.

It will be the extraordinary determination of ordinary Ukrainians to keep living their lives in circumstances that most of us can scarcely imagine.

I’ll be back. Oh yes.

There is still far too much of Ukraine left for me to discover, too many stories left untold, too many friends I’d like to see again, and too many friends I never quite got to meet.

I’ve left Kyiv; but Kyiv hasn’t left me.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Whether Lenin ever actually said those words is doubtful. No reliable evidence has ever surfaced to show that he did. Yet over the past week in Kyiv, they felt true.

This was one of those weeks.

Two days before one of the largest attacks on Kyiv of the war, the Ukrainian government issued an unusual warning. Officials cautioned that Russia might once again deploy an Oreshnik missile, the intermediate-range ballistic missile unveiled with much fanfare by the Kremlin.

The prospect generated considerable discussion. Not simply among journalists and analysts, but among ordinary Ukrainians as well. The warning came directly from the government, lending it a weight that speculation on social media often lacks.

The Oreshnik occupies a curious place in the war. In theory it is a formidable weapon. In practice, many observers regard it as something of a white elephant when used conventionally. It was designed with nuclear payloads in mind. Without one, it functions as much as a political statement as a military tool. An expensive statement, at that.

Still, the warning was taken seriously.

I spent much of that weekend as I had spent much of my time in Kyiv: working, exploring the city and talking to people. Despite the war, or perhaps because of it, daily life here has a remarkable ability to continue. Cafés remain busy. Parks remain busy. Friends meet for drinks. Couples stroll through the streets. Life persists.

By Sunday evening, however, there was a sense that something might be coming.

Shortly after 10pm, as I was preparing to head home, the first air alert sounded.

On its own, that was not unusual.

Air alerts are a fact of life in Kyiv. Some prove serious. Others pass without incident. Residents have developed their own ways of assessing risk, drawing on a mixture of official alerts, experience and a sprawling ecosystem of Telegram channels that track incoming threats in real time.

One woman I spoke to later summed up the reality of life in the capital rather succinctly. If the drones are on the other side of the Dnipro, she told me, she does not even get out of bed.

To an outsider, that might sound reckless. In reality, it reflects years of adaptation. If every resident rushed to a shelter every time an alert sounded, day or night, life would become impossible. People learn the difference between routine alerts and genuinely dangerous situations. They learn when to stay put, when to move to an interior corridor and when it is time to seek shelter.

That evening, the reaction across much of the city was relatively subdued.

We had, after all, heard alerts before.

But sometime after 1am, the atmosphere changed.

The flashes began.

Then the tracers.

Then the explosions.

The sounds arrived in layers: the distinctive buzz of drones, the sharp flashes of air-defence intercepts and the deeper booms that followed. Looking out across the night sky, I could see bursts of light punctuating the darkness as Ukrainian air defences engaged incoming targets.

Stupidly, idiotically or perhaps simply out of journalistic instinct, my first reaction was to film it.

I captured roughly thirty to forty seconds of footage before common sense finally prevailed and I moved somewhere safer.

The footage survives.

What remains strongest in my memory, however, is not what I saw.

It is what I smelled.

For days afterwards, the scent lingered in my mind. Burning tyres. That was the closest comparison I could find. The smell immediately transported me back to bonfire nights in Cork years ago. Yet that was it exactly: burning rubber hanging in the air long after the explosions had faded.

That smell has stayed with me more stubbornly than the flashes, the tracers or the noise.

It was one of those small sensory details that somehow makes an event feel more real.

As dawn approached, reports of damage began filtering through.

A building in my district had been hit.

Elsewhere across the city, the consequences were far worse.

In the aftermath of the attack, President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked what he would say to Vladimir Putin.

His answer was characteristically succinct.

“We will have our answer. You’ll see.”

At the time, it sounded like a warning.

By Thursday, it looked more like a promise.

Among the sites damaged during the attack was Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the oldest and most important religious sites in Eastern Europe.

For many readers outside the region, that fact may not immediately register.

Remember when Notre-Dame caught fire? Imagine if Notre-Dame had not caught fire accidentally, but had been bombed.

Or, to use a comparison closer to home, imagine if the Sagrada Família in Barcelona — the city where I live — had been damaged during a missile attack.

Then imagine that the building in question was significantly older than either of them and occupied an even more central place in the religious imagination of an entire civilisation.

That begins to convey the significance of the Lavra.

Founded in the eleventh century, it stands at the heart of Eastern Slavic Christianity. Few sites carry greater spiritual, historical or cultural importance.

The damage inflicted during the attack was not catastrophic, but that owed much to the rapid response of firefighters and emergency workers who prevented a far more serious outcome. The symbolism, however, was impossible to ignore.

Nor should it be forgotten that Ukrainian first responders rarely operate in safety. Throughout the war they have worked under the constant threat of so-called “double-tap” attacks, in which a second strike follows the first, targeting emergency personnel and rescue workers responding to the scene.

That such risks have become part of the job is a reminder of the brutal realities that now underpin daily life in Ukraine.

There was also a bitter irony to it.

For years, the Kremlin has presented itself as a defender of traditional Christian civilisation and Orthodox values. Yet here was one of the most important centres of Orthodox Christianity anywhere in the world, damaged during one of the largest Russian attacks of the war.

It was the sort of contradiction that no longer surprises Ukrainians — or, for that matter, anyone who has been paying close attention to this conflict. By now, we know better.

Nor was the Lavra the only tragedy.

Less than three weeks earlier, a Russian attack on a residential building in Kyiv had killed twenty-seven people in their sleep. Among the dead were entire families. For Ukrainians, such events have become grimly familiar. For outsiders, they can blur together into an endless procession of headlines.

Yet each attack leaves behind its own scars, its own funerals and its own collection of people trying to rebuild lives that have been shattered in a matter of seconds.

By Monday morning, however, Kyiv was doing what Kyiv almost always does.

It carried on.

That phrase appears repeatedly in accounts of wartime Ukraine because there is no better way of describing what happens.

The cafés reopened.

The traffic returned.

People went to work.

Life resumed with an almost eerie sense of normality.

Not because people were unaffected by what had happened. Quite the opposite. The attack dominated conversations throughout the day. But after years of war, Ukrainians have become extraordinarily adept at compartmentalising fear, grief and exhaustion.

The alternative would be paralysis.

That afternoon I met a Ukrainian friend who works as an English teacher. We spent several hours talking over coffee and later drinks. It was, on the face of it, an entirely ordinary social encounter.

And yet there was something faintly surreal about it.

Only hours earlier, the city had been under one of the largest attacks of the war.

Now people were sitting in cafés.

Walking through parks.

Meeting friends.

Living.

That contrast is one of the defining characteristics of Kyiv. The war is ever-present, yet daily life refuses to surrender to it.

After saying goodbye to my friend, I drifted through the city centre. Eventually I found myself talking to an American journalist and a group of young Ukrainians.

The encounter began in an unlikely fashion. I overheard the American cursing in Italian and responded instinctively in the same language. That was enough to start a conversation.

As it turned out, he also spoke Spanish, which helped. The young Ukrainians spoke only limited English and my Ukrainian remains rudimentary at best, but between translation apps, gestures and occasional interventions from the multilingual American, we managed perfectly well.

We exchanged stories, discussed the war and talked about life in Kyiv. It was one of those conversations that would have seemed entirely ordinary were it not taking place in a city that had spent the previous night under one of the largest attacks of the war.

Looking back, however, I suspect I was functioning on autopilot.

It was only later that evening, after I had returned home and begun winding down for the night, that the reality of what I had experienced finally caught up with me.

The attack had happened less than twenty-four hours earlier, yet it was only then that it properly registered.

The best way I can describe it is delayed shock.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the sudden realisation that I had spent the entire day walking around in a state of delayed shock without fully recognising it.

I had met a friend for coffee and drinks. I had wandered through the city centre. I had spoken to journalists and strangers. I had gone about my day as though everything were perfectly normal.

Only later did I realise that I had been processing the previous night’s events all along.

The following day I wrote a brief note online.

“Life in Kyiv has returned to normal today. Eerily so.”

At the time, it felt like an adequate summary.

Looking back, I think the word “eerily” was doing most of the work.

Because normality is not quite the right word.

There is nothing normal about spending a night listening to drones and explosions overhead.

There is nothing normal about checking air-defence channels before going to sleep.

There is nothing normal about discussing missile trajectories over coffee.

And yet these things have become normal.

Or at least normal enough.

That is perhaps one of the strangest lessons Ukraine teaches visitors.

Human beings can adapt to almost anything.

A few days later, after changing accommodation, I finally published the footage I had recorded during the attack.

The delay was deliberate.

Partly it was a matter of security. I have had enough uncomfortable interactions with Russians over the years to know that publishing real-time location information is rarely a wise idea. More importantly, however, I needed a little distance from the experience itself.

I had spent a day and a half processing it.

The footage showed the flashes, the intercepts and the explosions.

What it could not capture was the smell.

Nor could it fully capture what struck me most in the days that followed: not the attack itself, but the determination of Kyiv’s residents to carry on as though life, despite everything, remained theirs to live.

If the previous week had been defined by Russian attacks on Kyiv, the following days would be dominated by something very different.

By Wednesday evening, attention had begun to shift elsewhere.

Yet the war, as ever, had other ideas.

Overnight, from Wednesday into Thursday morning, air alerts echoed across Kyiv once again. The sirens sounded repeatedly from around 1am until 8am. Like many people in the city, I slept poorly. By the time I finally dragged myself out of bed around lunchtime on Thursday, bleary-eyed and exhausted, a very different story was dominating the news.

Ukraine had struck Moscow.

Not Moscow in the abstract. Not a military target somewhere on the outskirts of the Russian Federation. Moscow itself.

According to Russian authorities, nearly 200 drones targeted Moscow and the surrounding region in what they described as the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Among the targets hit was the Moscow Oil Refinery, one of the facilities helping to supply fuel to the Russian capital. One of the most striking images to emerge from the attack showed the lid of a fuel storage tank blasted hundreds of metres into the air.

Then came the memes.

So many memes.

What struck me most that day was not triumphalism but something subtler. A sense of catharsis.

When a Ukrainian friend living in Australia later asked me what the mood on the ground in Kyiv had been like, I found myself struggling to answer. Eventually I settled on a single word: joy.

Not exuberant joy.

Not celebration in the streets.

Joy expressed in the understated way I have come to associate with Ukrainians.

There was something different in the air that day.

After years of watching missiles, drones and bombs fall on Ukrainian cities, people were witnessing consequences arriving somewhere else for a change. Not in Kharkiv. Not in Odesa. Not in Zaporizhzhia. Moscow.

The significance of that should not be underestimated.

One of the most insightful explanations I have encountered came not from a politician or military analyst but from my friend and colleague Andriy Movchan.

Writing on Sunday, he argued that the attack on Moscow had generated a level of international attention and solidarity he had not seen since the first year of the full-scale invasion. Having spent years monitoring coverage across English-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, French- and Italian-language media, he was struck by the reaction.

Particularly in parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

According to Andriy, even comment sections that would normally be filled with pro-Russian narratives, bots and hostility towards Ukraine were suddenly full of ordinary people expressing a very different sentiment.

You reap what you sow.

Let them taste their own medicine.

Russia can end this tomorrow.

The war is coming home.

Whether one agrees entirely with Andriy’s interpretation or not, the broader point is difficult to dismiss.

As Andriy observed, one reason for this may be surprisingly simple: Moscow carries a symbolic weight that few other places in the former Soviet space possess for international audiences.

Many of Ukraine’s most significant military achievements have taken place in places that mean little to international audiences.

The liberation of Kherson.

The Kharkiv counteroffensive.

The sinking of the Moskva.

Attacks on strategic military infrastructure.

These events were enormously important. Yet for many people outside the region, they remained abstract.

Moscow is different.

Moscow is one of the few places in the former Soviet space whose symbolic significance is instantly understood around the world. Red Square. The Kremlin. St Basil’s Cathedral. The capital of a nuclear superpower.

For many international observers, seeing Ukraine strike Moscow carries an immediate emotional and symbolic resonance that events elsewhere simply do not.

There is also a deeper story.

Reading reactions from Muscovites in the aftermath of the attack, I was struck less by the fear than by the bewilderment.

One social-media user complained about what they described as an attempt to “drag Moscow into a war between Ukraine and Russia.”

I had to read the sentence twice.

It was one of those remarks that feels almost impossible to parody because reality has already done the work for you.

The comment was absurd.

But it was also revealing.

It spoke to the extent to which many people in the Russian capital have been insulated from the realities of a war fought in their name.

That observation was echoed by Dr Jade McGlynn during a recent appearance on The Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast. Discussing reactions to the drone attacks, she noted how unprepared many Muscovites appeared to be for a reality that Ukrainians have been living with for years.

The issue was not fear.

Fear is normal.

The issue was unfamiliarity.

People reportedly stood outside filming drones rather than seeking shelter. Others seemed genuinely uncertain how to respond at all.

The more I thought about it, the less this felt like a failure of individual judgement and the more it felt like a failure of the Russian state.

Ukraine has spent years adapting to this reality.

Residents follow air-alert apps and Telegram channels. They know where the shelters are. They know when a threat is distant and when it is immediate.

That is not recklessness.

It is adaptation.

What struck me about some of the reactions emerging from Moscow was that they suggested a society that had never really been prepared for the possibility that the war might eventually reach it.

And yet this outcome was entirely foreseeable.

Ukraine has spent months expanding its long-range strike campaign, increasing drone production and steadily degrading elements of Russia’s air-defence network. Even the most heavily defended city in Russia cannot guarantee perfect protection against attacks conducted at sufficient scale.

What we witnessed was not an unexpected anomaly.

It was the logical consequence of trends that have been visible for a long time.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, another debate was unfolding.

As Ukraine absorbed one of the largest attacks of the war and demonstrated an increasing ability to strike deep inside Russia, reports emerged that France, Germany and other member states were discussing reforms to the EU’s diplomatic apparatus and the role of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

Perhaps those reforms are necessary.

Perhaps they are overdue.

But at a moment when Europe is confronting its greatest security crisis since the Cold War, it was difficult to avoid the impression that this was not a particularly good look.

Not this week of all weeks.

The week also reinforced another trend that Andriy has observed for some time.

During the early stages of the full-scale invasion, many sceptics argued that Ukraine could not win.

It was presented as a prediction.

Russia was too large.

Too powerful.

Victory was impossible.

More recently, however, a different argument has begun to emerge in some quarters.

Not that Ukraine cannot win.

That Ukraine must not be allowed to win.

The distinction matters.

One is a forecast.

The other is a preference.

Many of the people making that transition describe themselves as anti-imperialists. Yet their opposition to imperialism often appears remarkably selective. Faced with a smaller nation resisting invasion by a larger neighbour, their sympathies frequently seem to lie not with the invaded but with the invader.

These are, in many cases, classic campists. Not an original point of mine, but one I believe more and more as time goes by.

Their objection is not to empire itself. Not in the abstract, anyway.

It is to the wrong empire.

Or, perhaps more accurately, any empire other than those they have chosen to support.

As Andriy has noted previously, there is a world of difference between saying Ukraine cannot win and insisting that Ukraine must not be allowed to win. The former is an assessment, however mistaken. The latter is a moral choice.

And so we arrive back where we began.

A famous quotation, probably never spoken by Lenin, about weeks in which decades happen.

Kyiv under one of the largest attacks of the war.

Damage to one of the holiest sites in Eastern Christianity.

Delayed shock.

Moscow under attack.

Catharsis in Kyiv.

Bewilderment in Moscow.

Arguments in Brussels.

A shifting international conversation about Ukraine.

This was one of those weeks.

The kind that reveals things.

The kind that changes perceptions.

The kind that leaves you with the uneasy sense that history has accelerated, if only briefly, before settling once again into its usual rhythm.

Most of them begin by not missing your flight.

The alarm, unfortunately, never went off. Or rather, it never went off because I never set it. By the time I woke up in Barcelona, any realistic prospect of making my flight to Warsaw had already disappeared. Had I surfaced half an hour earlier and thrown myself into a taxi, perhaps there might have been a slim chance. More likely, it was already over.

It was an irritating start to a journey I had wanted to make for a very long time.

Missing the flight also meant missing the sleeper train I had booked for that evening. My immediate assumption was that the ticket was gone and the money with it. More than that, I felt slightly guilty about occupying a place that somebody else might have wanted. My first instinct was simply to cancel it. Somewhere, I thought, there was probably a Ukrainian who actually needed that berth.

Whilst exploring the Ukrainian Railways app, I discovered that what I had initially taken to mean a return ticket actually referred to returning a ticket. To my great surprise, the cancellation process was straightforward and the refund was effectively complete. Given the circumstances, it felt remarkably generous.

In the end, the missed flight cost me little more than a day. The train ticket was refunded, a new one was booked, and the journey was postponed by twenty-four hours.

Ukraine has occupied a significant place in my thoughts for a very long time. My interest in the country stretches back to the Orange Revolution of 2004, but like millions of others across Europe, I remember exactly where I was when Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.

I was sitting in an office in uptown Barcelona, having only recently started a new job in public relations. One of my colleagues had spent part of their youth in Kyiv. Very little work was accomplished that day. Like everyone else, we spent much of our time doom scrolling, refreshing news websites and watching events unfold in what felt like slow motion. The war that morning still seemed almost impossible. By lunchtime it was undeniable.

Looking back now, it is easy to forget just how bleak those first hours appeared. Kyiv’s fall felt entirely plausible. To many Western governments, military analysts, experts and commentators, it seemed less a question of whether the Ukrainian capital would be captured than how long it would take.

From that point onwards, Ukraine was never far from my thoughts. Long before I began writing about it regularly, I found myself reading obsessively, following developments day by day and trying to understand a conflict that was reshaping Europe before our eyes.

Readers who have followed my work for a while will know that since the spring of last year I have been writing about Ukraine on a semi-regular basis. Quite unexpectedly, some of that coverage found an audience. A subject that had interested me for years gradually became a significant part of both my writing and social media output, to the point where I found myself, almost by accident, becoming a small voice in a much larger conversation about the war.

Yet I always felt a certain discomfort about that. There is something inherently unsatisfactory about analysing a war from afar while others are living through it. More than that, it increasingly felt like the height of journalistic bad taste to be armchair quarterbacking events from the comfort of Barcelona or Ireland while people elsewhere were paying the price in blood.

People are dying every day. Journalists continue to risk their lives to document what is happening and, in some cases, are murdered in the most brutal of fashions.

That discomfort was reinforced repeatedly by the realities of the war itself. Journalists were not merely reporting on events. Some were becoming victims of them.

One case that particularly stayed with me was that of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna. She disappeared while reporting in the Russian-occupied territories, investigating the detention and treatment of Ukrainian civilians. She later died in Russian captivity.

When her body was eventually returned to Ukraine, investigators reported evidence of torture and severe mistreatment. Several internal organs were missing, further complicating efforts to establish precisely what had happened to her. The details were horrifying. They served as a reminder that for some journalists, the risks of covering this war extend far beyond artillery fire and missile strikes.

The further the war entered my writing, the more I felt the need to leave the comfortable cocoon of distance and see the country for myself.

As previously stated, my interest in the country goes back more than two decades. The first real turning point came with the Orange Revolution of 2004. That was the moment Ukraine ceased to feel like just another post-Soviet republic and started to feel like something distinct.

I watched as millions of Ukrainians took to the streets in support of a different future for their country, and as Vladimir Putin’s Russia reacted with barely concealed hostility to the prospect of a neighbouring nation choosing its own path. There was a strong sense that Ukraine had voted, in Moscow’s eyes, the ‘wrong’ way. The economic strangulation that followed only reinforced that impression.

Being Irish, it was not difficult to find points of connection. The parallels should not be overstated, but I recognised echoes of our own history: language eradication, cultural suppression and the persistent tendency of outsiders to treat a distinct people as merely an extension of something larger.

Ireland spent centuries under English and later British rule. The plantations of Munster and Ulster were not simply about land; they formed part of a broader project that sought to reshape the country itself. The Irish language was pushed to the margins. Native culture was frequently treated as something backward or inconvenient. The ideal, from the perspective of the authorities, was not an Ireland comfortable in its own identity but an Ireland gradually remade in the image of its rulers.

Again, the histories are different and the parallels should not be pushed too far. But something clicked into place for me during the Orange Revolution. I began to see Ukraine not as a peripheral corner of the former Soviet Union but as a nation determined to be itself and to be left alone to forge its own path.

So when the opportunity finally presented itself, I did not think twice.

The route was obvious. No civilian flights operate into Ukraine. Like journalists, diplomats, aid workers and countless Ukrainians themselves, I found myself looking at the overnight sleeper train from Warsaw to Kyiv.

The first attempt failed with my alarm clock.

The second succeeded.

No such problems presented themselves the following day.

Getting to Barcelona Airport from the city centre is almost absurdly easy. Security was swift and efficient, as it generally is in Spain. I noticed that passengers were no longer being asked to remove electronics from their bags, something I had first encountered earlier this year in Dublin. Even a hair product I had accidentally left in my luggage failed to attract any attention. Air travel, if not as pleasant as rail, was at least becoming slightly less irritating.

A few hours later I found myself in Warsaw.

I had only a handful of hours before my train departed, but I managed to meet an old Irish friend from my childhood who has spent the last two decades living in the Polish capital. He had been inviting me to visit Warsaw for years. For one reason or another, I had simply never made it.

When I asked him where I should go for traditional Polish food, he pointed me towards a British pub.

It was not the answer I had expected.

The żurek was excellent. The chicken cutlet was hardly complicated cuisine, but there is a time and a place for uncomplicated food and this was certainly one of them. It did the job perfectly. The fresh cabbage salad on the side – something vaguely coleslaw-adjacent, perhaps in a distinctly Polish fashion – was excellent too. After an early start and a day spent moving eastwards across Europe, I left entirely satisfied.

Eventually, I caught up properly with my friend. Unfortunately, unlike the previous day - the day I should have travelled - he already had a prior engagement, so our time together was somewhat limited. Still, it was genuinely good to see him. We had not properly spent time together in well over a decade.

The afternoon disappeared quickly. We stopped off in a Polish bar and then, somewhat to my amusement, eventually found ourselves in an Irish pub. It would have been my first choice given the circumstances, but after all those years the location was largely irrelevant. It was simply good to catch up before I continued eastwards.

The city itself deserves an article of its own. The juxtaposition of communist-era architecture and gleaming modern development was striking. My previous visit to Poland had been in 2009. The difference was impossible to miss. Poland has changed enormously in the intervening years.

But Kyiv awaited.

My train was due to depart from Warszawa Zachodnia shortly before seven in the evening.

The platform grew steadily busier as departure time approached. As the minutes ticked by, it became apparent that mine was far from the only delayed service. Several trains passing through the station appeared to be running behind schedule, including one displaying a delay of around 80 minutes.

Eventually, my own train arrived, approximately 55 minutes late.

Under normal circumstances, I would not have thought much of it. Yet Ukrainian Railways has earned a remarkable reputation for punctuality, even during the full-scale invasion. In a country subjected to regular missile and drone attacks, trains somehow continue to run with a level of reliability that would put much of Europe to shame – looking at you here, Germany and Britain.

Given both that reputation and the number of delayed services visible around the station, I found myself strongly suspecting that the problem lay on the Polish side of the border rather than the Ukrainian one.

Boarding was straightforward enough, apart from the usual confusion caused by my Irish passport. Because it contains text in both English and Irish, there are occasional moments when officials become uncertain about exactly what they are looking at.

Over the years, I have had numerous people mistake “Éireannach” – the Irish word for Irish – for my surname because of where it appears on the document.

I had the distinct impression that the bilingual nature of the passport was causing some confusion here too. Rather than attempting a linguistic explanation, I simply pointed to my name in English - Joseph Sexton - and that appeared to resolve the matter.

My compartment companion was a quiet man, probably in his late forties. We exchanged a few words here and there, and I quickly realised that his English was considerably better than my non-existent Ukrainian. Beyond that, we settled into the unspoken understanding that often develops between strangers sharing a long-distance train compartment.

One of the first things I noticed after settling into the compartment was that my fellow passenger had changed into slippers. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Throughout much of the Eastern Slavic world, removing one’s shoes indoors is simply normal behaviour. Anyone entering a home is generally expected to swap outdoor footwear for slippers.

Even so, I had not anticipated finding the same custom on a sleeper train.

Then again, I had packed my own pair for Kyiv. I knew I was leaving Mitteleuropa behind and heading further east. The problem was that they were buried somewhere deep inside my luggage, and there was not a hope in hell I was going to start unpacking a large suitcase in the confines of a sleeper compartment to retrieve them.

I settled for socks.

The carriage itself was spotless. The train was not new. Far from it. Yet everything was impeccably maintained. The toilet was spotless. The compartment was spotless. Again, comparisons with British and Irish rail services inevitably sprang to mind.

At around 10pm, a conductor appeared and transformed the compartment from seating area into bedroom. He was a burly, muscular man who looked more than capable of wrestling the entire carriage into submission if required. With the practised efficiency of someone who had done this countless times before, he pulled down the bunks and, within moments, the compartment had become a bedroom for the night.

Before long, it was lights out.

I settled in and, somewhat to my surprise, nodded off fairly quickly. By the time we reached the Polish side of the border, I was asleep.

The Polish formalities seemed to take an age.

It was well after midnight by this stage. Passports disappeared. Officials came and went. The train sat motionless.

The process felt surprisingly lengthy.

The Ukrainian side, by contrast, was remarkably efficient. My passport disappeared briefly. A few checks were completed. Before long, we were moving again.

After years of reading about the country, writing about it and thinking about it, the actual crossing itself felt almost anticlimactic. A few checks completed. A train beginning to move again.

What happened next surprised me more.

Despite being someone who has never had the easiest relationship with sleep, I managed to drift off again without too much difficulty. I slept soundly for several more hours and even enjoyed something approaching a lie-in the following morning.

When I finally woke, green countryside stretched beyond the window.

The atmosphere on the train was calm. People sat with compartment doors open. There was no sense of urgency, no tension. Just travellers making their way home, or onwards, or wherever life happened to be taking them.

The only real frustration was the internet connection. Between the delay, the lengthy border formalities and patchy coverage, I found myself unable to check maps or track our progress properly. I knew I was getting closer to Kyiv. I just could not tell exactly how close.

I also regretted not packing anything for breakfast. Whether the train possessed a dining car remained something of a mystery. My complete lack of Ukrainian, combined with a certain reluctance to assume that everyone speaks English, meant I never properly investigated the matter.

Outside, western Ukraine rolled past the window.

The fields were green. Villages appeared and disappeared. Life seemed entirely ordinary.

That observation should not be mistaken for complacency. Ukraine remains a country at war. Only weeks before my arrival, a Russian attack on Kyiv had killed dozens of civilians when an apartment block was struck. More recently, another major attack had claimed yet more lives.

What I was seeing was not peace.

What I was seeing was resilience.

Shortly before my visit, footage circulated widely online showing a Ukrainian farmer working in a field when a drone landed only metres from his tractor and exploded. Remarkably, he appeared completely unhurt and, after the blast, carried on with his work utterly unfazed.

To outside observers, the video looked extraordinary. To many Ukrainians, I suspect it merely reflected a reality they have been living with for years.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable creatures. Sometimes that adaptability is inspiring. Sometimes it is heartbreaking.

Often it is both.

Kyiv arrived shortly afterwards.

A little bleary-eyed but in good spirits, I stepped off the train and onto the platform. After a night sustained largely by nicotine pouches and intermittent sleep, the first order of business was obvious.

Cigarette.

Then, coffee.

My first attempt was unsuccessful.

The café I approached informed me that it had no water. I do not believe this had anything to do with the war. It simply appeared to be one of those unfortunate situations that occasionally arise anywhere in the world.

My second attempt seemed more promising.

The premises doubled as both a gift shop and a café. One counter sold flowers and assorted gifts. Another appeared to be dedicated to coffee and pastries. The flowers, in particular, caught my attention. Even before arriving in Ukraine, I had been struck by how important they seemed to be in everyday life.

A woman was staffing the gifts counter, so I naturally assumed the coffee counter was operating too. I stood there for several minutes waiting to order.

Eventually, a group of stylish young Ukrainians approached. Realising I was a foreigner, they switched effortlessly into impeccable English and explained that the coffee counter was unstaffed and would not be serving anyone for the moment.

It was a small interaction, but a pleasant one. They were unfailingly polite and, judging by appearances alone, certainly considerably less dishevelled than I was after more than 24 hours on the road.

Eventually, I found salvation in the form of a kiosk outside the station. The coffee came from a machine rather than a barista, but by that stage I was hardly in a position to be fussy. One coffee became two. A cigarette or two followed. The world immediately became a better place.

I briefly considered taking the metro. Under normal circumstances, that would have been my instinct. I am very much a public transport person. But after more than 24 hours on the road in three different countries, the prospect of hauling a slightly overweight 20-kilo bag through stations, escalators and train carriages held limited appeal. Having also discovered that taxis in Kyiv were relatively inexpensive, the sensible option seemed obvious.

The taxi won.

The area around the station was largely unremarkable. International hotels. International fast-food chains. The ordinary architecture of arrival.

One restaurant bore the name Papito, which amused the Spanish speaker in me rather more than it probably should have.

As we pulled away from Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi station, I realised that the journey was over.

The city itself still lay ahead.

There would be air raid alerts. Long conversations. New friendships. History. Politics. Culture. More than one surprise. There would also be reminders, sometimes sudden and uncomfortable ones, that this remains a country fighting for its very survival.

Those stories can wait.

This article was never really about Kyiv.

It was about the journey.

A missed alarm in Barcelona. A flight to Warsaw. A bowl of żurek in a British pub. An overdue reunion with an old friend. Slippers on a sleeper train. A burly conductor transforming a compartment into a bedroom. Border crossings in the middle of the night. Fields rolling past the window. A coffee hunt at Kyiv station.

And perhaps, after more than twenty years of following the country from afar, the simple realisation that eventually there comes a point when reading about a place is no longer good enough.

Sometimes you have to go.

The founder of the global fashion giant Mango and patriarch of one of Catalonia’s most powerful business dynasties was born into a Sephardic family in Istanbul before moving to Barcelona in the late 1960s — a remarkable historical loop for descendants of Jews expelled from Spain centuries earlier who later returned to Catalonia through the old Ottoman world. He had slipped during a hiking excursion with his eldest son Jonathan and fallen more than 100 metres to his death. Then, last Tuesday, 19 May, everything changed.

That morning, the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, arrested Jonathan on suspicion of homicide. Hours later, after appearing before a judge in Martorell, he was released on €1m bail, ordered to surrender his passport and instructed to report regularly to the court while the investigation continues. What had once been publicly framed as a hiking accident had become one of the most extraordinary criminal investigations in recent Spanish corporate history.

And here in Barcelona, unlike the blackout piece I wrote recently where the story stretched across the Iberian peninsula and beyond, this one really is local. Outside Spain, Mango is often understood simply as a global high-street retailer. Here in Catalonia, however, the company functions almost as a civic institution: one of the great modern business success stories to emerge from Barcelona itself.

Mango is not simply another clothing company. As the Financial Times noted in its coverage of the case, the privately owned company occupies a curious position within European fashion: unusually secretive and still deeply shaped by its founder, yet globally enormous, competing in the same commercial ecosystem as Zara and H&M while maintaining a far lower public profile.

In that profile piece, Barney Jopson lso captured something the Spanish press largely took as read rather than stated outright: the degree to which Mango belongs to the discreet world of the Catalan bourgeoisie, where privacy, family control and public restraint remain deeply prized — a characterisation with which, having lived in Barcelona for as long as I have, I would entirely concur. That, perhaps, is one reason why the scandal has produced such genuine shock inside Barcelona’s business elite.

The company’s headquarters at Palau-solità i Plegamans sit barely half an hour outside the city. Its founder was woven deeply into the Catalan business establishment. Its stores are everywhere. This is not some distant dynasty collapsing in public. This happened right here, in my own backyard.

The clearest narrative account of the case so far has come through the reporting of Rebeca Carranco of El País, who has covered the story extensively from Catalonia since Andic senior’s death. Her appearance on last Friday’s episode of the Hoy en El País podcast served as an excellent primer for anyone seeking to understand how a hiking accident on Montserrat evolved into one of the most extraordinary criminal investigations in recent Spanish corporate history.

Carranco described the case as resembling “a kind of Iberian true crime story”, but what emerges from her reporting is less lurid than profoundly tragic: a family empire, a failed succession, a father and son attempting reconciliation and a death on a mountain path that investigators now believe may not have been accidental at all.

The facts of the original incident are relatively uncontested. On 14 December 2024, Isak and Jonathan set out together on a route near the Cuevas del Salnitre in Collbató. Jonathan later told investigators that he had been walking ahead of his father when he heard falling stones behind him and turned to see Isak plunging down the slope. He himself called emergency services.

The case was initially treated as an accident and formally archived by a judge in January 2025. But the Mossos continued investigating quietly behind the scenes, and by March the case had been reopened. Eventually Jonathan’s status shifted from witness to formal suspect. Last week came the arrest.

Carranco’s reporting, together with extensive coverage from La Vanguardia, lays out the growing body of circumstantial evidence that convinced investigators and Judge Raquel Nieto that the case warranted prosecution. The most important element appears to be the allegation that Jonathan visited the same area of Montserrat three times in the days before the fatal excursion and, according to investigators, completed a route “almost identical” to the one he later walked with his father. Prosecutors believe this may indicate planning. The defence insists there is a far simpler explanation: Jonathan was checking the safety of the route beforehand because he was worried about his father managing the terrain.

There are other elements too. Investigators reportedly found discrepancies between Jonathan’s version of events and geolocation data recovered from mobile phones. A forensic report cited by Spanish media argued that the injuries suffered by Isak Andic were difficult to reconcile with a simple slip or stumble. Another major point concerns Jonathan’s mobile phone. According to investigators, the original device he possessed at the time of the incident later disappeared during a brief work trip to Ecuador in circumstances the judge described as suspicious. Mossos investigators also believe some content had been deleted before the device was replaced.

And then there is the family itself.

One of the most striking aspects of the reporting by Carranco and her colleague Jesús García Bueno is the degree to which the investigation now turns not merely on forensic reconstruction but on the deterioration of a strained relationship between father and son inside one of Spain’s most powerful business dynasties. In a remarkable passage published by El País over the weekend, the journalists described that strained relationship as “the background noise” running through the entire investigation.

That relationship, according to the reporting, had fluctuated for years. Jonathan was long viewed as the natural heir to Mango. At one point Isak effectively handed him operational control while stepping back to travel aboard his yacht, Nirvana.

But the experiment failed.

Mango entered a difficult period and Isak returned to steady the company personally before gradually professionalising its management structure around Toni Ruiz, the longtime executive whom the FT portrayed as the stabilising corporate figure tasked with steering Mango beyond the vulnerabilities of family succession.

This is where the corporate story becomes almost as interesting as the criminal one.

Over the past several years Mango appears to have been consciously transforming itself from a family empire into something closer to a modern professionally governed multinational. The board now includes major business figures such as Marc Puig and Helena Helmersson. Jonathan remained vice-president, but operational control increasingly migrated elsewhere. Even now, amid the scandal, Mango continues posting record financial results while trying to isolate the company from the judicial chaos surrounding the family.

The FT, meanwhile, framed the crisis not merely as a criminal investigation but as part of a broader story familiar across Europe’s founder-led business empires: ageing patriarchs, uncertain succession plans and the fragility that can emerge when family dynasties attempt to transition into modern corporate institutions.

That institutional separation may prove critical. Because what Spanish media now describe is not merely an inheritance dispute but an emotional and psychological collapse within the Andic family itself. According to El País, tensions escalated after Andic the elder began considering the creation of a philanthropic foundation that would redirect part of his fortune into charitable work as a “legacy to the world”. Investigators believe Jonathan reacted badly to the idea.

The reporting goes further still.

Therapists working with the family reportedly became important witnesses in the investigation. Carranco and García Bueno write that Jonathan himself appeared to recognise that his relationship with money had become unhealthy and that father and son had entered therapy in an attempt to reconcile. In court last week, Jonathan’s defence tried to present those sessions positively, arguing that relations between the two men had in fact improved significantly before Isak’s death.

And that is ultimately where the case now sits: suspended between circumstantial accumulation and the absence of direct proof.

The defence’s central argument remains straightforward. There is no eyewitness. No recording. No direct evidence showing Jonathan pushed his father from the path. His lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, has called the homicide theory “inconsistent” and “painful”, accusing investigators of stigmatising an innocent man. The family continues publicly to insist on Jonathan’s innocence.

But equally, the atmosphere around the case has changed completely. What began as a hiking accident on one of Catalonia’s best-known pilgrimage routes has become a sprawling investigation touching on inheritance, succession, elite Catalan business culture, family therapy, corporate governance and the future of one of Spain’s most recognisable brands.

Whatever ultimately happened on that path at Montserrat, the Andic family tragedy has already ceased to be private. In Barcelona now, it is impossible to discuss Mango without discussing the case. And as Carranco noted in Hoy en El País, the story no longer belongs merely to the family itself. It has become a national obsession.

The decision, announced this week after years of lobbying by players and activists in exile, clears the way for a team made up almost entirely of Afghan refugees living abroad to participate officially under the Afghan name and flag, despite women’s sport effectively being banned inside the country since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

For the players involved, many of whom fled Afghanistan during the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, the breakthrough is about far more than football.

“It’s a very historical moment for every single one of us,” midfielder Mina Ahmadi told Australia’s ABC News. “We will be working hard to be their voice.”

The significance of FIFA’s decision extends well beyond the pitch. International football is ordinarily governed through national federations recognised by FIFA itself. In Afghanistan’s case, the federation remains under Taliban control and has not permitted women’s football since the regime’s return to power nearly five years ago. Under normal circumstances, that would effectively veto the existence of a women’s national team.

Instead, FIFA has now created an exceptional pathway allowing the Afghan women’s side in exile to compete internationally without the approval of the federation nominally responsible for the sport inside the country.

In governance terms, that is extraordinary.

“This opportunity will be the time for us to also show some skills,” former Afghanistan captain and activist Khalida Popal told Reuters, while stressing that the team had “always been known as an activist team”.

The players themselves are now scattered across several continents. Large parts of the squad are based in Australia, while others live in Britain, Portugal, Albania and elsewhere in Europe following evacuation efforts after the Taliban takeover. Many continued playing through refugee or diaspora football structures while campaigning for official FIFA recognition.

For years, that campaign exposed an awkward contradiction at the heart of international sport. FIFA publicly promotes women’s football and gender equality as central parts of its identity, yet its own statutes traditionally deferred to national federations on questions of representation and recognition. In practice, that meant the Taliban’s ban on women participating in sport effectively erased Afghanistan’s women’s national side from international football.

The new arrangement changes that.

Reuters reported this week that FIFA’s revised framework allows representative teams to compete where “special circumstances” prevent a federation from operating normally. Human Rights Watch described the move as a landmark shift that effectively prevents a government from excluding women from international football simply by banning them domestically.

Spanish newspaper AS called the decision a “historic step forward” for women’s football.

The breakthrough follows sustained pressure from players, campaigners and former officials, particularly Popal, one of the founders of the Afghan women’s national team, who has spent years lobbying FIFA and national federations to formally recognise the exiled side.

The team’s existence has long occupied a strange limbo: internationally visible but institutionally homeless.

That changed gradually through unofficial matches, refugee tournaments and exhibition fixtures organised in Australia and Europe. Last year, an Afghan women’s refugee side played internationally under FIFA observation for the first time. This week’s announcement effectively transforms that experiment into official recognition.

For many players, however, the emotional weight of the decision matters as much as the sporting implications.

“When I step on to the pitch, I feel powerful,” defender Fatima Haidari told The Guardian in an earlier interview reflecting on the team’s years in exile.

Others described football not simply as competition, but as continuity – a way of preserving identity after displacement.

“Football is my freedom,” one player said.

That language of representation runs through almost every interview the players give. Many describe themselves not just as athletes but as public representatives of women still living under Taliban rule, where girls and women face sweeping restrictions on education, public life and organised sport.

The symbolism is difficult to ignore. Afghanistan’s men’s national side continues to compete officially through conventional FIFA structures, while the women’s side now exists through an exceptional arrangement outside the control of the country’s own football authorities.

In effect, FIFA has acknowledged that the normal rules no longer function in Afghanistan’s case.

There are historical precedents for displaced or stateless teams in football and Olympic competition, but this situation is unusually sensitive because it directly bypasses the authority of a FIFA-recognised national federation. That helps explain why campaigners have spent years arguing the case publicly and why the breakthrough has attracted attention well beyond football itself.

It also arrives at a moment when women’s sport has become increasingly politicised internationally, particularly in relation to authoritarian governments and questions of representation.

The Afghan players themselves, though, often return to simpler language.

Relief. Validation. Recognition.

Many had feared the team would disappear entirely after 2021.

Instead, nearly five years later, it will return to the international stage under the Afghan name – even if almost none of its players can safely return to the country they represent.

For FIFA, the decision is likely to be remembered as one of the most politically consequential governance interventions in the organisation’s modern history.

After years in exile, Afghanistan’s women footballers finally have a national team again.

The blackout of 28 April 2025, which affected an estimated 36 million people across the Iberian Peninsula and spilled into neighbouring regions of France, remains one of the most serious infrastructure failures in recent European history. Trains stopped, traffic systems failed and entire cities were left without power for hours. Yet, as reporting by El País journalists Ana Fuentes, Carmen Monforte and Verónica Figueroa makes clear, the central questions raised on that day – what caused the collapse, and who is accountable – remain unresolved a year on.

What is clearer now than it was then is the nature of the failure itself. This was not a simple shortage of electricity, nor a single point of breakdown. It was, rather, a cascading systems failure triggered by instability in the grid – specifically, a surge in voltage that the system could not absorb.

In the minutes leading up to the collapse, oscillations in power and frequency spread through the Iberian network. Voltage rose sharply. Parts of the system began to disconnect. Within seconds, that instability cascaded into a full system collapse.

Crucially, this was not, as was widely suggested at the time, a failure of renewable energy itself. Multiple analyses – including the final report by European grid operators – point instead to a failure of voltage control, coordination and system design in a grid increasingly reliant on renewable generation but not yet fully adapted to it.

That distinction matters.

Spain’s energy system, by European standards, is in many ways a success story. Renewable sources account for well over half of electricity generation, with wind and solar forming a substantial share. This has helped keep electricity prices relatively competitive compared with many European peers, even in the turbulent years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But systems that are efficient are not necessarily resilient.

At the time of the blackout, the grid was operating with relatively low levels of synchronous generation – the gas, nuclear and hydro plants that provide inertia and stabilise voltage. Renewable sources, while abundant, do not inherently provide that same stabilising effect. The result was a system with insufficient buffering capacity when disturbances began.

Once voltage began to spike, the system had no effective way to absorb the shock.

What followed was not overload, but loss of control.

Subsequent investigations have reinforced this picture. The blackout is now widely understood as the product of multiple interacting failures – oscillations, gaps in voltage regulation, insufficient stabilising generation and coordination failures across the system.

More recent reporting suggests that even conventional power plants struggled to maintain voltage stability in those critical moments, while regulatory investigations have widened to include multiple energy firms over potential failures to comply with grid rules.

In short: this was a systemic failure, not a single mistake.

And yet, one year on, responsibility remains diffuse.

The blackout has hardened into an institutional dispute between the main actors in Spain’s energy system: the grid operator Red Eléctrica, major utilities and regulators. Each has advanced its own version of events. Investigations continue. Sanctions are being considered. But no definitive conclusion has emerged.

From Lisbon, El País correspondent Verónica Figueroa underscores the cross-border nature of the crisis. Portugal, sharing the same interconnected grid as Spain, experienced parallel disruption – as did parts of southern France – underlining the extent to which this is not a national system but a shared European infrastructure.

In the immediate aftermath, there were signs of hesitation in Portugal about reliance on Spanish electricity. But that quickly gave way to economic reality. Spain remains one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the region, and cutting off that supply would have come at a significant cost. Interconnection resumed, because it had to.

For consumers and businesses, the consequences have been tangible: higher costs, uncertain compensation and a lingering sense that something fundamental has not been resolved.

But for those who lived through the blackout, the experience was less about systems than about their sudden absence.

In Barcelona, it unfolded in stages. I woke up late that day to find that my phone had no signal – the first sign that something was off. Then the electricity. Lights would not turn on. Nothing worked.

I went out into the city, trying to make sense of it. I walked from bar to bar looking for somewhere with Wi-Fi, somewhere that might have a connection to the outside world. I did find one place that was open – a bar I used to go to when I was an Erasmus student, a place I had not set foot in since around 2010 – but the internet was down, and they were only accepting cash. I am typically not somebody who carries cash, but by chance I had a tenner in my wallet that day. It was just enough. Without it, I would not have been able to pay for anything at all. Card payments were not working anywhere. ATMs were out. If you did not have cash on you, you were screwed.

It was a strange, slow-moving kind of dislocation. Not panic, just a gradual realisation that all the systems you rely on, without thinking about them, had simply collapsed.

In those early hours, when information was scarce and speculation filled the gap, my mind went in a familiar direction. Could this have been Russia? Typical grey zone activity?

It would have been an easy conclusion to reach.

But it was wrong.

There was no evidence of sabotage, no cyberattack, no external trigger. What happened was internal: a system pushed beyond its limits, revealing weaknesses that had been building for some time.

And yet, as the hours passed, something else began to take shape.

Across Spain – and in Portugal too – the blackout became, unexpectedly, a social moment. It was, as it happened, a beautiful day. People drifted into the streets. Terraces filled. Cash circulated where cards could not. Beer flowed – not always cold, but enthusiastically consumed nonetheless.

Cities that had briefly stalled began, in a different way, to come alive.

Eventually, though, the limits reasserted themselves. With no internet, I spent part of the afternoon listening to podcasts I already had downloaded, until my phone battery gave out – particularly on an iPhone SE, whose battery, in my experience, struggles compared with similarly priced Android models. At that point, the digital world simply dropped away.

And so the day narrowed into something older still.

I picked up a copy of Brendan Simms’s Unfinest Hour, a study of the Bosnian war in the 1990s and of the failure of European powers – above all Britain and Germany – to confront that crisis. It is, in part, an account of hesitation, of political evasion, of governments wringing their hands and asking what could possibly be done, while genocide unfolded on Europe’s doorstep, most infamously at Srebrenica, until the United States stepped in and forced a resolution.

I read on my terrace as the afternoon wore on, until it grew dark and I could no longer see the page. Then I went back out into the city in search of somewhere – anywhere – with light, power or connection.

Three decades on, the setting is different but the underlying dynamic feels uncomfortably familiar. In Ukraine, once again, a European crisis has exposed the limits of European coordination and resolve. And once again, Europe finds itself heavily dependent on the United States – a partner that is no longer acting with the same clarity or sense of responsibility it did in the 1990s.

The blackout revealed something smaller, but structurally similar.

One year on, the lights are back on. The system is more cautious, more expensive, arguably more robust.

But the deeper questions remain.

Not just what failed – but how responsibility is structured in systems where failure is inevitable.

The blackout did not answer those questions.

One year on, neither has anything else.

The increase marks the strongest March on record in comparable data going back to 2001, when Spain began compiling these Social Security employment statistics in their current form, while unemployment fell by 22,934 to around 2.42 million, the lowest level for that month in 18 years, since the early phase of the global financial crisis. Compared with a year earlier, employment has risen by 524,501, maintaining a robust pace of growth across the economy.

The figures point to a labour market that continues to show strong momentum in the face of mounting global pressures. For now, the escalation of the United States–Israel–Iran conflict and its wider economic repercussions, particularly through higher energy prices, has yet to make a discernible impact on employment growth. Spain’s energy mix offers some insulation: renewable sources account for roughly half of electricity generation, reducing exposure to fossil fuel volatility. Over a longer horizon, the system has added close to two million workers in less than two years, according to government data cited by ministers.

The data were released under unusual circumstances after Pedro Sánchez announced the milestone early, publishing the seasonally adjusted figure on X at 08:22, breaking with the customary embargo that holds until 09:00. The early release drew attention to the symbolic crossing of the 22 million threshold, although the unadjusted monthly figure remains the standard reference for short-term comparisons.

Part of the strength in March reflects the timing of Easter, which this year fell across late March and early April, bringing forward hiring in sectors tied to tourism and hospitality. As a result, some of the gains recorded in March would typically have appeared in April. Even allowing for this effect, however, the scale of job creation remains historically strong.

As expected, the hospitality sector led employment growth, accounting for roughly 80,000 new registrations, with hiring accelerating ahead of the spring tourist season. Construction and administrative services also posted solid gains, adding around 17,000–19,000 jobs each, while healthcare and industry recorded more moderate increases, adding 8,368 and 7,353 jobs respectively. Employment also rose across retail, leisure and technical activities, each contributing several thousand additional workers.

Growth was also evident among the self-employed, with their numbers rising by around 15,000 in March, one of the strongest increases in recent months. Within this, newer categories of work continue to expand. A recently defined segment covering content creation and digital media activity – including influencers and online platform-based work – has now grown to more than 100,000 registered workers, reflecting a gradual shift in the structure of employment towards more digitally-driven forms of self-employment.

The expansion was particularly pronounced in regions most exposed to seasonal tourism. Andalusia and the Balearic Islands recorded the strongest increases in employment, while unemployment fell sharply in Andalusia, with 8,836 fewer unemployed, and in Catalonia, with 3,777 fewer. The Valencia region also saw a notable decline. By contrast, the Canary Islands, where the peak tourist season falls in winter rather than spring, showed a more muted performance in March, reflecting a different seasonal pattern.

In Catalonia, the latest data carry additional significance. The region reached 3.882 million people on the Social Security payroll, narrowly surpassing Madrid (3.879 million) and regaining its position as the region with the highest level of registered employment, reversing a recent trend in which the capital had edged ahead.

The labour market expansion is also visible across demographic groups. Women accounted for 54.6 per cent of new jobs, and the total number of women in employment reached a record around 10.4 million. Foreign workers represented 35.3 per cent of new registrations, highlighting the growing role of migration in sustaining labour supply.

Unemployment fell across most sectors, led by services, where the number of registered jobseekers declined by 18,852. Construction and industry also saw reductions, while agriculture recorded a small increase in unemployment, and the number of people entering the labour market for the first time – including many younger workers and recent migrants – rose by 2,881. This increase is generally interpreted by economists, according to reporting in El País, as a sign of a more dynamic labour market, drawing in new participants rather than reflecting weakened demand.

On an annual basis, unemployment has fallen by around 160,000 people, a drop of just over 6 per cent, while seasonally adjusted figures also point to a continued downward trend.

The breakdown of categories of new employment remains broadly stable, though with some shifts in contract types. Total hiring rose by 17 per cent compared with February and 12 per cent year-on-year, with permanent contracts accounting for around 44 per cent of the total. Within this category, full-time contracts remain the largest share, though more flexible arrangements – including part-time and discontinuous contracts – are growing at a faster pace.

In a statement, Social Security Minister Elma Saiz said the figures reflected sustained momentum in the labour market. “In less than two years, we have added two million people in employment,” she said, describing the data as “very positive” and pointing to the series of record highs, including the increase in female employment.

Taken together, the March figures reinforce a picture of a labour market that continues to expand at a rapid scale, supported by services activity and seasonal demand, while also drawing in new workers from abroad and from within Spain. The underlying trend – as captured in the seasonally adjusted data – suggests that employment growth remains resilient, even as external risks gather.

La Sexta’s El Intermedio reacts to Pedro Sánchez’s announcement of the 22 million milestone.

Whether that resilience can be maintained in the face of rising energy costs and broader global uncertainty remains an open question. For now, however, the data point to an economy still generating jobs at a pace sufficient to push employment to new highs while bringing unemployment down to levels not seen since before the financial crash, which hit Spain particularly hard, with overall unemployment peaking above 26 per cent and youth unemployment exceeding 50 per cent at its height.

By comparison, labour market trends across other major economies have been more subdued. In Germany, employment growth has been effectively flat in recent months, with annual increases of well below 1 per cent, reflecting broader industrial weakness. In the United Kingdom, employment has also shown limited momentum, with growth of around 0.5–1 per cent year-on-year, alongside a continued decline in vacancies from post-pandemic highs.

In the United States, employment growth has remained positive but has moderated, with recent monthly gains translating into annual employment growth of around 1.5–2 per cent, and the unemployment rate holding at close to 4 per cent. Taken together, the contrast underscores the relative strength of Spain’s current expansion, where employment growth – at roughly 2.5 per cent year-on-year – remains stronger and more broadly based than in several comparable advanced economies.

It seems to me that Apple’s level of customer service has improved again after having degraded somewhat in the past decade plus or so.

By way of context, Apple’s EMEA (European, Middle East, and Africa) headquarters is in my home city of Cork, and I’ve worked for Apple several times over the years - everything from the factory floor, as it started life as a humble manufacturing facility in 1980, the year before I was born, very much reflecting where Ireland was as an economy at the time - through various positions later on, as it grew into the corporate EMEA HQ behemoth that it is today, to other incarnations later on. My earlier experiences working for Apple were always very hugely positive. There was a strong emphasis on going above and beyond for customers, and they genuinely encouraged pride in your work; they made me feel deeply fulfilled by going the extra mile and positively encouraging that; always taking ownership, never shirking responsibility, no passing of the buck — no matter who may or may not have ballsed it all up beforehand.

My last experience working for Apple was in 2015, in a remote-based technical support role for iPhones and iPads — and yes, we were doing remote work before it was fashionable. By that point, Apple had expanded its Cork campus so much that there simply wasn’t enough office space, and they were also renting very expensive spaces in the city centre as well; those already at capacity too.

During that role, however, we were explicitly told never to ask customers at the end of a call whether there was anything else we could help them with, because customers would ‘always come up with something else’. I found this very dispiriting, especially given my previous experiences with Apple as an employee. Even when the work itself wasn’t glamorous, Apple had always made you feel a sense of pride and care in how you treated customers, so that instruction really didn’t sit well with me.

This exchange I’ve had with an Apple customer service agent just now actually heartened me. I even noted the fact that they did ask ‘that’ question, and their response was excellent - they were genuinely helpful and engaged.

It reassures me both as someone who has worked for Apple and as a customer. Apple’s customer service, when it’s done properly, really is top notch, and seeing it move back in that direction after having felt it downgrade in the past is genuinely encouraging.

I’ve also worked for Amazon Technical Support in Cork, and while they were good to work for, they call themselves the ‘most customer-centric company in the world’. They ain’t that, dawg, they ain’t that. The audacity!

And my experience dealing with and working for Amazon customer support and technical support in the interim period is that they are very far indeed from ‘the customer-centric company in the world’— their own branding.

You have to kick their arse and - usually, inevitably - demand to speak to a supervisor. You get the desired result in the end, but they have some nerve calling themselves the ‘most customer-centric’ company. They are a monumental pain in the hoop to deal with, and getting anything from them seems to require the sort of experience and insider knowledge one only gets from having worked in technical and customer support. Most people would just give up or lose heart. But as I said, you kick their rear end hard enough, you demand to speak to a higher up, you do get the appropriate result in the end, but it shouldn’t be this way.

This is simply not good enough. And to have the nerve to call themselves the most customer-centric company out here, this must be some sort of a sick joke.

Spare me. Lawd have mercy!

During this exchange with the Apple customer service agent, I was initially offered a callback time for tomorrow that reflected CET Spain opening hours. In the past, dealing with Apple support, without ever having requested or arranged it beforehand, I have om occasion ended up speaking with an agent in Cork - Cork accent and all, biy! - purely because I was speaking English.

When I saw the opening hours offered for the callback, I said, “Hang on a second - could I possibly speak with somebody from your Cork office?” They’re open later, and they are, of course, fluent English speakers (mostly) rather than second-language speakers. It’s not that I’m not fluent in Spanish - I am - but when it comes to technical matters, jargon and the like, it can be tricky in Spanish. It can also be tricky, not always but often, for Spanish agents to deal with the precise English technical terminology that an exchange like this requires.

The agent was only too happy to oblige. They offered me a much later callback time, and the callback will be from someone in my home city. Excellent customer service, 10 out of 10. Apple might have lost its mojo a little, based on my past experience, but they are sooooo back, baby. And yes, I’m a sucker for buying Apple products and paying well over the odds - I’m a “bad European... bad!”. Etc, etc. We are where we are.

I’d have included more of this agent’s superb customer service below this screenshot above, but they gave their name away so I don’t feel comfortable doing so.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve worked several times for Apple. They are a huge employer in my home city. At the last verifiable count I could find, something in the region of seven or eight thousand people work for Apple in Cork — in a city of roughly a quarter of a million. That doesn’t even account for the wider hinterland, with people commuting in from well beyond the city limits, which is entirely normal given our intolerable housing crisis — and I’m not even sure whether that figure includes the remote workers now scattered across Ireland. I doubt that heavily.

At one point, I was considering writing an article about how I’d ‘broken up with America’ – economically, culturally, politically, emotionally – but hadn’t quite broken the Apple habit, the multinational impact. This was about six months ago, before things deteriorated even further. Even then, there were the threats of tariffs, then the tariffs themselves, the bullying behaviour towards Europe, the unbridled contempt shown by Trump and his administration. Since then, that posture has only become more aggressive and more grotesque.

But I want to say something that sits alongside that criticism, and it feels appropriate to append it here.

In my experience, multinational American companies in Ireland – Apple included – have been excellent employers. The benefits are really good. The conditions are not bad. At all. And in many cases, the opportunities for progression are tremendous (I sometimes regret going to university as a mature student and not sticking to that game).

Even Amazon, despite everything I’ve said about them from a customer’s point of view, were actually quite good to work for. And I’m genuinely grateful for all of that. These companies form a huge part of the Irish economy, and for many people they’ve provided stability, opportunity, and a real sense of progression.

Which brings us to the bigger picture — and the current transatlantic mess.

No one really knows what happens next between the European Union, Brexit Britain and the United States. We’ve already seen explicit counter-threats from Europe itself — including what has been described, somewhat theatrically, as the EU’s ‘trade bazooka’ — alongside the whole Greenland fiasco and the European troop deployments.

Trump remains stuck mentally in the 1980s, obsessed with goods, tariffs, and crude trade imbalances. Yes, the EU runs a large surplus with the US on goods – but the second you look at services, the picture flips (almoat) entirely. Services are where the US truly excels, and America runs a healthy services trade surplus with Europe.

And crucially: Trump’s tariffs only apply to goods.

Services? His backers, either explicitly financially, or in other ways — these people have his ear; a direct line. They serve to shape his policies. And many of them actively interfere in our politics.

Let these bastards suffer. Let them burn.

If Europe wanted to retaliate properly, we could. Services are the obvious pressure point. Would that hurt us? Yes. Would it hurt Ireland in particular? Absolutely. But as a European – and as someone increasingly sick of being condescended to, insulted, and spoken to in the most appalling bad faith by the current US regime – I’m willing to accept the collateral damage. At some point, you have to stand up to bullies.

Nobody wins a trade war. Least of all smaller countries, with open economies, such as my native land. But perpetual submission isn’t cost-free either. We’re already diversifying. The Mercosur deal may be tied up in legal scrutiny for now, but the India trade agreement has just been signed — “the mother of all deals”, as Ursula von der Leyen put it, in rather Trumpian terms.

As for Trump himself, and his sudden interest in cutting a deal with India? And after selectively slapping them with massive tariffs for importing Russian oil? It looks suspiciously like a reaction to that.

And, of course, we all know the acronym by now: TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out. Greenland is only the latest example. I could list others, but we’d be here all day.

So yes, to end on a positive note, it really is good to see Apple offering genuinely excellent customer service again. After my last experience working for them, when we were explicitly told never to ask ‘that question’ – never to ask whether there was anything else we could help with – this felt like a return to something better. Happier times.

These companies have been amazinbg for Ireland. It’s not all ‘leprechaun economics’ as the Paul Krugman once famously labelled it all, nor sheer financial chicanery, although there’s plenty of that too. This is part of the real economy. Apple opening a factory in Cork when they did– which later became their EMEA headquarters – is a neat illustration of how far the country has moved up the value chain in a single lifetime. My own.

I would very much like such a relationship with American companies to continue. But with an increasingly hostile Trump 2.0 regime, I’m no longer sure that it will. As the song goes, “there may be trouble ahead”.

And perhaps this is where I end. As I mentioned earlier, I’d been half-threatening - mostly to myself - to write an article about Ireland, and about my own personal relationship with US multinationals. I didn’t expect this piece to become quite so long, but I suppose that, in the end, that’s precisely what it’s turned into.

These companies have been genuinely great for Ireland, and I would never want to downplay that. But we seem to be entering a world of decoupling — of alliances fraying, of long-standing assumptions collapsing. A world in which Trump bends the knee to dictators of every stripe – left, right, Islamist, theocratic – whilst all the time shitting on his democratic allies, absolutely including some of America’s closest and most loyal ones.

So there you have it. Those are my thoughts. I hope, at the very least, that they come across as coherent.

As a final point, though — my experience in working for US and Canadian firms here in Spain has been very different. Yes, they absolutely do tolerate cigarette and coffee breaks — which is great as someone prone to both vices. But with regards to everything else? Conditions, and the like? Yeah. Not great, actually. Indeed, pretty bad.

I decided to fill my boots, as you can see here.

Alas, I did not make the time to dig out my collection of Diego Maradona biographies. His time at Napoli is very much something I’ve been meaning to write about ever since my fourth visit to that incredible city with its boundless, chaotic energy this week last year. I have the art good to go. My mother is going to post them over.

If I do that piece, I want to do it justice.

Rather, these were what I could readily and greedily snatch from by brother’s old bedroom. It’s a pity. I had time; I had space — much like the man himself always seemed to conjure up. I most certainly was not lacking in motive.

But I never quite got down to the deep storage.

Oh well. As Johnny Logan once lamented: “what’s another year?”

I’m pretty sure I have both of the Gabriel García Márquez ones and the Eduardo Galeano classic in the original Spanish back in Barcelona but - and please don’t shoot me here purists, I know, I know - anything that can get me spending more time on book reading this year is surely a win.

I do recall the translation of Love in the time of Cholera, being pretty decent, and as for the latter, how to even do the Uruguayan maestro’s prose justice?

I do also believe that it either has (as I type, I am past security in Dublin Airport’s Terminal 1; always choose Ryanair for short haul if you’ve got filthy habits such as your faithful correspondent, you can avail of this rather marvellous terrace) a photo either inside or outside the back cover of Hugo Chávez himself.

On this, of all weeks...

Frank O’Connor? One of Cork’s finest. Actually… I’d been meaning to share some short form video content on the relevant platforms about him and also to write (yes, yes…) a biographical article about this titan.

Making a mental note to move that up my my to-do list.

Next to Roy Keane, another of Cork’s very best (or, am I obliged to say the Northside’s here?) top row, second left.

Edward Lucas.

When people ask me nonsense like “How much are the Ukrainians paying you?”, “Why are you so obsessed with Russia?”, or accuse me of somehow hopping aboard some sort of bandwagon on 24 February, 2022 (or more readily apparent to most, a year or so ago when Meta suddenly relaxed its platforms’ community standards to make nice upon Trump’s second inauguration, pliantly ceasing to bury political content in their algorithms), I have to smile.

I finished that book all the way back in January 2009, some months after Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin ordered the invasion of my then-wife’s homeland. I remember the Orange Revolution and the same man’s subsequent attempt to economically strangle Ukraine for voting the “wrong” way, turning off the gas taps: energy blackmail in the depths of winter.

That was 2004. What he did then with the flick of a switch, he does now with daily drone and ballistic missile attacks (even Oreshniks now, I’ve learned, since I first started writing this).

He had his reasons for all of these actions, naturally. Just like every malignant ex always does.

I remember the massive, crippling DDoS attack on Estonia - an early and eager adopter of digitalisation - from when it happened in 2007. The Kremlin’s line at the time? Those Estonians? Oh yeah… quite literally “Nazis”.

Plus ça change…

I remember Boris Yeltsin’s self-coup against the Russian parliament in 1993, and the botched attempted one in the dog days of the Soviet Union in August 1991. I also remember the whole edifice of that state collapsing later that year. Granted, I was far too young to make sense any of this, but these are the sort of events that leave an impression on a young and inquisitive mind.

Indeed, no Irish person of my vintage will ever forget Yeltsin’s visit - or should we say, non-visit? - to our emerald isle back in 1994. Raise a glass if you were there too!

I started studying about the history of the Russian Empire all the way back in 1995, aged 13. My mother’s partner, the most delightful, erudite, educated, yet down-to-earth chap you’ll ever meet, warned me, when I picked up the book below: “I’d be careful there boy if I were you; read that and you might just turn into a communist.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I won’t labour the point, but while I outgrew communism in my early 20s, my interest in that vast land to the east never truly went away. People from there and its immediate vicinity - I’m sure many of them would hate that phrasing, but for want of a better expression - have come, gone and stayed in my life in the subsequent three decades or so.

Camus? Not my own. An inheritance from that very same man who warned me off looking into Marxism-Leninism all those years back. But I’ve been wanting to give this son of colonial French Algeria a go for a while now, and to be fair, he can’t be as much of a bastard as Éric Zemmour, non?

Tom Holland’s Persian Fire had the misfortune of coming into my life at about the same time as the attention economy had gone into overdrive, and I found it harder and harder to devote myself to entire tomes. It’s not that I’ve ever stopped consuming high quality history content — I haven’t. It’s just been primarily via the means of podcasts. Like Estonia and digitalisation, I got in on the ground floor there.

But couple attention span issues with the fact that I had become so fully consumed in the Roman, later Greco-Roman world - don’t say the ‘B’ word here - that taking a step back to what preceded it felt thoroughly alien and jarring. It left a sensation of being unmoored.

To round matters off here, we have the Meditations. I think it’s safe to say this isn’t going to be the best of translations, but then, how would I know anyway? When it comes to authors in languages I don’t understand - think everyone from Kafka to Dostoevsky - or had forgotten and was never much good at to begin with anyway - Guy de Maupassant, Simone de Beauvoir et al - I’ve bought a ton of Wordsworth editions in my time.

I’m sure the critics will groan but they helped me to expand my horizons further than my finances would have ever allowed and at a time when the internet wasn’t so ever-present in our lives — with the entire sum total of human knowledge merely a few clicks away.

I don’t want to go too far down the nostalgia route, because the benefits have been enormous, but there is something to be said for those days.

Just to go back to the point of translations, if we’re speaking strictly about living authors, then Haruki Murakami - another favourite of mine for most of my adult life - has apparently worked exclusively with Jay Rubin throughout his entire career, and it shows. The minimalistic style, the tone, the voice: it’s always there. You feel it.

Perhaps 15 years or so back, a friend of mine who worked for Planeta, the biggest publishing house in the Spanish-speaking world - who incidentally I would later go on to work for, they saved me from odd-jobbing in Madrid during the latter stages of the pandemic - presented me with a copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in Spanish after he visited their offices here in the Catalan capital. I have no doubt the translation was of the highest standard. But it was not not my Murakami, that of Rubin.

It just didn’t sit right with me.

And what are you, dear reader, reading currently? What will you read next?

As for myself - to the audible gasps of my Facebook audience, and perhaps more besides - I’m labouring through Tom Mutch’s The dogs of Mariupol. “Labouring” makes it sound dull — it’s anything but, and should be essential reading for many. But despite the considerable expense of getting a print copy here in Spain, that cursed attention economy has dragged me so far off course that I’ve learned an updated paperback edition is now imminent and I probably ought to have waited it out.

Oh, well.

And next?

There are so many on my list, but I think it would be rude not get around to my dear friend Prateek Dasgupta’s debut history work Forgotten Footprints at some point. He truly kept that one under wraps, at least as far as I’m concerned. But to see him signing copies recently at the Kolkata Literary Festival, I was delighted for him!

Don’t just take it from from me, his Substack has been recommend by all manner of heavy hitters, so if ancient and steppe civilisations or pre-history are your sort of thing, you should definitely check him out.

Happy new year, and happy reading!

This is an issue where I must depart sharply with the leader of the Green Party of England & Wales, Zack Polanski, the Greens in my own country, Ireland, and the wider, EU-level Green movement.

As you will see here in explicit detail: I absolutely do have concerns. It's just that they are not the concerns such people routinely articulate.

We are taking about actual, painstakingly recorded artillery and drones attacks, fully-documented by Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and his underlings at this agency, upon that power plant.

They have been stated in public many times.

So yeah, it does go to show how such installations can be used as a weapon of war as a 'bargaining chip' as it were.

"We can do this to you. We have done this to you you. We *will* do this to you…. we are doing this to you.”

Russian drones (suspected, but in some cases, absolutely confirmed) have been recorded as flying in the vicinity of a wade range of civiilan, military, and indeed nuclear facilities in several Western European countries in recent times — this is in addition to the aleady accounted for and confirmed multiple and significant drone incursions in many such countries; many more, to the east; including non-aligned Moldova just this past week week.

That's not to mention the MIG fighter jet incursions into Nato airspace..

But beyond that, in terms of environmentalism - an argument I fully fail to understand - sustainability etc: please, can someone please, likely, actually list me some good arguments against nuclear power, kindly?

Look how the Fukushima incident in Japan was handled. It was managed, properly, promptly. There was a great sense of both power and vertical (accurate, correct, timely…) information, and subsequent actions and reactions; all of which took place in a “high trust” society, with a functioning democracy.

Now, you only need to contrast this with the abysmal handling of Chornobyl in the dying days of the, somehow, ‘more open, more ‘free’ Soviet Union. Terrible and inaccurate information fed up the chain, because of fear: rather like the ‘SVO’/’SMO’/’Special Training Exercise’ currenttly taking place on the ‘territory of the Ukraine’, in its diastrous opening stages.

Chornobyl was something which, by the way, affected the rest of Europe materially and physically. Yes: we were far away from the nuclear fallout in Ireland. But I remember the “Chernobyl [sic] children” attending our summer camps and youth groups back then.

Many were fully orphaned, had lost both parents. Quite a few were going to die soon. The ‘lucky’ others they didn't fit either category? Just the most horrific levels of physical deformation and disability you could imagine.

Many of them were brought to Ireland by this borderline saint of a woman (alas, anti-nuclear power campaigner, but can you blame her?), Adi Roche.

Roche ran - and fared quite poorly - in the 1997 presidential elections: an almost wholly ceremonial role.

Of course, back then in my days in the early 90s... I was a child, not even yet a teenager.I had not yet to - though it was not hugely not afterwards, only a couple of years hence - pick up books on the history Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia/the USSR, but: all of that said, and said, as a sign of the times - what nationality were these poor kids?

Certainly, not Belarusians, Ukrainians, or anything else like that.

No.

No. They were all simply “Russians”. All of them.

As I've said, I do see some strategic and indeed military elements regarding the dangers of nuclear power plants and operations, and their vulnerabilies a fulll-scale, ‘total war,’with ‘plausible deniability’ being employed as the rule, and not the exception.

But beyond that, I just don't see the downsides.

And my home county of Ireland is allergic to this to the point where the Sellafield nuclear reactor, just across the sea in Britain, has never ceased to be a live issue in my 30 years-plus of devouring news media.

"Muh most radioactivae are in the world….”. they say about the Irish Sea on account of this. “OMG! We're all gonna die”, etc, repeat ad nauseam.

As Elton John once sang:

Keep on keepin' on

Also, I've just published a pretty spectacular rant by Rossiya-1 television propagandist Vladimir Solovyov as a note where he threatened - amongst many other things - that Russia will "wipe the US off the map and drown it in a radioactive tsunami".

You won't want to miss that one. I had already published it to my Instagram earlier. Do give me a follow there too if you want more up-to-date daily content on Europe from the perspective of an Irishman living in Spain, but be forewarned — things do get... a little bit silly over there. But then, with all that's going on the world right now, we could surely all do with a dose of levity.

Let's start with the daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets: "The US President's attempt to end the conflict on his own terms was a dismal failure. Trump received from Putin, albeit extremely politely, and stretched out over time, a complete slap down. This a 'medical fact' that cannot be hidden or obscured. The US leader looks like a loser. For him, this is totally unacceptable."

Meanwhile, over in Kommersant: “The latest statements from the White House chief, with his unusually harsh words about Vladimir Putin, and his confirmation that military assistance to Ukraine will resume has brought to an end the period of positive US-Russian dialogue."

The once pro-Western - he was the first Russian director of the Carnegie Moscow Center - but now firmly Putinist commentator Dmitri Trenin, also wrote in Kommersant:

"The conflict will not end in 2025. Nor will it end when hostilities in Ukraine finally subside. This is because the struggle is not really about Ukraine at all.

"This war will be long. And the United States – with or without Trump – will remain our adversary. The outcome will determine not only the fate of Ukraine, but the future of Russia itself."

"What we are witnessing is an indirect war by the West on Russia – part of a much broader World War. The West is fighting to maintain its dominance. And Russia, in self-defence, is asserting its sovereign right to its very existence, on its own terms.

The existential tones in which Trenin speaks here are in keeping with the Kremlin's own internal narrative about the "Special Military Operation".

Of course, it’s worth repeating that it was Russia who launched the full-scale scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, deepening the conflict which it began back in 2014. The West did not invade or attack Russia. The West is not invading Russia's maritime borders, or its air space, which happened yet again as recently as today when a Russian drone crashed in Lithuania.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes: "The West will ratchet up the pressure on Russia. Washington and Brussels have decided to talk to Russia's leadership in a different manner."

In Izvestia, Oleg Karpovich of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy says: "If [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz and the 'Coalition of the Willing' are serious about laying down the gauntlet to us, as their latest efforts to pump Kyiv full of weapons suggest, then we needs to mobilise all our forces to repel our opponents. Not only through conventional means, but also through hybrid methods.

A curious way of putting things, to say the least. One could argue that Russia has been engaged in a hybrid war with the West for at least 19 years now — ever since defector Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London in 2006 via a dose of the radioactive substance polonium-210.

The following year, Russia launched a crippling cyber attack on ex-Soviet Republic Estonia. This was especially damaging because the small Baltic nation was already trailblazer in digitalisation. Moscow had been irked by the removal of Soviet-era, Red Army monuments. At the time, their propaganda machine went into overdrive, labelling the Estonians as "Nazis".

Perhaps this all sounds familiar.

Karpovich continued: "Our opponents are still hoping to undermine the stability and unity of Russian society, and destabilise the situation in our country. Our response should involve symmetrical steps with consequences that will leave them struggling for a long time to come, as well as an unprecedented consolidation of Russian society.

"Some people in our country were expecting gifts from Trump, and let their guard down. But life has shown us that we need to remain vigilant to the very end. Only once the German Chancellor and others of his ilk understand what a real hybrid war against Russia looks like can we hope for genuine diplomacy that brings results."

I really wanted to get my teeth into this piece a bit more, to relay its contents in more depth, but the clock is my enemy here. But here's a link, if you don't understand Russian you can feed it through through a translation service. Although there's a character limit on the free version, I strongly recommend DeepL above all others. I can vouch for it in terms of the languages I'm most proficient at.

I'm eternally gratefully to the BBC's man in Moscow, who guide me in a lot of of interesting directions with the internal Russian written media scene. I strongly recommend you follow him on X. He's one of the few Western journalists remaining in Russia, where he's been since the dog days of the Soviet Union. He retains great access, and his presence is still tolerated. For now.

Beyond that, I would like to express my continued indebtedness to my Bulgarian colleague Kai E. Iliev who is a constant source of assistance in helping me skirt the limits of my still rather rudimentary Russian when it comes to navigating the Russian media space. You should also also follow him on X. Not only is a veritable polyglot hive of information on events behind the former Iron Curtain, and Europe more broadly, he's also a pretty damn handy football journalist to boot, which is how our paths first crossed many moons ago.

Also Ireland, during a never-ending, always-worsening housing crisis: record homelessness levels, now more than 15,000 people, including 4,658 children.

Housing crises is a topic I've been looking into for some time now. Back home in Ireland, here in Spain, across Europe, as well places such as Canada and Australia — the latter two, ironically, being very popular destinations for Irish people.

For all the talk of the situation in the United States,  the raw numbers say things are a lot better over there than in all of those other places I've mentioned.

But admittedly, I haven't dug as deep under the bonnet with regards to the US, and basic economic data rarely tallies with the real lives of ordinary folk there. If it did, Donald Trump wouldn't be back in office.

The raw numbers, however, also tell us that Ireland is one of the richest countries on the planet - this remains true when you substitute GDP with GNI; an important measure that corrects to a certain degree the distorting effects of foreign capital blows - and that Spain has a "miracle economy".

And, yet... many people in both of those countries simply are not feeling it. You don't have to look too far to find such opinions on Irish social media. Meanwhile, in a recent, glowing YouTube video about the Spanish boom, the American geopolitical author Peter Zeihan - never a man to stick rigidly to his own areas of expertise - got absolutely roasted in the comments by enraged Spaniards.

We could tie both countries together quite neatly with a recent discussion on Irish economist, broadcaster and author David McWilliams' podcast on the situation here in Spain with my fellow Corkonian Joe Haslam, the Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program at the IE Business School in Madrid, a globally renowned private university.

These are just some of my preliminary thoughts, heavily centred upon Ireland, sparked through some discussion on social media today and media I've been consuming over the past few days.

It's far from exhaustive, nor is intended to be.

But, in fact, it's a topic I've been exchanging my thoughts about in private with numerous people in many countries, and researching for a very long time now.

I will eventually bring it all together in a long form piece. What's been exercising me above all is the situation with regard to housing scarcity and how it's fuelling both anti-immigrant and far right sentiment.

This is especially true of Ireland, where people thought we were immune to this sort of thing. Here in Spain, it's a little more nuanced, with even the far right Vox party being incredibly open to at least Latin American immigration.

Yes, they have their own reasons - an imperialist mindset, and they would like the votes of Latin Americans moving here - but in any discussion about the nexus between housing and immigration here, we can't escape the fact that arrivals from the New World are the driving force behind Spain's current population growth.

To go back to the Irish catastrophe though, and before anybody - looking at the North Americans in my audience here in particular -  jumps in and says, well, yes, homelessness is driven primarily by addiction and mental health issues:

Yes, of course that all factors into homelessness. There will always be some unfortunate people stuck on the streets - or at the minimum, shelters - because of their conditions and resultantly chaotic, disordered lives

But it simply is not even close to being an adequate explanation for this massive spike in homelessness in the last decade, including a great many economically active people.

All of this, in an exceptionally wealthy country — with the government sitting on a pile of cash. Let's see how Donald Trump's attempts to blow up the global trade system change this, but the fiscal story in Ireland is one of record tax take after record tax take, driven by corporation tax receipts which seem to reliably come in well above government projections every single year

When you walk around Cork city centre, my hometown, you see derelict housing and buildings that could be readily converted into housing everywhere.

And the situation has only gotten worse in the six years since I left. A September 2023 Central Statistics Office report said there were some 17,000 vacant dwelling in Cork; 5,061 in the city, and a further 11,994 in the county.

Cork is not unique in this regard, but it is by far the most extreme case in Ireland. Even America's paper of record, the New York Times wrote about the situation there last year.

The NYT even went so far as to say Cork is right up there at the top globally when it comes to this sort of urban blight and social vandalism.

As an aside, Portugal - where I've spent a lot of time over the years, and where there's also an acute housing crisis - also has mass dereliction, both in major and medium-sized cities.

In Porto, a city I'm intimately familiar with, the situation is especially pronounced: something like 20% of the buildings in the city centre lie vacant — 20,000 across the city as a whole.

Nationwide, according to a report last December, homelessness rates had shot up by 22% in the previous year.

No doubt, the housing situation was on Portuguese voters’ minds when they went to the polls in general election on 18 May. An aside within an aside — the leader of the far right Chega party, André Ventura, is a fellow almunus of University College Cork, where he completed his PhD in 2013.

But yes, going back to Ireland again.

To put it bluntly, the massive failures of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - who have led every government since the foundation of the State more than 100 years ago - and especially the policies pursued during the Great Recession - including opening the doors to vulture funds - are the root cause of this problem in Ireland.

Those institutional investors were brought in to prevent house prices collapsing even further than they already had. Truly, it's a poisoned chalice we've been bequeathed, with average house prices now at an all time high.

But all of that being the case — yes, of course immigration adds to this problem. I absolutely include myself here in Barcelona here too, I'm one more body in a saturated market.

“Without decent housing we can't learn!!!” — a school in Barcelona's Raval district this week

But immigrants didn't create the policy failings that have led to this mess. Neither here in Spain, nor in Ireland.

And here's a crucial figure when it comes to my native land:

Approximately 20% of people born in Ireland now reside abroad. That's the highest percentage in the entire OECD.

After seeing trends reverse during the previous Celtic Tiger boom, after the population had decreased in every census from 1841 - right before the famine - to 1991, we have now quite literally gone back to the dark old days of mass emigration.

And we can't vote for change. Unlike some 151 other countries around the world which allow their citizens abroad to vote in some capacity or another, we lose our democratic voice completely the second we leave.

Last year, Ireland bucked the global trend of incumbent governments being thrown out by irate electorates and returned an unholy alliance of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to power once more.

The mere idea of those two parties, with their bitter rivalry going back to the Civil War, governing together in a coalition, if you'd told that to Irish people just six years ago, they'd probably have laughed you out of town.

So who's really to blame here?

If you ask me, this new Irish far right are missing the point entirely. Quite possibly deliberately, in the case of their leadership.

Why has Ireland, one of the richest countries on the planet, failed its people so badly that around one in five of the people born there have voted with their feet and left the country?

It's a national disgrace, truly a travesty of a mockery.

We often here about the problems of immigration, but emigration on that scale has all sorts of tangible and intangible costs. For one, it rips the heart of communities and families.

And of course, brain drain.

Irish is highly unusual in having both very high rates of emigration as we as immigration. This population churn is indicative of something being very broken there.

Incidentally — I don't count myself here at all. I'm an emigrant by choice. I'm living exactly where I've always wanted to live.

Had it not been for the Spanish newspaper I'd been working for in Barcelona in 2014 suddenly laying off our entire team, the terrible general labour market here at the time, and my refusing to take filthy Kremlin cash to write propaganda, I'd never have left here to begin with.

But that's not the case for many, possibly even most people who've left Ireland in recent times. Just look at any voxpop of Irish people in Australia.

But the housing situation means I couldn't go back even if I wanted to.

Anyway, I'm just throwing out some new headline data I came across today. New to me, at least.

As stated previously, I've been researching and discussing this mess in private correspondence for a very long time now.

Not just in Ireland either — in many countries. Absolutely including here in Spain.

The specifics differ widely. But it's a global issue.

But if we don't get this right - this most basic of human needs, shelter - then our politcs are only going to grow more toxic. Everywhere you look - certainly everywhere I've looked - the backlash and finger-pointing is already underway.

This also includes parts of the developing world in this new age of remote work, from Mexico City to Medellín. You can slot Portugal into this very category too, as a poor country by EU standards that has courted high-earning foreigners with its digital nomad and golden visa schemes.

Those are some very general thoughts. I could easily continue here for hours.

But I would prefer to continue with with my investigations and present a more comprehensive and cogent long form piece. I am constantly learning new details and sometimes they are very counter-intuituve.

I also feel like a bad person for recently chiding someone from the Netherlands (population: 17.9 million) online for them 'only' having a housing deficit of around 400,000 units compared to the Republic of Ireland's (population: 5.3 million) shortfall of between 212,000 and 256,000 homes.

But I do know one Dutchman who left a high-earning job in Dublin last year, fed up with paying extortionate rents to share substandard accommodation in our capital. He's already secured himself social housing back home.

Meanwhile, in Cork, the average wait time to secure social housing currently stands a fraction below ten years.

It's pretty incendiary stuff, much like the attacks themselves were.

Attacks took place at air facilities as far away as Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, and the Amur region in Siberia, close to the Mongolian border — over 8000km away from Ukraine.

The attacks targeted the Tu-95, and the Tu-22, as well as the Tu-1600 planes. Repairing them would be extremely challenging given the apparent state of damage in in the verified videos circulating, and replacing them is an impossibility — as these aircraft are no longer in production.

Tu-95 bombers were unleashing large-scale Kh-101 subsonic cruise missile attacks on Ukraine as recently as last week.

A-50s can detect air defense systems, help guide missiles strikes and coordinate targets for Russian fighter jets. Each unit costs an estimated $350 million.

All of this was accomplished with domestically-produced Ukrainian drones valued in the low hundreds of dollars each.

With all of that said, let's hear from our frustrated Russian soldier. Be advised — the language here is pretty industrial:

“So, my dear friends, after six hours of fucking around, I feel just fine. I got 300 points for the Russian Union of Martial Arts. 1 June is for the kids.

"Fuck. And here you are, bitch, the situation. Vladimir Ladimirovich, I'm reporting the situation verbally.

"Fucking hell, our strategists are fucked up. Fuck. 95th, 22nd.

"This bitch means that tomorrow there will be fucking faggot negotiations. I feel like they're fucking with you. We don't need any negotiations.

"They fucked us over today. They fucked us over today in Irkutsk. They showed their strength.

"They showed their strategy, that they are working. They spat in our faces again. They spat in the faces of our intelligence because we're not working.

"Our boys are fighting every day. Bitch, when one regiment dies. Fuck, most likely while fucking, because my comrade called recently and said that our regiment was wiped out in four days.

"A year ago, our comrade also said that their regiment was wiped out in nine days near Kleschi. Our losses are incomparable. Fuck, we've been fighting for four years, bitch.

"The government doesn't give a fuck. Vladimir Vladimirovich, fuck, my Shustin's friend is Ilyiev. Next to the White House, bitch, is the Azerbaijan bank.

"Fuck, they have openly started helping Ukraine, the very people who are fucking fighting against us. Many, I'll say it again, many heads of districts and regions are against the Special Military Operation. But I'm telling you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, it is fucked up.

"The country is fucked up. When this fucking Zilyabobyr sucked up. Fuck, look, there are young people next to them.

"He fired all the old ones. Fuck, so that there will be no connection with our old morons. With whom, bitch, they once slept in the same bunks.

"Fuck, that's it, fuck, that's it, bitch. They just fucked us over today. We're all cocksuckers.

"Fuck, he always taught us to strike first. We struck. Fuck.

"But they beat us every day. Fuck. Is there really no one around who can tell you the truth?

"Fuck, we're fucking tired, you bitch. The people already understand everything. Don't you fucking understand in intelligence or anywhere else, bitch, that it is fucked up completely?

"They're selling us out, betraying us, the bastards. They showed us that we're helpless. Fuck, it's Silyuanov, it's fucking Nabiullin who are to blame.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, they're fucking up our boys. The trenches are full of our dead people, our fighters, our people. Fuck, how much longer, bitch, can you take it?

"Fuck you, bitch. Faggots, gays and cocksuckers. Fuck, who sit in their offices and give fucking orders to our fucking commanders, who say, here's the order, but you don't have to carry out this shit because it's fucking shit.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich, here are the people. I am the voice of the people. I'm fucking tired.

"My hands are down after this. Something, bitch, has to be done. How can I fucking help?

"How can I fucking help if they think I'm an idiot? Many volunteers are considered idiots. And those people, bitch, who are district heads, governors for fucking justice, they're considered fools.

"Your surroundings consider you. These old faggots are the fucking youth who worked with them and they're fucking children. They consider you.

"Fuck, the old man has lost his mind. Vladimir Vladimirovich, fuck them. Vladimir Vladimirovich, hear us.

"Everything is fucked. It's over. My patience is gone.

"Fuck it, I can't take it anymore."

This account comes via the excellent The Eastern Border podcast, War in Ukraine episode 290: Spiderweb special, 3 June 2025.

Its host, Kristaps Andrejsons, made the following analogy, which also came to my mind — this is a textbook case of "Good Tsar/bad boyars".

The podcast in a great source for the feverish online 'Z' community world, but I'm going closer to the source material on Telegram too, these days.

I must have first become aware of Andrejson's podcast over a decade ago, back when it covered more general events in the post-Soviet space.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, that's become his central topic. You can find his articles in the likes of Foreign Policy magazine. Here's a Spotify link to the relevant episode for you to survey the full gamut of  'Z' reactions on the events of Sunday 1 June.

On Tuesday 3 June, the Ukrainians also attacked the 18km Kerch road and rail bridge from Russia to Crimea, which was personally opened in 2018 by Vladimir Putin, for the third time since the full-scale invasion occured.

This time, according to Ukraine's SBU security services, about 1,100kg of the equivalent in TNT in underwater explosives were placed on the support bases.

Three days on from Sunday's attacks on the air bases, and Vladimir Putin is nowhere to be seen in public, which is not at all uncommon during moments of national catastrophe. It's a pattern he's repeated over and over again throughout his 25 years of rule.

The Sunday attacks garnered a mere 30 seconds on main state television channel Rossiya-1's flagship news program on Sunday night.

[So... I originally sat down to write this on Saturday night. I went much further than this short little stub here, examining the American strategy towards the negotiation process (neocolonial in its treatment of Ukraine, amateur and out of its depth when it came towards Russia) and also had a look at Vladimir Putin's approach. I think he did quite a few things right at several points in fact, and I wanted to give credit where it was due.

It got quite late, so I called it a day.

Alas...

When I returned to my draft on Sunday, I discovered that Substack had eaten my homework. The entire text had disappeared, with just the title remaining. The text here below was composed elsewhere. I tried several things, and then suddenly... the entire post disappeared.

Substack are looking into this for me. It might be possible to retrieve it. But we could be talking several days here, if that's even possible. I'll either update this post of post a follow up if that's the case — that's if the news cycle hasn't rendered this all redundant.

The latest is that Putin, in his own highly disingenuous manner (putting all of the blame on Ukraine, as per usual) is extending an olive branch, saying he wants to restart talks. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has laid down the gauntlet and challenged Putin to meet him face to face.

I've borrowed the expression "negotiating without negotiating" in the headline here from political philosopher Vlad Vexler. While this whole duplicitous approach only became clear to some during the process - extremely late in the day for slow learners, such as Donald Trump  - Vexler anticipated this possibility and concluded it would be exactly Putin's strategy well in advance]

I have a take on the whole collapsed recent US-Russia negotiation process to end the war in Ukraine.

Hear me out here.

I think Vladimir Putin completely overplayed his hand in this whole process with Donald Trump.

Spectacularly so, actually.

Trump bent over backwards for him. He tried to stab Ukraine in the back and sell America's European allies out too.

A truly incredible, epochal offer.

Putin's long-term strategic goal has always been the end of Nato and the destruction of the transatlantic alliance.

What did Putin do?

Fixated upon the short to medium term stuff and completely missed the bigger picture; the prize being dangled right before his eyes.

He didn't budge a single inch from his original maximalist war, sorry, 'Special Military Operation' aims from the spring of 2022.

He's clearly far smarter than Trump. I think he's pretty clever, in fact. But he's no genius, either.

Basically, you've got two sides to Putin's character... Putin the gopnik, and Putin the silovik.

His gopnik instincts won out here.

Greetings!

I haven't written any articles in a while.

It's not the first time this has happened, but unlike in the past I can assure you it's been through no lack of inspiration.

A lot has been happening. I've had a lot on my mind.

I've started using the Substack Notes feature a little bit more as of late, but that's probably not the best place to keep up to date with me. I try to keep things strictly formal and professional there.

Instagram Stories and Threads are a better bet. You can find the links on my profile (my handle is @josephsbcn in both cases).

Some forewarnimg though — it's all a little bit chaotic in both places. I don't hold back. There's also a lot of irony behind what I post there, so please don't everything I share literally, or as an endorsement.

I'm also on BlueSky - again, same handle - but I don't use it much.

Anyway — the reason I haven't written any articles recently is because my computer is broken. Getting it repaired is pretty damned expensive, even with Apple's extended warranty (yes, I'm a total sucker). Even now, it's been in the shop for a few weeks, already paid for, and they're still waiting for parts.

So — I'm going to go full on Generation Z. I'm going to start writing articles on my phone.

I have material in the bank already, so expect a flurry.

They're going to vary a little in terms of things like overall quality, length and depth. It's not so easy doing this stuff on the phone when you're a total Boomer like me.

Nonetheless…

I did say a while the overall focus of this newsletter was going to change, and that's been evident already with the last couple of posts. That same general topic is going to feature in some of the posts I've got planned here — but I have some other Western European topics too.

I also have a Spanish piece I really want to cover - bringing this newsletter back to its original focus - but it's not doable on the phone. It requires a lot of research. So that's going to have to wait.

“Volando vengo, volando voy…”

Russian media is nothing more than an extension of the State.

And that State is embodied by the person of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who has ruled the roost ever since 1999.

"We must understand that Trump has given us four years to prepare for what is inevitable — a big European war. It is crucial that we use this time wisely, consider everything carefully, and not think that any agreement that can be reached will last long.”

So said Solovyov on his hugely popular Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show on TV station Russia-1.

Russia is openly rubbishing the prospects for a lasting peace, and those who believe in it.

"So far, we're only hearing statements from the White House about how 'productive' [his emphasis] the conversation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy was, how close everyone is to peace, and so on and so forth.”

So said Mikhail Zvinchuk, head of the wildly popular ‘milblog’ Rybar Telegram channel, during an interview on state TV.

He continued:

“But we all understand that this is just verbal frippery, that finds no reflection on the battle field — except for those various stories where it's claimed our troops shot down 'seven drones' that they themselves launched.

“Well, the collective West seems to have bought into this whole circus, so fine.” — these were the words of ‘milblogger’ Mikhail Zvinchuk, head of the wildly popular Rybar Telegram channel, on state TV.

Milbloggers - military bloggers - who have amassed huge followings on messaging app Telegram, are in some cases the closest thing Russia has to unfiltered media.

However, many of major players are also tightly controlled by and adjacent to the regime, on whom they depend as their main source of material to communicate to their huge and enthusiastic followings.

However, neither are they immune to the draconian laws against freedom of speech - on top of all the incredibly harsh prior restrictions on public thought and opinion that have in place for years - introduced since the start of the 'special military operation’

Even the mere act of calling the 'special military operation' a 'war' has landed numerous people with many years in prison.

In March 2023, Dmitry Ivanov, a 23-year old student activist received an eight-and-a-half year sentence for calling the invasion a “war” on social media posts.

Amusingly, there were even calls for Putin himself to face prosecution in December 2022 when he inadvertently labelled the conflict as a ‘war’.

Just this past week, Alexander Skobov, a 67-year old veteran Soviet-era dissident who was criminally charged during the days of the USSR and was twice confined to a psychiatric hospital for his pro-democracy activism under the communist government received a 16 year prison sentence for a Telegram post resisting Putin’s regime.

During his closing statement after his appeal was denied he said: “I am the accuser here —I accuse Putin’s corpse‑stinking clique.”

Skobov refused to leave Russia when had the chance in 2022, when so many others did, choosing instead to remain and continue the struggle.

Scores of Western YouTubers in Russia - including conservative and pro-Putin influencers, some of whom have even moved there - have also been arrested and even sentenced to prison.

The popular Russian emigré YouTuber NFKRZ - real name Roman Abalin - covered one such case involving the American vlogger Sabbatical on this video several months ago.

Abalin left Russia immediately after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, for neighbouring Georgia - another country invaded by Russia as recently as August 2008, and another country whose territory - much like that of Ukraine and Moldova - Russia controls some 20% of.

Here’s his video made right after leaving Russia in February 20222.

After two full years in limbo the small Caucasian nation which allows visa-free entry to Russian citizens, but almost never approves residency permits for them, he was finally able to move to Western Europe a year ago and currently resides in Lisbon

Given events last year in Georgia where the ruling Georgian Dream party - whose strings are pulled by billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, a man featured in the Pandora Papers and who made his fortune in 1990s Russia - took a decidedly 180 degree pro-Kremlin turn and, following elections internationally criticised for multiple violations and for being neither free nor fair, and put EU accession on ice despite 85% of Georgians supporting it — Alabin clearly got out of there, too, just in the nick of time.

Although given the maximalist goals of Dmitry Medvedev - currently deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, but also formerly Prime Minster and even ‘President’, albeit a stand in for Putin due to term limits, back when there still remained the merest pretence of democratic niceties - during his feverish daily outbursts on X and in state media, maybe Lisbon isn’t so safe after all.

The enormously popular British travel vlogger Bald and Bankrupt, whose YouTube channel has a staggering 4.3 million subscribers, became a sensation for his heavy focus on Russia and the other countries of the former USSR.

‘Bald’ - real name Benjamin Rich - started learning Russian as a teenager, and showed the unvarnished realities of life in the former Eastern Bloc, always preferring to get off the beaten track, showing the weird and wonderful, but also, as he spoke to ordinary folk in a lingua franca, the innate humanity, humility, generosity and basic decency of people in those countries.

You couldn’t buy PR this good — although we know Russia has long tried to purchase cachet, such as with several greedy and feckless right wing American influencers last year.

Indeed, Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti, once tried to recruit me to cover Catalan separatism, and use it for propaganda value — for a lot less money than Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and co, admittedly.

A geopolitical topic they’ve relished meddling in for some time.

But that’s one for another day.

Rich’s viewers were inspired to go themselves to visit the places he’d shown them, and there was a boom in similar channels and online content — none of which came close to scaling the same heights as Rich.

But in the Autumn of 2022, whilst traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway, he was stopped and arrested in the Russian Far East. The authorities had combed through his channel and found a throwaway remark about Putin that was mildly critical.

Rich’s channel had always been highly apolitical.

After being held in detention for several days, he was finally escorted all the way west to the Estonian border, and told he was never welcome to come back to Russia.

He recorded that final trip to Russia, publishing it at the time, but appears to have deleted the video publicly.

All that remains on his website is a dead link to the video and the following words:

But back to these milbloggers.

Those who have been too zealous - the most famous case being that of notorious ultra-nationalist Igor Girkin, also known by his alias 'Strelkov' - have ended up in prison too for saying the war isn't being prosecuted brutally enough.

In The Hague in 2022 , Girkin was found guilty in absentia of the murder of 298 people — the passengers and crew of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

The Boeing jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine en route from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam on 17 July 2014 by Russian-controlled forces led by Girkin in the early stages of Russia's war there.

All of that was absolutely fine in Russia, apparently.

But in January 2024, then then 53-year old Girkin was sentenced to four years in prison for this criticisms that Russia was being too soft in its war in Ukraine.

He failed in his appeal in May later that year.

“I serve the fatherland,” Girkin was quoted as saying by independent news outlet Mediazona when asked by the judge whether he understood the ruling. The appeal was heard behind closed doors.

Even the most ardent ‘Z’ radicals, from the organised ultra-nationalists to your common or garden variety Vatniks, exist solely at the whim of Vladimir Vladimirovich in contemporary Russia.

It appears that Ukrainian electronic warfare along the frontline and counter measures have drastically reduced the efficacy of Russia’s hitherto devastating glide bombs.

What are glide bombs?

Glide bombs are cheap 'dumb' bombs with guidance systems attached, a very cost-effective way of using up old stocks, and have been raining down hell for about a year now on civilian and urban targets as well as Ukrainian defensive positions.

But now there is such saturation in terms of jamming across the frontlines that the threat has been massively reduced.

Glide bombs are satellite guided, using bombs that ordinarily had to be dropped directly above a target, but with a seeker head at the tip to pick up guidance information, and fins at the back to steer them with greater accuracy towards their target. They're not effective against moving targets but have been brutally effective against fixed ones.

In a war of improvisation and innovation, they had until now been a particularly effective weapon.

With Russian forces currently stalled outside Pokrovsk, it would appear that “the golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” according to Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force.

“The bombs are still flying,” Fighterbomber notes. According to the Ukrainian Centre for Defence Strategies, there are still KAB/UMPK attacks happening in Sumy, Chernihiv and Donetsk Oblasts in eastern and northern Ukraine.

That would be Russia attacking the very Russian-speakers in Russian-speaking regions that it purports to be 'saving'.

“But there’s a catch,” Fighterbomber continues. “All satellite-guided correction systems have left the chat.”

And for one very clear reason: Ukrainian radio jammers have become so effective, and so numerous, that they “saturate the front line.”

“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by electronic warfare,” Fighterbomber claimed.

Now, it might take as many as 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added.

While glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition - only costing around $25,000 each - the Sukhoi jets that launch them two or four at a time are certainly not cheap.

Using four jets at at a time to - maybe - hit a single target is pretty risky and inefficient for an air force that has only a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.

Only a year ago, Russian fighter place were firing about 100 glide bombs a day, right across the 1,300 kilometre front line.

Meanwhile, Russia attempts at jamming have proven far less effective, with their jammers being antiquated and inefficient.

Typical comparable Ukrainian munitions - largely French and American-made - have GPS guidance too, but also have backup inertial navigation systems - INS - which are fully self-contained and can't be jammed.

So, it would seem that these satellite-guided KAB and UMPK bombs, which can glide over 40 kilometres to their targets, and were considered a “miracle weapon” by Russian military analysts, no longer pose the grave threat they once did.

I think what converted me from being a habitual espresso (simple 'caffè' in Italian, ask for a coffee there, and that's what you'll get) drinker to someone who prefers milky coffee is probably meia de leite in Portugal: a bloody strong coffee with frothed milk. And genuinely, the coffee quality is really good in Portugal — certainly compared to the average here in Spain, where low-grade torrefacto and robusta are the norm, though a lot of bars in my neighbourhood in Barcelona do arabica, thankfully.

I could never understood how the likes Starbucks and Costa ever entered the market in Portugal around a decade or so ago. Not only is Portuguese coffee great, but it's very cheap too. I guess tourism has exploded there since, plus there’s the digital nomad, golden visa and international tech worker crowd, so if there wasn't a big market for generic global rubbish like that before, there probably is now.

Moving back to Ireland in 2016, flat white had become a thing, and that plugged the large meia de leite-shaped hole. Very similar overall. Just a lot pricier, as coffee culture is a new-fangled import in our traditionally tea-sipping society.

I still to this day don't know whether it's Australia or New Zealand we have to thank for that particular innovation, but a big thank you to our brothers and sisters down there where the toilet water flushes in reverse.

But back to Spain. As I said, the standard is for torrefacto preservation and robusta beans. Apparently, this is in part a legacy of the post-Civil War period where coffee was in short supply, and you needed a long-lasting preservation method, and it just sort of stuck. James Blick covered this well a few years back.

But if you can find a place with better quality coffee (and my local bar de confianza in Barcelona has Illy, prized by Italians, ditto my old haunt in Malasaña in Madrid where I went for breakfast over the weekend), then a good old café con leche becomes a really great fix. No need to go to any of these proliferating, expensive, hipster roaster spots.

In addition, these fancy places never seem to have a terrace. As a filthy smoker, there's no better combination than having a cigarette with coffee. Anyway, also as a smoker, and when not brewing copious amounts of short coffee in a moka pot at home, you really want something longer than an espresso.

All in all, this is what led me to do what I did when I went back to Italy for the first time in thirteen years last month, my first time in il bel paese since espresso ceased to be my go-to — breaking all the rules by ordering cappuccino after the 11.30am, breakfast time, cut-off. With an apology and great trepidation at first, but increasing relief after the initial time. I didn't get arrested. They didn't deport me to Albania. They didn't even tut, scowl or throw me a dirty look.

Maybe all those viral social media posts over the last few years were wrong.

Or maybe, if I'd gone down the coast to Nicotera, where the American biologist Ancel Keys 'discovered' the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s, or deepest, darkest Abruzzo, I'd have been met with a less favourable reaction.

But in the centre of a large city like Naples, it was fine.

Basically an espresso, café solo or a ristretto is now only something I'd want after a heavy meal to cut through the food.

Otherwise, I need something that's going to last me at least as long as my cigarette, rather than downed in an instant.

I'm also making good use of the Aeropress my brother bought me a few years ago at home, so my beloved set of Bialetti moka pots don't get much of a workout these days.

So there you have it. It was a good innings. I had a lot of Italian friends back home in Ireland, indeed I even once lived in all-Italian house in Cork. And when I first moved to Barcelona in 2009, perhaps half of my social circle was Italian (Italians always seem to be the biggest contingent on any Erasmus program, and also they're also the biggest immigrant community in Barcelona these days, some 40,000 all told).

But I've broken up with Italian coffee.

Vi prego di perdonarmi!

Give me good beans and a café con leche these day, on a terrace, and I'll be a very happy man.