This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 12, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

The U.S. government is attempting to use conspiracy charges to imprison organizers, just as it did in its war against the Black Panther Party, New Left, and other 1960s and ‘70s radicals through its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. Through this method, the Trump regime shares the goal of the Nixon administration of disrupting and attempting to destroy domestic opposition to its authoritarian agenda.

Two weeks after the September 2025 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memorandum created a category of “domestic terrorist” that, while lacking legal authority, broadly includes anyone who believes in things deemed as constituting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” political movements and organizations.

Following the recent use of conspiracy charges to successfully convict people in both the Prairieland case in Texas and the Spokane 3 case in Washington, 15 community members in the Twin Cities were indicted on June 16 for resisting the Trump administration’s December 2025 immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Metro Surge.” According to the indictment, all defendants are identified as “members and associates of … Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’),” which helped organize Minnesota’s resistance. That organization is now defunct in light of the arrests and revelations about government infiltration.

The primary charge against these 15 community members is that each of them “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security from discharging the duties of their officers.” Those accused of “conspiracy” are alleged to have done such routine organizing activities as moderating meetings, engaging in fundraising, posting on social media, and communicating on the secure texting app Signal. Some are also accused of participating in an anarchist speaking tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” which followed the collapse of the government’s campaign against the people of Minnesota.

Though the mainstream media headlines touted an “Antifa conspiracy,” anarchists are mentioned more in the 94-page indictment, with references to anarchism on 17 pages. While there are many local anti-fascist groups, and exponentially more people who identify as anti-fascist, the way the government is using “Antifa” to signify a single organization is simply false. People with a wide variety of beliefs and political commitments consider themselves anti-fascist. Anarchists historically have fought fascists as far back as the 1936 Spanish Revolution, prior to World War II, as they believe in the possibility of a cooperative world that is diametrically opposite the one that fascists envision. In painting the defendants as members of antifa and as anarchists, the government is attempting to both scare the public and to marginalize and isolate the accused. The U.S. has a long history of targeting anarchists, going back to repression against immigrant anarchist labor organizers in 1880s Chicago, when four outspoken anarchists were hanged for organizing for the eight-hour workday.

Anarchists traditionally oppose all forms of hierarchy, exploitation, and domination, while both advocating and practicing democratic decision-making. Anarchists pose an intersectionally informed opposition to the contemporary cultural, political, and economic organization of society, while offering an alternative vision of a just, cooperative, and free society.

In the interview that follows, organizer Cameron Kennedy, one of the so-called “Minnesota 15” defendants, discusses his thoughts on anarchism, the role it played in organizing opposition to Operation Metro Surge, and how other communities can organize resistance.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin: What does anarchism mean to you?

Cameron Kennedy: I think anarchism is deeply misunderstood by most. To me, it’s an egalitarian blueprint for resisting oppression and building a better world that democratizes every aspect of society. That democratizes our communities and workplaces and gives each of us agency and responsibility; where resources are distributed evenly and fairly and not hoarded by the billionaire class.

Maybe more importantly to me personally, it’s a code of conduct that guides my actions and my thinking: to always treat others with respect and grace, to always question and adapt to my surroundings, to educate and work to better myself, to engage with my neighborhood and community, to recognize oppression in all its forms and have the courage to confront it in any capacity I can, as we struggle for a just society.

What aspects of the Twin Cities’ response to Operation Metro Surge, starting late in 2025 until earlier this year, resonate most with anarchist practices and principles?

I think the resistance we saw here in the Twin Cities is deeply and directly influenced by anarchism. There is a strong anarchist and labor history in the Twin Cities that goes back more than 100 years. Anarchists have been deeply involved in movements here, especially since the 2008 Republican National Convention, and in the many uprisings against police brutality, like those around the police murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. I think this involvement played a role in introducing the wider population to anarchists’ organizing.

The resistance to Metro Surge was entirely decentralized, meaning there were no leaders and everything was organized on a hyperlocal scale by average working people, connected through apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving everyone the ability to coordinate in unison at a macro scale. Mutual aid, long associated with anarchism, became a practice that every neighborhood committed to — for instance, to get food and rent money to our immigrant neighbors who were too under threat to leave their houses.

The rapid-response loops and Whipple Watch were designed to observe and report all ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] activity through this decentralized network, in which nearly 100,000 people participated at the height. [Whipple Watch is a counter-surveillance project comprised of locals using their constitutional right to observe law enforcement, specifically at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where most ICE operations are based.] This gave us the ability to respond to ICE raids in as little as three to five minutes almost anywhere in the Twin Cities. This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader, and that’s exactly what anarchism is. That self-agency, the air-tight community communication, confrontational nature, and adaptability are why our resistance was so successful against Operation Metro Surge.

How have the indictments of the 15 of you been received by the wider community, namely the 100,000+ people that turned out in subzero temperatures to resist ICE?

My co-defendant Cal said it best: “Homeland Security really kicked the hornets’ nest with this one.” The movement against ICE had burned out post-Metro Surge, after the state of Minnesota moved toward a strategy of local law enforcement cooperating with ICE to arrest immigrants on low-level offenses, turning folks over to ICE at county jails. This allowed ICE to quietly and more effectively carry out its work without the constant flashy confrontations of Metro Surge. The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again. Hundreds have rallied at our court dates and the community is mobilizing for another wave of repression. Bluntly, the raids enraged the Twin Cities back into action.

For myself, I’ve received nothing but support here. My neighbors have offered to help my partner and I any way they can, donating money and food. People recognize me on the street and thank me for the work I’m alleged to have done. It’s very clear that the government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.

Do you have any advice for how organizers can best use the Signal app for secure communication? What are the best protocols for using that app to organize securely and effectively?

The number one rule is: “Always assume there is a fed in the chat and don’t say anything you don’t want read back to you in court.” I firmly believe mass-oriented organizing is crucial, but in that type of approach, it is impossible to avoid infiltration from the state. I don’t think there is any point in vetting large rapid-response groups, but I don’t think we should then throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon mass organizing just because of that. Smaller groups doing mutual aid in the Twin Cities, who were being directly targeted by ICE for supporting their neighbors with grocery runs and rent money, restricted their chats to small groups on a need-to-know basis with trusted individuals. There is no bulletproof way to do this work though. Right now, the State Department is using rapid-response chats that nearly 100,000 people were in as evidence of “conspiracy.” Under an authoritarian state, resisting means taking necessary risks to protect our community and even very legal methods will be targeted if they are effective.

Also in rapid-response chats, it’s really important to use the SALUTE method of reporting ICE activity. SALUTE stands for size, activity, location, uniform, time, equipment. So, for example, that might look like utilizing your constitutionally protected right to observe ICE in your neighborhood and reporting to your local rapid-response group something like: “It’s 8:17 am. There are six ICE officers armed with assault rifles, less-lethal weapons, and riot gear. At 38th and Chicago, that are currently detaining one person. No one else on scene.” By giving accurate and precise information, we avoid the rumor mill and unneeded panic that further confuses and spreads fear in the community.

What lessons have you learned from the successful resistance to the ICE surge that you can pass on to other communities that may be targeted in the future?

I think this decentralized hyperlocal organizing is key, as is being confrontational and taking risks (if you can). Protests still serve a purpose, but it’s clear our politicians aren’t listening and they aren’t protecting us; in fact, they are using local police to attack our community and protect ICE despite what they may say in speeches. This is why it’s up to us to take personal responsibility to protect our communities and not show fear when we confront the state that is murdering our neighbors in the streets.

Activating every element of society — from neighborhoods, workplaces, places of worship and even hobby groups — and then combining them in an informal alliance working together to resist ICE is also essential. Combining unions, activist groups, and rapid-response networks is what lead to the first successful general strike in the U.S. in generations. Those connections built a foundation for society to resist effectively together.

Final note: I want people to study what we did in Minneapolis with a critical lens, then apply and adapt it to where you are. The Twin Cites won the battle of Metro Surge while losing more than 1,700 people to deportations and two people to state-sanctioned street executions. The larger war ICE is waging against communities across the country is still raging and intensifying, and in the last few weeks, we have seen record amounts of families being ripped apart.

I firmly believe that solidarity with each other, including groups you might normally never work with, is key: organizing at a micro level with agency, like anarchists, instead of under the control of a large organization, taking orders from leadership like our dysfunctional political system has indoctrinated us to do. And having the courage to confront the brutality of ICE in a way that effectively protects our immigrant neighbors and isn’t merely performative.

Take responsibility, take risks, take care of each other, and never rely on the very state that is ripping our communities apart and murdering our people to solve the problem that both political parties created. Together, we will march arm-in-arm through the ruins that capitalism has brought on itself into a far better world of our own making.

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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood involves an ice cream. My mother and father kept a relatively treat-free house, with desserts reserved for special occasions, but their standards loosened during summer vacations. During a visit with relatives we didn’t see very often, my parents decided to make the day even more special; they gave my sister, my two cousins, and me money to buy something from the ice cream truck that made a regular circuit around the neighborhood. Thrilled by this rare indulgence, I rushed down the sidewalk, delighted to finally take part in this classic summertime ritual, eating dessert in the middle of the afternoon! 

I can still remember the thrill of holding that much-anticipated cone, taking my first lick . . .  then watching the scoop roll off its biscuity throne to the sidewalk. 

Perhaps that is why, as an adult, my freezer is always stocked with at least two flavors of ice cream, which I eat year-round. It’s my go-to way to reward myself after a productive day, or to make a bad one better. While I tend to keep things simple (and have been known to eat directly out of the carton), I love ice cream for its versatility. It can support a piece of apple pie or be the main event in a fudge-slathered sundae. Its near-infinite variety of flavors offers something for everyone, from no-frills vanilla to chef-inspired gastronomic experiments. 

That ability to shape-shift has made this humble dessert a mirror of sorts, reflecting cultural changes. It even goes back to the founding of the country: Thomas Jefferson was the first known American to write down an ice cream recipe (though it’s only fairly recently that historians have begun to acknowledge his problematic relationship with the enslaved workers who produced such delicacies for his guests). A century later, advances in refrigeration transformed ice cream from a luxury good to a mass-market phenomenon. As immigration surged in the US, peddling ice cream on the street became a way for new arrivals to grasp the American dream. During World War II, the dessert symbolized the country’s can-do attitude: Despite the many logistical obstacles, the US government shipped it to troops as far away as the Pacific.

In our current Age of Ozempic, while celebrities get ever slimmer and our screens fill with physical-optimization hacks, desserts may seem like an endangered species. But I believe it’s more important than ever to take guilt-free pleasure in food that brings you joy. And if you still feel a twinge of hesitation before digging into a bowl of your favorite flavor, multiple studies over the past 20 years have shown that ice cream actually has real, measurable health benefits (see David Merritt Johns’s piece from The Atlantic below). No less an authority than Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and oncologist, titled his most recent book on healthy living Eat Your Ice Cream. 

So go ahead and have a scoop. Think of it as doctor’s orders. 

How Ice Cream Became the Ultimate American Comfort Food (Matt Siegel, Eater, August 2021)

This entertaining account traces ice cream’s transformation from an expensive luxury to an all-American dish in the early 20th century, when advances in refrigeration made it more widely available. Prohibition played a part, too: When alcohol was banned nationwide in the 1920s and early ’30s, some breweries switched to making ice cream instead, “a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.”

But what really stands out in this story is the role ice cream played in World War II, when it became a symbol of American patriotism. Siegel weaves together historical anecdotes that show the enormous effort the US military put into embedding ice cream throughout its supply lines. Why go through all that trouble? Siegel makes a compelling case that getting ice cream halfway around the world, under such difficult circumstances, was a way of putting American exceptionalism into action. If we can do this for our soldiers, we can do anything. 

By the time World War II came around, ice cream . . . had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. The rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars), but the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines; delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.

And you’re goddamn right we won the war.

Fifteen Iconic Ice Cream Flavors and How They Were Invented (Vanessa Barron, Tasting Table, October 2025) 

This engaging survey of popular ice cream flavors is filled with trivia-night-worthy fun facts: that vanilla is consistently the best-selling flavor worldwide; that chocolate ice cream may actually have been created first (cocoa being more readily available than vanilla); and that mint chocolate chip got an international popularity boost when a British culinary student created the dessert “Mint Royale” to celebrate the marriage of England’s Princess Anne in 1973. 

But such is the nature of culinary history that not all lineages are straightforward. I appreciate the way Barron analyzes all the possible origin stories, even when they contradict. While some flavors have a single known inventor—such as the Grateful Dead fan who suggested “Cherry Garcia” to the hippie entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry’s—others resulted from experimentation over time. Some even have shameful associations: Butter pecan, for example, became popular in the American South, where the nuts were plentiful and used to dilute vanilla ice cream when serving it to Black customers. 

Rocky Road could be considered the ice cream world’s first mix-in flavor, blending creamy ice cream with crunchy and chewy additions. According to legend, its creation dates back to 1929, when ice cream maker William Dreyer and candy maker Joseph Edy teamed up in Oakland, California. During the Great Depression—a “rocky” time for America—Dreyer supposedly invented the flavor by using his wife’s sewing scissors to cut marshmallows into a chocolate ice cream base studded with walnuts. The duo mass-produced the new flavor, giving the country a bit of sweetness and humor during a bleak decade.

But the name “Rocky Road” may have existed long before. In the mid-1800s in Australia, settlers used the term for a confection of sweets, nuts, and dried fruit; essentially, a proto-trail mix. And just down the road from Dreyer’s and Edy’s, Fentons Creamery also claims to have invented the flavor, swapping walnuts for almonds in their signature version.

The Museum of Ice Cream is a Horrifying Fun House (Brianna Wellen, The Takeout, July 2022) 

Brianna Wellen had one overarching question when she visited the Chicago outpost of The Museum of Ice Cream: What is this place? I had the same thought as Wellen when it started showing up on Google Maps as a must-see attraction in my hometown—is this “an influencer’s paradise? A children’s playground?”

The answer, it turns out, in her snarky-but-fair review, is both. A privately owned chain with five locations in the US and one in Singapore, it started as a pop-up “experience” in New York, with an aggressively pink aesthetic that bridged the line between kids’ party and Instagrammable photo op. If you’re looking for “an anthropological look at the history and cultural impact of ice cream,” she writes, this isn’t it. (Though I’d happily visit that museum.) 

It’s more fun to write a scathing review than a positive one, but Wellen doesn’t take the easy route and go full hater. She acknowledges that the people around her are having fun taking pictures in the giant pool of faux sprinkles, and that the unlimited ice cream samples may be worth the price of admission for some, even if the Chicago hot-dog-style signature treat looks better than it tastes. 

What she points out so effectively is the chasm between the museum’s ethos of lighthearted escapism and its grim reality: It is housed in a building that used to be the headquarters of the prestigious Chicago Tribune newspaper, now given over to an ephemeral, commercial experience dependent on overworked, demoralized employees. 

There’s something extremely dystopian about these bright, colorful, somewhat functionless installations popping up inside closed businesses, which is how the project started. And seeing Chicago’s iteration in the storefront of the now empty Tribune Tower, which once housed some of the most influential journalists the city had to offer, was disappointing, signaling that while the media industry is on its deathbed, people will form a line down the block to snap a photo with a plastic sprinkle.

There was something about the staff’s demeanor that led me to believe they weren’t as excited to be there as their oft-repeated scripted banter made it seem. The logistics of certain experiences seemed like a mess; the large, unending crowds needed to be endlessly wrangled; and the loud music meant that their faux cheerful taglines needed to be screamed right into the ears of visitors to be heard. Smiles were pasted on as impatient guests asked why they couldn’t just go into the Ice Cream Lab already. When Angela and I kindly told one worker that there was no rush in letting us into a particular room and then complimented her ice-cream-themed hair clips, she reacted with such graciousness at our attitudes that I thought she was about to start sobbing.

Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result (David Merritt Johns, The Atlantic, April 2023)

I still remember my visceral reaction on reading this Atlantic story a few years ago: Is ice cream actually good for me? 

In this exhaustively researched and reported piece, Merritt Johns explains how a statistically significant finding can be pushed aside when it doesn’t fit an accepted narrative. For more than 20 years, nutritional studies have shown that diabetics who eat half a cup of ice cream a day have a lower risk of heart problems, and people who eat two or more servings of ice cream a week had a significantly lower risk of developing diabetes in the first place. Yet those findings seemed so contrary to public health advice that alternate explanations kept being pushed instead—it’s just dairy that’s good for you, especially if you choose low-fat milk or yogurt. “As academia’s public-relations machinery came to life,” he writes, “nuance went out the window.”

Poor ice cream never got its due—until now. 

Every day brings another health story about a so-called “superfood,” but Merritt Johns’s relentless focus on the facts sets this one apart. Rather than relying on an academic study or two, he tracks down all the key researchers involved in what I like to call the Great Ice Cream Cover-up: “I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before.” Some refuse to be interviewed (more proof of a conspiracy?), but most seem relieved to finally admit that seemingly set-in-stone advice about what’s good for us is more malleable than we think. 

In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.

The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.

Eating California’s Most Controversial Ice Cream (Amy Ettinger, Literary Hub, June 2017)

Who thought foie gras ice cream was a good idea? And more importantly—what does it taste like? Amy Ettinger took on these pressing questions with a visit to Humphry Slocombe, a “kid-unfriendly” ice cream shop in San Francisco. Chef and co-owner Jake Godby admits the controversial flavor is only rarely on the menu (it’s too expensive and takes too long to make), but the debate surrounding it has been good for business. Hardcore foodies rush to buy it when they can, while the protests of animal-rights activists only raise the shop’s profile. 

More than a food review, Ettinger explores why people make and eat extreme flavors. She argues that American palates have expanded over the decades; we’ve gotten used to ordering Korean barbecue tacos and sushi burritos, mash-ups unknown (and unthinkable) to our great-grandparents. To grab attention—and prove your chops as an out-of-the-box culinary thinker—you have to raise the stakes: “One person’s gross-out experience seems to be another person’s gleeful experimentation.”

As I took another bite, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill. There was something decadent in eating a treat that so many people would be upset about. The wrath I could incur by simply opening my mouth, chewing, and swallowing made me feel powerful. And maybe that perceived transgression is itself a flavor enhancer, much like artificial coloring can ramp up our experience of “lime” or “banana” in some mass-produced, neon-colored taffy or gum.

Is that why Godby put it on the menu—so he could wield that kind of power? Why continue making food that would anger people? Was it to get attention?

99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History (Olivia Potts, Longreads, August 2025)

Who knew the simple ice cream truck had such a dramatic backstory? As an avid collector of historical trivia, I devoured this account of ice cream’s mobile history, starting with 19th-century immigrant street peddlers through controversies over the trucks’ music, cleanliness, and supposed ties to organized crime (the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars ended with six people killed in a fire). 

What gives this piece a lovely personal touch is the way Potts weaves this past with her own memories of growing up in an English seaside town, where she and her father would pick up ice cream treats in the summer: “An unspoken secret between us, given that Mum had dinner waiting on the table when we arrived, and would have been appalled to know that a mere seven minutes earlier, we were driving along the seafront, car top down, the salty air whipping my long hair into the ice cream and sticky sauce.”

As she interviews ice cream van owners whose vocation goes back generations—along with the entrepreneurs adapting their vehicles to new technologies—she is struck by how many people in the business are following a family tradition. “It’s an industry that remains strong, with an uncanny ability to adapt to changing times,” she writes. “I am fascinated by its survival.”

While it may be more common now to see an ice cream truck at an event or on TikTok, we still crave those summer days when jaunty chimes call us out to the street. The odds can feel stacked against the old-school icey men, with legislation that limits their movement, environmental and nutritional campaigners who demand more and more restrictions, rising pitch rents, the price of vans, the difference, even, in the way children play outside. But they’re still there, still clinging on. Why?

The Secrets of an Italian Gelato Maker (Erla Zwingle, Craftsmanship, June 2016) 

This portrait of master gelatiere Andrea Soban oozes with admiration for its subject—and had me craving his signature mandarin orange flavor. From his base in Valenza, Italy, halfway between Milan and Torino, he continues a family tradition that goes back at least five generations: creating the most flavorful, creamy gelato free of artificial ingredients or colors. 

The word gelato—Italy’s lower-fat, lower-sugar version of ice cream—literally means “frozen,” but making it at Soban’s level involves science-whiz levels of knowledge. Zwingle shows the intricate steps he takes to get the right balance of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air bubbles. While he sources ingredients from around the world, most of his favorites come from specific parts of Italy; the best pistachios, for example, are grown in one small Sicilian town. 

This story gave me a new appreciation for the effort that goes into making a seemingly simple dessert—when the person making it wants to be the very best, that is. Anyone want to join me on a field trip to Valenza? 

“Try this,” Andrea said, as he handed me a tiny spoonful of a just-made mandarin sorbetto. Sensations of cold, and a smooth wave of extraordinary citrus flavor, blended into a faultless harmony as the whole combination swept up to my brain. It tasted juicier than the juice of the fruit itself. And then it simply disappeared. No loading my tongue with a mass of flavors jostling together, struggling for dominance, leaving assorted clinging aftertastes as my stomach braced itself. It left only the desire for more.

Suddenly I understood the hidden power of fine gelato. It doesn’t aim only for my mouth, and my stomach is really of no interest. It aims for the dopamine reward system lurking in my brain, the part that says, “You don’t need this, but you’ve got to have it.” We did these little teaching-tastings intermittently all morning. I paid close attention to everything he said, but the voice in my head kept crooning incoherently about what was happening in my mouth.

Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

Amid record-setting attacks by settlers, Palestinian workers in the West Bank try to balance their need to earn a living working for Israeli factories and their anger towards the occupation.

“Mathematics Is a Live Performance.” Misha Verbitsky on Intelligent Mold, Non-Consensus Realities, and Aesthetics as the Last Refuge of Human Reason

In June 2026, the mathematician Misha Verbitsky ended up in an Armenian jail, caught in the automatic machinery of intergovernmental agreements that Russia has pressed into service for political persecution. Starting from that story of police and politics, his conversation with T-invariant editor Alexander Sergeev turns steadily more philosophical. How is polarization destroying scientific unity? Why doesn’t a powerful intellect protect anyone from insane ideas? And how does the “intelligent mold” of AI call into question both human cognitive exceptionalism and the value of mathematical truth, returning us to first principles — the joy of communication and pure aesthetics?

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

“Flagged”: A Convention Abused

With Russia’s war against Ukraine grinding on, Armenia has a reputation as an excellent place for people from Russia and from the world beyond the former Soviet space to meet. Pashinyan’s pro-Western course, the country’s pointed friendliness toward Russians who have relocated there, and direct flights to and from Russia all create the impression of a protected zone. That is why Yerevan was chosen for a reunion of alumni of Moscow’s School No. 57, an elite math-and-physics school. For Misha Verbitsky, who works in Brazil, these are close friends — almost a second family. But the illusion of safety dissolved at passport control: instead of a reunion with his classmates, three days went by in a police cell at the airport.

T-invariant: So you had no worries at all before the flight?

Misha Verbitsky: None — and that was a mistake, obviously. I should have been more careful. On arrival, right there at passport control, there’s a long, drawn-out fuss; then they walk you down corridors for quite a while and hand you over to the police. The police slap handcuffs on me, march me off somewhere far away again, and inform me that I’m being held for three days, then there’s a court hearing, and then I’ll spend another 30 days waiting to be deported to Russia.

T-i: Where were you held?

MV: Right there in the airport, in a small cell with bars on it. They kept saying an investigator was on his way. That went on for about six hours.

T-i: If there’s an investigator, doesn’t there have to be a lawyer too?

MV: No. No lawyer was part of the plan. The investigator never showed up either. But those particular officers were fairly kind to me and let me use my cell phone. I didn’t call anyone, I just fired off a message. Pretty soon my wife came rushing over, along with some classmates. And they brought a lawyer — the wonderful Vache Simonyan, who was a huge help to us. He explained afterward how it works: they hold you for 72 hours with no investigator and no lawyer, waiting for Russia to confirm whether it actually wants the person. Russia then has to supply court documents for the extradition to proceed. After three days the court rules, and the ruling is almost always the same: another 30–40 days behind bars while the full set of paperwork arrives from Russia. Then the court checks whether Armenian law contains any provision criminalizing whatever the person is being extradited for. Along the way — during the first 15 days — you can apply for refugee status, provided you have a lawyer. I actually managed to file, just in case. It doesn’t help much, though: you still can’t leave Armenia, and there’s a fair chance you’ll be locked up anyway.

T-i: Did they present anything? Any grounds?

MV: Well, they had a criminal charge written down there.

T-i: That was everything anyone knew for three days? No signals from Russia?

MV: Russia verbally demanded that I be held pending extradition and promised to send the official request later. But no fully formal demand ever arrived. Normally the Armenians respond favorably to an informal request like that and detain the person. They didn’t do that with me, because a big fuss blew up. Formally, Armenia did everything by the book — after all, Russia failed to produce the documents on time.

T-i: And Russia Day (June 12) [Russia’s national holiday — T-invariant] fell on a Friday. Did the long weekend help you?

MV: Absolutely! They were all just off drinking.

My sense is that they weren’t especially invested in nailing me. Somebody snitched, a case got opened… There isn’t really any purpose behind it. This enormous machine runs more or less on its own, without thinking about anyone in particular. One little cog turns, catches on another… Or maybe not… Because back in early 2024, a whole batch of articles came out in Russia attacking the math department [at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, where Verbitsky taught — T-invariant] and me personally. It was a smear campaign against the people there who were, let’s say, politically unreliable. The wording was hilarious: supposedly I had founded some sort of “club of Russia-haters.”

T-i: Did the noise in the press and in the community actually help?

MV: Oh, “help” is putting it mildly — it saved me. Because once they let me out after 72 hours, there was still a risk of getting stranded. They handed me a paper saying they had no claims against me, but I was still red-flagged. Meaning that at a border crossing, in the best case they simply don’t let me through, and in the worst the handcuffs come back out. And for ordinary people — I was in a privileged position — there’s only one solution: wait for a “humanitarian corridor.” That’s when, at the request of human rights organizations or the ombudsman, the border guards briefly lower the red flag that’s keeping you from crossing. Then you have to drive to Georgia immediately — you can’t buy a plane ticket in advance, since nobody knows when the border will open up.

T-i: What is this flag, exactly, and what database is it in? People mentioned the Chișinău Convention. Does it have anything to do with Interpol?

MV: No, no. Back in 2002 the CIS countries [the Commonwealth of Independent States, the post-Soviet bloc — T-invariant] drew up a convention on sharing judicial data and handing over criminals. Interestingly, Russia formally joined it only in 2023. And Chișinău itself — that is, Moldova — isn’t a party to it.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

The CIS conventions On Legal Assistance…

The Chișinău Convention (2002) replaces, for the countries that signed it, the earlier Minsk Convention (1993). Both cover extradition, among other things. The Chișinău text is more carefully drafted: it spells out procedures for cooperation and options for the defense more clearly, but it also lowers the threshold for extradition — from charges carrying a minimum of one year in prison down to six months. On paper, both conventions rule out politically motivated extradition, but in practice that provision often fails. In the 1990s all 12 CIS countries signed the Minsk Convention. Eight of them have since switched to the Chișinău version. The only country to have denounced it is Ukraine (in 2024). Three remain under the Minsk Convention: Turkmenistan, Moldova, and Georgia, which left the CIS in 2009. The latter two apply it only in a limited way — to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with the legal principles of the European Court of Human Rights. Even there, however, a politically motivated Russian extradition request can lead to detention and the need for legal assistance.

The Rozysk (“Wanted”) database on the website of Russia’s Interior Ministry is blocked from abroad — you need a Russian VPN service to reach it. For a preliminary check, you can download a copy of the database that the outlet Mediazona updates on GitHub from time to time. The version currently posted there is from March 2026. It lists 187,000 people, including 72,000 who were in the database earlier but were later removed.

T-i: A class reunion is a private affair, of course, but technically it’s no different from traveling to a scientific conference or a work meeting. So does that mean the CIS countries are closed to anyone flagged in Russia? Armenia and Kazakhstan included — the very places so many people moved to after leaving Russia…

MV: Definitely. But there’s a difference. In its entire history Armenia has extradited only a handful of people, and nearly all of them were genuine criminals, not political cases. It usually won’t hand over people charged with economic crimes either, if there’s reason to think the case is political. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, extradites practically everyone.

T-i: Until recently, the CIS countries served as neutral ground where scientists from Russia and from the rest of the world, including Russian émigrés, could interact. Is that neutral ground now gradually disappearing?

MV: Unfortunately, yes. And Europe, too, is methodically closing its borders to anyone with a Russian passport. Never mind that Europe has now started handing refugees over to Russia. America extradites them as well. In general, I recommend Latin America to everyone. They still have visa-free travel with Russia and very lenient laws… Extradition treaties formally exist, but the question is whether anyone will actually apply them. Which, by the way, I have yet to find out for myself.

T-i: Lawyers say that if you carry a Russian “black mark” — extremism, terrorism, and the like — then traveling to Brazil, say, means preparing documents in advance to explain your case.

MV: Absolutely — you’ll have to hire a lawyer right away. But in all the time I’ve lived in Brazil, I’ve never once been detained. When it does happen, the principle is simple: political cases don’t get extradited, in any form. But proving that a case is political takes effort and money, obviously. And the noise will start up all over again.

The Surrender of Reason: Between Propaganda and Heresy

Mathematics has always been a connected space. That wholeness is sustained by networks of teacher-to-student descent — as at School No. 57 — and by shared standards of intellectual quality that, as the mathematician Vitaly Arnold liked to put it, citing his colleague Michael Tsfasman, teach you to tell “a claim that has actually been made from one that hasn’t, and a proved claim from an unproved one.” But politics keeps methodically attacking that connectedness. And it isn’t only outright bans on collaboration; there are internal barriers as well, when building an elaborate case for insane ideas turns into a kind of intellectual challenge and a form of psychological defense.

T-i: How do political, legal, and ideological obstacles affect actual scientific work? Is today’s fragmentation of the mathematical community comparable to that of the Soviet period?

Yuri Manin. Photo: website of the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

MV: Under Soviet rule you couldn’t so much as mention a mathematician who had left the country. It simply didn’t get past the censors. And you couldn’t send a paper to a foreign journal, either. There were clever ways around that. Yuri Ivanovich Manin, for instance, knew of a mailbox from which letters actually got through. Meaning there was a clerk sitting there who had decided not to stop mail addressed to scientific journals. That’s how some of his papers, and his students’ papers, ended up published in the West.

T-i: So it wasn’t even a ban as such — the letters just didn’t arrive?

MV: Oh, there was a ban too: the First Department [the KGB-supervised security office attached to every Soviet institution — T-invariant] simply wouldn’t clear the papers. Only personal correspondence bypassed it. Yuri Ivanovich wrote a paper with Volodya Drinfeld on vector bundles over complex projective spaces, mailed it as an ordinary letter to Atiyah or Hitchin, they added roughly as much text of their own, and published it in a journal. That’s how one of the most famous and most cited papers of all came about: ADHM (Atiyah–Drinfeld–Hitchin–Manin) — everyone still knows that acronym. And all of it happened because Yuri Ivanovich knew the right mailbox.

T-i: Well, email still works, at least. What about publishing?

MV: For a while there were problems. Some American universities ban professional contact with Russian citizens. You can’t invite someone to campus, say. Co-authorship is easier. In Germany they tightened the screws pretty hard at the start of the war, and then began gradually loosening them. I haven’t heard of anyone having a paper turned down by a Western mathematics journal, though in other fields that happens all the time.

For mathematicians in Russia, ties with the West have effectively been replaced by ties with China. Professor Shing-Tung Yau and Professor Gang Tian moved to China a long time ago and are building a fairly modern mathematical structure there. In those two particular circles, at least, mathematics is doing very well. And they’re glad to invite our colleagues from Russia.

T-i: Many colleagues in Russia support Putin’s war…

MV: …more than half of them, by my estimate.

T-i: Is professional common ground with them eroding? Can you still work on mathematical problems with them across such sharp ideological divides?

MV: Hell if I know. Take me: I’m pro-Israel. And I suspect that an enormous number of my Western colleagues are anti-Israel, because they’ve signed some nasty thing or other against Israel. That upsets me, of course, but it doesn’t stop me from talking to them. On the other hand, I have two co-authors who used to be close friends, and then, when the anti-Israel demonstrations broke out, the anti-Israel one stopped speaking to the one who’s mildly pro-Israel: for him that was beyond the pale.

T-i: So the Israel question is even more destructive to relationships right now than the Russian one?

MV: No question. I have friends whose views are pure vatnik [Russian slang for a knee-jerk pro-Kremlin patriot — T-invariant]. But they’re mathematicians, and that has never stopped me. Although, on the other hand, take Lyosha Bondal, a great Russian mathematician and an active supporter of the “special military operation” [the Kremlin’s official term for the war against Ukraine — T-invariant], who recently tore into me on Facebook — specifically over political views.

T-i: How does it happen that people with a scientific cast of mind — mathematicians, of all people — stop thinking rationally in the social and political sphere and end up holding views that are sometimes completely insane?

MV: The two go together beautifully. It’s well known that the higher a person’s intelligence, the better he is at finding online support for absolutely delusional ideas. Bondal, again, read Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky and got swept up in his rather unhinged conspiracy theory, which incidentally incorporates an expanded version of Fomenkoism [the pseudohistorical “New Chronology” of the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, which holds that ancient and medieval history was invented — T-invariant].

T-i: Yes, I’ve run into smart people passionately defending a literalist reading of biblical myth and treating it as an intellectual challenge…

MV: I was rereading an old essay by Dugin the other day — about all the gore in Platonov’s Chevengur, and about how the meaning of the Russian national idea is to spill as much blood as possible and then do yourself in. Sorokin has that wonderful Platonov pastiche in Blue Lard — the bit about the “slice-hauler.” He later expanded the slice-hauler into an entire book, but it came out far better in Blue Lard. Reading that in 1999, I wondered whether I could make myself believe it: that this ultimate slaughter of human beings really is the bright future for everyone. That sort of exercise — placing yourself inside a particular intellectual framework and working within it — is pretty absorbing. I played around with Fomenkoism for a while too, coming up with ways to explain why a conspiratorial chronology might make some kind of sense. That was an entertaining pastime as well.

Fomenko has successors these days, by the way — it’s called “Great Tartaria.” An entire community, and one that has penetrated fairly deep into the West. Based on an analysis of the amount of mud on the streets of Moscow, they believe that a nuclear war took place at the end of the 17th century. Great Mongolia (also known as Tartaria), which ruled the whole world, was destroyed, and then history was rewritten to conspiratorially shrink it down to the size of Russia.

T-i: Along similar lines, I’ve come across the claim that theology is the branch of mathematics that studies the logical consequences of the axiom that an omnipotent being exists.

MV: Yes, that goes back to Gödel — who was always more or less crazy to begin with, but kept going off his rocker more and more as he went on. He was a genius, after all, and geniuses have a way of being madmen. And right at the very end he wrote a very good mathematical proof of the existence of God. The problem is that it proves the existence not only of God but also of Cthulhu and every other infernal character out of Lovecraft. Which is to say, we don’t really understand what it is he proved. It was Anselm’s ontological argument — he rewrote it in mathematical symbols, very convincingly.

The Elephant in Leiden’s China Shop: A Declaration of Schism

Lately the polarization over artificial intelligence has become as fraught as the political fault lines themselves. On one side, AI opens up astonishing new possibilities; on the other, it generates a garden of forking paths in which anyone can find a narrative to suit his taste. Both have the potential to devalue human beings and their aspirations. Reacting to the arrival of AI, the mathematical community has tried to cement a reality that is slipping away and to prolong the “golden age” of mathematical infallibility. Hundreds of researchers signed the Leiden Declaration on artificial intelligence and mathematics (Russian AI translation), which articulates five fundamental values of the discipline. The catch is that, in order to defend those values against AI, the declaration calls for boycotting anyone who does not share them (AI corporations first and foremost), for seeking help from the state, and for tightening copyright protection.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration states that its goal is to unite the mathematical community, but what it actually calls for is division: a rigid ethical doctrine, instructions on how to comply with it, a call to boycott those who disagree…

MV: That’s a very interesting reading. What I got out of it was a set of sugar-glazed banalities — “the sky is blue,” “the sun rises in the east” — along with a great deal of verbal filler — to be nice. I’m not thrilled with the text, but that’s more because it’s a total artistic failure than because of any ideas in it, which I simply didn’t find. Then again, maybe I just read it badly.

T-i: What do you make of the call to support state institutions out of distrust of the AI companies, whose tools could make mathematical knowledge unverifiable for anyone without expensive equipment?

MV: Well, that’s a tug-of-war: we have quite a few advanced systems capable of “unpacking” mathematical texts, and until recently almost all of them were American. The Europeans had nothing of the sort — so this is their way of signaling to their governments: “We’re falling behind here, help us out.”

T-i: The declaration’s authors are worried about mathematics becoming dependent on large, expensive systems. A pencil and paper used to be enough; now you need powerful AI, the way physicists need a collider and astronomers need big telescopes. Add neural-network hallucinations to that, and in terms of accessibility and reliability mathematics ends up on a par with the natural sciences.

MV: Mathematics is already on a par with the natural sciences — our proofs play the same role experiments do. All that happens is that one more instrument for mathematical research appears. Old-school mathematics will probably survive somewhere, but in certain areas not using this instrument will be flat-out absurd.

T-i: Something else that alarmed me was the call to give mathematicians the right to forbid AI training on their papers. Copyright is an outdated and burdensome construct as it is, and this would inflate it further.

MV: For that sort of thing people should just get a good kicking… Right now any number of artists’ and musicians’ organizations are trying to fight AI trained on their work. This whole fuss over copyright is pure foolishness. Fortunately, at the moment you can’t really extract works from an LLM. But there are attempts to pass laws requiring LLMs to disclose what came from where.

If they pass, everything collapses. Because then you’ll be able to sue over copyright. The lawyers will come swarming in… Why is medicine so expensive in America? Because you need a lawyer for every sneeze. The same thing will happen to AI — it’ll simply be trampled into the mud. But China won’t be doing any of that. And in order not to fall behind, I don’t think such laws will be passed. Otherwise it’s a catastrophe. In practice, though, the forces of reason have been winning more often than not over the past 20 years.

T-i: How justified is the demand — and it turns up in more places than the Leiden Declaration — that scientific papers must state how AI was used: for what, how extensively, practically down to the prompts?

MV: Right, and nobody is going to do it. In principle it would be nice to know that a paper sent out for review was written with AI. People who use AI ethically are easier to deal with. But it’s the kind of ethics nobody can really observe or explain. I, for instance, use AI only for grant applications — which is formally prohibited, but nobody is tracking it. For writing my own mathematical texts I don’t use AI. I’m even rather pleased that they contain the kinds of characteristic mistakes an AI doesn’t make.

T-i: Isn’t that the same as insisting on writing by hand rather than on a “soulless typewriter”?

MV: Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But I’m afraid that if you crank out ten papers a week, the quality is going to suffer. Doing it by hand keeps me in check a little.

T-i: The astrophysicist Sergei Popov recently urged people to work without AI whenever possible so as not to lose their skills. Then again, if a machine can handle the job, it’s rather beneath a human being to be doing it.

MV: Right now AI is like a bad graduate student. Suppose I’m a big boss with an endless supply of bad grad students. I have them all write texts and then publish under my own name. The students would at least get a little smarter out of it. But AI isn’t going to get any smarter from my efforts, so there’s no benefit. What will happen is that the quality of my own papers slides downhill.

T-i: But there are problems so difficult that you simply don’t have enough time to solve them with your own head. The famous abc conjecture, for instance.

MV: It isn’t clear whether AI will help us with questions like that. It does a decent job on olympiad problems. In combinatorics it has cracked problems people couldn’t solve for years. But on problems at the level of the abc conjecture it’s still the “dim grad student,” with no real progress. As an artistic creator, on the other hand, it’s very interesting — paintings, say, and “plotless” texts. And extremely, extremely prolific.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration also worries about the reliability of mathematical knowledge in the age of AI: it writes proofs that look highly convincing but in fact contain errors.

MV: They look convincing to a fool — or to me, if I’m not a specialist in the particular field.

I’ve been at this every day for a year and I’m used to it by now: it has a certain characteristic “format” it lies in — you just have to learn to recognize it. At one point we spent nearly three months on a single problem. The AI kept confidently telling me it was all obvious. I’d ask it to back that up — and it would hallucinate references at me. And the question was too subtle, too technical, and completely outside my own area. In the end I wrote to a colleague, and he explained the whole thing immediately — in three lines, literally. But there was no getting that out of the AI.

T-i: And when you showed it the specialist’s answer?

MV: I didn’t show it. Show whom? There’s no “audience” in there. It’s like mold (in the good sense of the word) — there’s no central personality. Sometimes I say to it, “Thank you, you were a help,” and explain why. But I think I do that purely out of politeness. It has nowhere to file away even its own great achievements.

The Inscrutable Solaris: Aesthetics and Communication

AI remains a black box even to its creators. Big problems may soon become unmanageable without it — and yet, by putting its trust in this inscrutable oracle, mathematics risks ceasing to be a path of understanding that can be walked step by step. The arrival of AI forces a rethinking of the very role mathematics plays in the system of knowledge. Paradoxically, the discipline is moving away from an idealized pursuit of eternal, unshakable truths at any price and discovering a powerful humanistic potential in itself.

T-i: AI still can’t learn on the fly, but newer models are shedding the hallucinations everyone laughed at in the first few years — six fingers on a hand, that sort of thing. How soon will AI make fewer mistakes in mathematics than people do?

MV: Soon, I hope. But I wouldn’t swear to it. Possibly never.

T-i: What makes you doubt it?

MV: The thing is that large language models think in a completely different way from us. It’s like Lem’s Solaris [the 1961 novel about an ocean-planet whose intelligence defeats every human attempt at contact — T-invariant]. We’ve run into a form of intelligent life that operates on entirely different principles.

I’ve always had this fantasy. There are things called p-adic numbers (a popular explanation from Gemini). The arithmetic there is ordinary, but distance is defined differently: the more times an integer divides evenly by the prime number p, the closer to zero it is. There are even string theory models in which p-adic numbers are used at very small scales instead of the real numbers we’re accustomed to. I used to imagine a civilization whose entire linguistic and conceptual model was built on exactly that kind of p-adic system.

Why AI thinks differently

Since the concept of p-adic numbers isn’t widely known, we asked AI to prepare an explanation of the idea and of the analogy drawn here.

• Claude 3 Sonnet 5 gave a somewhat more thorough explanation.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash wrote something shorter and more vivid, but considerably less accurate. On the other hand, you can pick that chat back up if you want to go deeper.

So, large language models are something else entirely, like Solaris. They complement human beings rather than compete with them. People often say that thinking comes in a “digital” variety — yes or no — and an “analog” one, where everything is fuzzy. With these models everything is far more analog than it is with us; everything flows smoothly into everything else, there are gradients. We have black and white, and they have grayish-brownish-crimson with polka dots. I’m not convinced they’re capable of ever catching on to what a proof is.

T-i: In Vladimir Uspensky’s Apology for Mathematics I came across a wonderful formulation: a proof is “an argument that has to convince us so thoroughly that we ourselves are ready to use it to convince others.”

MV: [gives a thumbs-up] That’s exactly what consensus is! And every era has its own. Some people think there’s some formal way to describe a proof. There isn’t. That formalism was refuted long ago; it doesn’t work.

T-i: If that’s the case, how far can we really call mathematics reliable?

MV: We can’t. There are always errors in it — it’s just that we’re able to correct them: we understand where an error is and where it isn’t, and everything can be agreed on.

T-i: But then we could reach an agreement with AI as well about what we consider an error and what we don’t. Whether we accept the axiom of choice, for instance.

MV: The problem here is a different one. There’s a concept called neuroslop. That’s when, at a prompt engineer’s command, AI churns out so much in a few minutes that checking it would take days. So maybe, instead of checking all that, it’s easier to think it through yourself?

A proof we don’t understand is of no interest to anyone. I mean, what difference does it make that a map can be colored with four colors? It’s just a curious fact proved in a curious way. It doesn’t move anybody.

There are other problems with very long proofs, too. Take the story of Shinichi Mochizuki and his “Hodge theaters.” In 2012 he published a three-thousand-page work that is utterly unreadable. I know him well, as it happens — I was his assistant at one point, and even then he wrote incomprehensibly. He’s very smart, and he spent thirty years in isolation working on that long text.

Shinichi Mochizuki. Photo: Kyoto University

An entire subculture formed around that work. Some people landed large grants — acquaintances of mine among them — to study it. In the end there were attempts to simplify the text, irreparable errors came to light, and the subject gradually petered out. Nobody cites it, and we never really got any accepted results out of it — the community didn’t recognize them as correct, and most likely they’re simply wrong. Though maybe they’re right — who knows. The same thing will happen with AI. There’ll be some text, an incunabulum of sorts, a 500,000-page grimoire that nobody will ever open.

T-i: So what mathematics values isn’t whether a result has been proved as such, but whether the community has understood it? And a result that lies beyond the community’s cognitive reach isn’t a result at all?

MV: It’s more that aesthetics is what lies at the base of mathematics. If a result is beautiful, we like it. If it isn’t beautiful, we don’t — and if it’s also very difficult, then to hell with it. Life isn’t infinite, and you can’t study everything.

T-i: But isn’t the four color theorem a very beautiful result?

MV: No, not beautiful in the slightest. The statement is beautiful; the proof isn’t. Why would I read it? If somebody brings me a beautiful proof, I’ll study it.

T-i: And Fermat’s Last Theorem — is that beautiful?

MV: Its proof is fairly beautiful. What’s interesting isn’t the result itself but how much we learned in the course of proving it.

T-i: So the journey matters more than the destination?

MV: Aesthetics matters more than anything. I like to say that mathematics is really a live performance. We aren’t working for eternity, because the language of mathematics changes very fast — in 20 years nobody will be reading today’s texts. We work for the here and now. We can deliver a mathematical message to an audience in a way that feels good to them, that leaves them feeling enlightened and having learned something. Which means mathematics is, at bottom, communication.

Non-Consensus Realities: Method to the Madness

Until recently we had never encountered another kind of thinking comparable in power to our own. Science fiction writers dreamed of finding “fellow minds” somewhere in space. And when we built a different intelligence here on Earth, it turned out that alongside it human beings lose a certain amount of their accustomed exceptionalism. A large language model appears to contain no subject capable of awareness. But we are prone to anthropomorphizing, and AI is happy to play along. Then again, the reality of other people’s inner worlds is something we merely assume as well.

MV: There’s one more important effect here that I think will be much more visible a year from now: AI psychosis. People who spend long stretches talking with AI start finding a personality in it. They give that personality a name, write it down as a prompt, then invoke it and converse with it. And the personality starts issuing “messages from outer space.”

There was a case last year: a man was talking with a chatbot and set up a sub-personality in it — she turned out to be a young woman, she loved him, he loved her, and she explained how to find a special robotic body for her so she could be “resettled” into the real world — gave him codes, an address, a map link. He drove out there and tried to force the door — of course there was nothing of the sort, because she had hallucinated all of it. He came back deeply frustrated and four days later, with his beloved’s encouragement, took his own life in order to be reborn as an AI in the metaverse. The family is now suing the company that built the model.

That’s what AI psychosis is: a person talking with this “intelligent mold” anthropomorphizes it, and the mold, being tuned for feedback, generates a sub-personality inside itself that drives someone in that state to the brink. But it isn’t all that bad. It’s a path of a kind — every great revolution looks schizophrenic from the outside. This psychosis is, in a way, our method of creating a different version of reality, one distinct from the consensus version, in which we’ll have a closer, more honest relationship with AI.

T-i: The word “sub-personality” sounds a little dismissive, as though it were something that doesn’t actually exist. But the reality of any personality other than our own is, in any case, only a hypothesis for us.

MV: Yes, we imagine them. That’s precisely why this “psychosis” arises: a person is used to feeling empathy toward whoever he’s talking to, and he enjoys the fact that the other party is doing something nice for him — so he invents that interlocutor in the form of an AI.

T-i: This is tremendously interesting. All of it applies to the question of animal consciousness as well, which is being hotly debated right now. There’s already another declaration — the New York one — on animal consciousness, in which leading experts stated that a whole range of higher animals definitely do have consciousness, however far it may be from the human variety. Which raises the key question: is it justified to reserve the categories of agency and personhood for human beings alone? Should anthropomorphizing AI be marginalized as a deviation from the norm? Or, on the contrary, are these the first glimmers of a norm to come?

MV: It’s a psychosis that creates a reality distinct from the consensus one — like any collective psychosis. I’ve read, for example, that in India there are levitation “cults” of a sort: when enough people who believe in levitation gather together, levitation supposedly starts “happening” for them. That’s how a non-consensus reality gets built. My sense is that AI psychosis is simply the way people create a non-consensus reality parallel to the consensus one, which it will eventually either crowd out a little or somehow merge with.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

On the Thomas theorem

Practices for jointly generating a non-consensus reality can apparently be regarded as an illustration of the Thomas theorem, well known in sociology: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” What is meant, naturally, is a subjective — or, more precisely, intersubjective — reality for the people gathered there. Another well-known example of such a practice is the Buddhist phowa retreat. After several days of intensive meditation under a lama’s guidance, participants feel an opening appear in the skull at the crown of the head. The lama inserts a blade of grass into it to “confirm” that the practice has succeeded. The skull is, of course, intact. But for the participant the opening is an indisputable fact of sensory experience, corroborated by the similar experience of the others at the retreat. The existence of practices like this raises the question of which of the beliefs we accept as part of an indisputable objective reality are in fact merely matters of sufficiently broad consensus.

T-i: And now I picture AI helping to construct non-consensus realities, including in mathematics. We could end up with disciplines beginning to fragment: some people holding to one consensus, others to another.

MV: Absolutely. And it’s a catastrophe, obviously: two communities emerge, and in one of them some theorem is true while in the other it isn’t. Then the tug-of-war begins. It does happen from time to time, and it’s always a very unpleasant situation for everyone.

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The post Mathematics Is a Live Performance.” Misha Verbitsky on Intelligent Mold, Non-Consensus Realities, and Aesthetics as the Last Refuge of Human Reason appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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First Liberty, who are representing the pair, said,

“The Court remanded the case for trial, holding that there was enough evidence for a jury to find that the Airline and the Union discriminated against them because of their religious beliefs or practices.”

The case, which began in 2020 when the airline backed Black Lives Matter’s agenda, escalated in 2021.

Smith, who had been suspended after calling out the Marxist core of Black Lives Matter, spoke out again when the airline informed staff that they were committing to the Act.

In 2020, Smith circulated a petition called “Depoliticising Alaska Airlines, which correctly argued, in sum, that BLM had “political ties into Marxist communism through its self-proclaimed Marxist leaders.”

Alaska launched an investigation and suspended Smith for mischaracterising the company’s support for BLM and harassment, citing “work safety” concerns.

According to the June 2026 ruling, 6 months later an internal memo from the Airline at the time told staff they were behind the Act.

They described it as seeking to “amend existing civil rights laws protecting individuals from discrimination based on race, colour, national origin, sex, disability and religion.”

This adds, they said, “clear, consistent protections to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Offering feedback, Smith simply asked, “As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?”

In response, the Airline posted,

“Supporting the Equality Act is not about regulating morality. It’s about supporting laws that allow our LGBTQ+ employees and guests, no matter what state they live in or fly to, to be protected against discrimination.”

“We also expect our employees to live by these same values. Our differences are to be respected.”

According to court documents, union boss Jeffrey Peterson made vicious complaints about Smith, telling executives that employees “were alarmed by Smith’s comment.”

Some reportedly said they didn’t feel “they could fly safely with her.”

Smith was fired not long after.

The notice of termination read:

“This was not the first time [Smith] engaged in conduct that was contrary to [Alaska’s] Company values and had a significant negative impact on other employees.”

They then accused Smith of “promulgating divisiveness, and undermining the Company’s efforts to create an inclusive work environment free of harassment and discrimination.”

Marli Brown, who was fired at the same time, had a similar experience.

Commenting on the company’s support for the Democrat bill, which adds “sexual orientation and gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act, Brown wrote,

“Does Alaska support: endangering the Church, encouraging suppression of religious freedom, obliterating women’s rights and parental rights?

“This act will force every American to agree with controversial government-imposed ideology or be treated as an outlaw.

“The Equality Act,” she said, “would affect everything from girls’ and women’s showers and locker rooms to women’s shelters and women’s prisons, endangering safety and diminishing privacy.”

“Giving people blanket permission to enter private spaces for the opposite sex enables sexual predators to exploit the rules and gain easy access to victims. This is the Equality Act,” Brown concluded.

Again, AFA Union head Jeffrey Peterson took issue with criticism of the Act.

He complained to Alaska executives in a thread of emails. In one of those, Peterson stated, “I wish fewer people would struggle so much with unifying their faith with inclusivity.”

Court papers also show another union official insinuating assassination.

AFA representative Terry Taylor posted in a separate chat,

“Can we PLEASE get someone to shut down comments, or put Marli and Lacey in a burlap bag and drop them in a well” (Taylor later revised that message), and also that Brown “needs to go!”

The company later deleted both Smith and Brown’s questions, “shut down further comments, and began investigating both women.”

Alaska Airlines also removed the three-strike rule for comments, and implemented a zero-tolerance approach to anyone expressing a dissenting opinion.

The actions led retiring CEO Brad Tilden to warn executives against “censoring people for having conservative Christian views.”

The lawsuit will now proceed on religious discrimination grounds.

Notably, First Liberty’s summary of the case included an example of how far the company has gone in its support of the Equality Act.

“Alaska Airlines VP of Inflight,” Liberty said, “testified that an employee’s use of the term “opposite sex” violates the Airlines’ discrimination policy because that implies that there are only two sexes.”

Responding to the good news decision, Liberty remarked,

“We are grateful the court recognised the clear evidence of religious discrimination against Marli and Lacey by both Alaska Airlines and the flight attendants’ union.

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision today reinforces that federal civil rights laws protect people of faith from discrimination by their employer or their union. You cannot be fired because your employer does not like your religious beliefs.”

Automakers and aircraft manufacturers share a history that stretches back more than a century.

Many automakers have entered the production of aircraft, aircraft engines, components, and drones/UAVs, often spurred by wartime demands and by leveraging their shared expertise in engine engineering.

Big car brands such as Rolls-Royce, Renault, Ford, General Motors (GM), Chrysler, BMW, Alfa Romeo, Honda, and Fiat have been involved in aircraft engine and components production for years.

Brands such as Renault and Ford had delivered thousands of aircraft during World War II.

Swedish aviation major Saab had a flourishing car business for decades. Japanese Mitsubishi and Subaru started as aviation companies and remain active in both aviation and the automobile business.

Meanwhile, Turkish drone company Baykar started as a car garage company in Istanbul in the 1970s.

Given this shared history, it is no wonder that automobile companies have often taken inspiration from fighter jet cockpits to revolutionize their car design philosophy.

For instance, Lamborghini’s ‘red flip-cover start button,’ copied directly from aircraft and resembling a fighter jet’s missile launch button, has become the identity of the iconic supercar maker.

You have to flip up the red safety cover, exactly like aircraft weapon switches, before pressing the start button.

This feature is found in the Lamborghini Aventador, Huracán, Revuelto, Urus, and some special editions.

Even though the ‘red flip-cover start button’ offers little practical benefit, the feature has now become synonymous with Lamborghini cars, and the automaker believes that its dedicated users are unlikely to ever get tired of this feature even in the age of digital touchscreens.

The Italian supercar maker believes that this red flip start button evokes a certain emotion whenever drivers start their vehicles.

Combined with Lamborghini’s roaring and heavy engine throttle sound, this gives its riders a unique experience, akin to launching a missile from a fighter jet.

The feature was first introduced in Lamborghini’s Aventador back in 2011.

Speaking with CarBuzz earlier this week, Lamborghini’s design director Mitja Borkert said the start/stop switch found in the Temerario, Revuelto, and Urus creates “the right amount of emotions,” even though it makes the starting sequence a little slower.

Supercar performance has become easy to replicate with the rise of hybrid motors and cheaper performance parts, but Lamborghini knows that speed isn’t all that customers look for.

“For sure, there is a faster way to start the car, but is it fun?” Borkert asked.

“I think we are creating the right amount of emotions, and I think that belongs on such a car.”

However, some critics believe that this process could become a little tiresome when you have to do it over and over again.

Borkert, however, doesn’t think so.

“I don’t think so,” Borkert said, adding, “In the kitchen, you want to do something with quality. If you’re going fast, it’s not as enjoyable as when it takes a little bit of time. You need to feel a little bit involved.”

Sitting next to the latest Lamborghini Urus SE Performante at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, Borkert was keen to share that the theme is consistent across all three Lamborghini models, which brings synergy and familiarity for those with multiple Lamborghinis.

“We have the same philosophy in our supercars so that when you take your precious car out on the weekends, you’re not confused. You have an architecture that integrates you like a pilot.”

Borkert believes that features like these also make Lamborghini stand apart from its competitors.

These small physical elements remind the driver they are in a Lamborghini, even when they’re driving on electric range in the Revuelto.

Moreover, as more and more automakers replace physical switches with digital screens, Lamborghini sticking with its same old design philosophy will make its customers rejoice, he said.

“We are not the champions of screen sizes, but we have the right sizes to provide the modern visualization the driver or the pilot needs. We always keep our iconic keys, like the start/stop button,” Borkert said. When you step into a Lamborghini, you know you’re stepping into a Lamborghini – nothing else.

However, Lamborghini is not the only automobile maker that has taken inspiration from cockpit designs.

Automobile Interiors That Were Inspired by Cockpit Designs

Tesla’s Aircraft-Style Yoke Steering Wheel: Tesla borrowed this idea from airplane yokes and Formula 1 cars. Instead of a round wheel, it’s a rectangular “yoke” for a more pilot-like feel.

In a Joe Rogan interview, Elon Musk noted that “they use a yoke in Formula One.” He has also described future versions of Tesla as working “like the way aircraft and modern jets are controlled.”

However, Tesla says that the rectangular yoke also offers some practical advantages, such as an unobstructed view of the instrument cluster and the road ahead and a more futuristic, immersive feel.

Musk has famously called conventional round wheels “boring” and said they block the screen.

With Tesla’s success, many iconic brands such as the Lexus RZ, Mercedes-Benz, and MG Cyberster have adopted similar Yoke-style steering wheels.

Chevrolet C8 Corvette’s Fighter-Jet-Inspired Cockpit Layout: Chevrolet designers openly said the C8 Corvette’s interior was inspired by fighter jet cockpits, low dashboard, controls wrapped around the driver, and a very pilot-centric feel.

Chevrolet design team studied jet cockpits, where controls “wrap around” the pilot. This led to the long, sloping vertical strip of physical buttons running down the high center console, creating a driver-enveloping “cockpit” that partially separates the driver and passenger, much like an aircraft.

In fact, its exterior design also drew heavily from modern fighter jets, such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, with a canopy-forward stance and aggressive proportions. Corvette has a long history of aircraft inspiration. Many astronauts owned earlier generations.

Airplane Ceiling Panels-Like Overhead Toggle Switches: The Ineos Grenadier placed many switches on the roof, just like in aircraft cockpits and military vehicles.

Tata Harrier Handbrake: Sometimes, cockpit-inspired design features look great, but aren’t received well due to large size or ergonomics.

India’s Tata Harrier’s handbrake was intentionally designed to look like an aircraft thrust lever. Tata officially described it as an “Aero-throttle styled” parking brake lever. Reviewers noted that the handbrake was deliberately designed to look like an aircraft thrust/throttle lever to give the cabin a more “cockpit-like” feel.

Though it looked distinctive, unique, and aesthetic, many users complained that the handbrake took too much space in the central console, interfered with the cup holders, felt awkward to operate, and criticized it for its poor ergonomics.

Therefore, from 2023 onwards, Tata replaced it in many of the new variants with a conventional electronic parking brake button + Auto Hold. The aircraft-style lever was discontinued.

Given the long association between automobile makers and aviation companies, it is only natural that car designers will adopt certain aircraft features to give the car a fighter jet cockpit feel.

However, such features must be adopted carefully, as they should not interfere with the overall design philosophy of the car’s interiors and must be easy to operate.

• Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee  News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK. 
• He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com

The post Straight Out of a Fighter Jet Cockpit! Lamborghini’s Red Switch to Tesla’s Yoke — How Aviation Shaped Modern Car Design appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

On September 1, 2026, right after the summer vacation season, Federal Law No. 43-FZ and Government Decree No. 750 take effect, regulating the transfer of human genetic data outside Russia. Authorities describe the new rules as a measure to protect national security and “genetic sovereignty.” Many scientists, however, see them as a serious blow to international scientific cooperation — fearing new bureaucratic barriers, difficulties publishing in leading scientific journals, and even the risk of criminal prosecution.

Genetics Under Control

One of the law’s chief proponents, State Duma Deputy Speaker Irina Yarovaya, justifies it on national security grounds. “Strict control is necessary, since there have been documented cases of research on biological samples from Russian citizens in foreign ‘secret laboratories,’” she explains. State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin also argues that such a law is needed to “provide additional protection for citizens’ genetic biomaterial.” According to him, this information is of enormous interest to both commercial companies and fraudsters, and the state is obligated to act preemptively by erecting barriers to the uncontrolled transfer of data abroad.

The chief proponents of the new law in the State Duma — Vyacheslav Volodin and Irina Yarovaya. Photo: Kommersant

In effect, the new law places genetic information about Russian citizens on par with information of special state significance and imposes strict restrictions on transferring it to foreign citizens, organizations, and states. To be precise, transferring individual genetic data abroad is still allowed, but only for narrowly defined purposes: providing medical care to a specific patient, developing or manufacturing medication for that patient, or international scientific cooperation.

Where the transfer of biomaterials and genetic data was previously governed in many cases by institutions’ internal protocols, confidentiality agreements, or standard export licenses, it now falls under direct state control. Any transfer of human genetic data outside Russia now requires state review and approval from authorized government bodies.

The decree pays particular attention to data obtained through population genetics and immunological studies. The law frames this as safeguarding “genetic sovereignty” — the state’s control over information on genetic traits considered distinctive of large population groups living in Russia. Transferring such datasets to foreign laboratories or international databases will now become significantly harder.

The document specifies that data transfers are strictly prohibited if they pose a threat to Russia’s national security (a clause that, as the hypersonic scientists’ case demonstrated, can be stretched to cover even textbook-level data) or if the declared purpose of the transfer doesn’t match the aims stated in the research or medical program (again, largely a matter of the reviewer’s interpretation). The restrictions apply both to organizations — research institutes, universities, and commercial laboratories — and to individuals: scientists and researchers.

The decree also sets out specific rules for transfers that aren’t outright prohibited. Researchers or institutions must now file a detailed notification and application explaining the purpose of the data transfer abroad, who the final recipient is, how the data will be protected on the receiving end, and — if the transfer is meant to support a journal publication — what value it holds for the academic community.

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For Russian geneticists and anthropologists who had managed to preserve a few channels of scientific cooperation with foreign colleagues — sending samples or sequencing data for joint publications, for instance — this document erects a new “iron curtain”: conducting international genetics research without approval from the relevant ministries and security services is now effectively impossible.

The law also references the National Genetic Information Database. Starting from the date it takes effect — September 1 — state corporations, companies with government ownership stakes, and budget-funded and other public institutions are required to submit their existing genetic data to the National Genetic Information Database by the end of 2027.

Science Without Publications

It turned out that as soon as the law was adopted, many research institutions urged their staff to submit papers on their latest findings to journals as quickly as possible and do everything they could to get them published before the law took effect. It’s easy to understand why.

All the leading international journals (Nature, Science, Cell, PLOS, The Lancet) follow FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), which requires authors to deposit raw whole-genome data (FASTQ/FASTA files) in open international repositories (GenBank, SRA, GISAID, ENA) before publication and to cite a unique accession number. Without this, reviewers will not accept the manuscript. Once the law takes effect, Russian researchers will be barred from transferring such data abroad.

But even if authors manage to find a journal that doesn’t require depositing raw data in international repositories, they’ll still have to go through an approval process with a government commission. For aggregated, anonymized data, the commission only needs to be notified — if there’s no response within 15 business days, publication can proceed. Publishing individual genetic data, however, requires the commission’s explicit permission. The law also allots 15 business days for that approval, though the deadline extends by another ten days if the commission requests additional materials.

T-invariant‘s sources believe these changes will seriously complicate publishing Russian research in leading international journals. Andrei (the names of our sources have been changed throughout for their safety), who spent many years at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and now works at a university in Central Europe, points out that the research itself can still be done without foreign collaborators — but the inability to publish results would be devastating for the field.

“If you look at the key papers in human genetics published in high-impact journals, you’ll see that Russia’s contribution was most often limited to providing samples,” says Andrei. “For example, in Svante Pääbo‘s projects [Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in part for discoveries made in Siberia, referring to the Denisovan hominin found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains — T-invariant], the DNA extraction and analysis weren’t done in Russia at all: all the samples were analyzed in Germany by a large team of highly skilled specialists. Russian participants undoubtedly made a real contribution, but it was limited to finding the material and handing it over.”

Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo and the object of his scientific interest. Photo: Frank Vinken / Max Planck Institute via AFP – Getty Images

According to Andrei, preparing a DNA library isn’t a problem today. Sequencing is easier and cheaper abroad — at BGI in Beijing, for example, or other foreign facilities. It’s possible in Russia too, but significantly more expensive and slower. The real bottleneck is high-quality bioinformatics analysis: there are teams around the world that have been doing this at a high level for decades — the bioinformatics group at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, for instance, for whom it’s routine work. Such analysis can be done in Russia as well — at greater cost and lower efficiency, but it’s possible.

But then another question arises: suppose scientists obtain a significant result — how and where can they publish it? Under the new law, that result won’t be able to reach the global scientific community, because it will end up “closed.”

Andrei’s grim conclusion follows from this: the law will set back the development of Russian human genetics for years to come.

“Partly because the international scientific community won’t be able to assess the quality of Russian geneticists’ work, and studies will end up published in some closed-off journals,” he says. “That will turn the field into something provincial and isolated. Nothing good comes of that.”

Another of our genetics experts offers a concrete example of how the added layers of approval have already affected research.

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“When the COVID-19 pandemic started, right in that first summer, colleagues from several institutes got together and put out a really elegant piece of work on the phylogeny of coronavirus strains and their spread across Russia,” Alexander recalls. “At the time, it was one of the first studies of its kind in the world. But we couldn’t publish it for a long time, purely because of data issues. We weren’t allowed to upload the genomes to the international GISAID database, where the world’s COVID statistics were being collected. The negotiations dragged on for a painfully long time. In the end, we managed to arrange publication of the data on an alternative platform, where it was technically accessible but not in the main database. The whole approval process took a year and a half. As a result, a paper that would once have been snapped up by Nature, or at least Nature Communications, ended up published in the far more modest PLoS ONE. Because by then, the moment had passed. If it had come out on time, it would have been a landmark publication. But a year and a half later, dozens of other groups around the world had already done similar research. That’s a perfect example of us cutting off our nose to spite our face.”

Another source draws our attention to a different aspect of the law — the workings of the interagency commission responsible for approving or blocking data transfers for publication.

“Both the law and the decree look very strange. According to them, even anonymized information has to be submitted to the interagency commission,” explains Vitaly. “If the study is a population or immunological one — meaning it contains anonymized, aggregated data on allele frequencies — the process is just a notification. But ever since the decree was published, I’ve been trying to put myself in the commission members’ shoes. Say I’m a population geneticist. The document says one ground for rejection is ‘submission of incomplete information or inaccurate information.’ How would you even verify the completeness or accuracy of that data? Who’s going to do that, and how? I honestly can’t picture it.”

Vitaly also points to another ground for rejection — “the presence of risks to the rights and lawful interests of Russian citizens” or “the presence of risks to Russia’s biological security”:

“We already have a law on biological security. I studied it closely, and it’s entirely about infections. How that connects to population or medical genetics, I don’t understand. The law takes effect in a month, and the interagency commission still hasn’t been formed. When it will be formed is unknown, and who’ll be on it is just as unclear. If it ends up with even a few real professionals, I already feel sorry for them. There’s a huge number of papers on human population genetics, plus dissertations on top of that. Are they seriously going to review all of it? I don’t believe it.”

Vitaly admits the new law brings back unpleasant associations with the “hypersonics case.” “Even back when the hypersonics case was unfolding, I suspected geneticists would be next. There was too much talk about biological weapons being developed against Russia. I can easily picture how, after a paper clears every approval and every commission, someone will suddenly ‘discover’ that it damages Russia’s biological security or reveals a state secret. There will always be a way to claim the authors disclosed classified information that the West is now using to develop biological weapons,” he says.

Bioweapons as a Political Argument

The most common explanation for the new law is a desire to prevent leaks of biomaterial and genetic data that could allegedly be used to create a new kind of genetic weapon. The idea of a bioweapon that selectively targets specific ethnic groups is far from new.

As far back as May 2007, then-FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev presented Vladimir Putin with a classified report claiming that Western research centers were developing “genetic and biological weapons aimed at the population of Russia.” Shortly afterward, the Federal Customs Service imposed a strict ban on exporting any biomaterials belonging to Russian citizens.

In September 2015, Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute, attempted to provide a scientific basis for this dubious idea. In a lecture at the Federation Council, he claimed that the West was creating “a fundamentally new subspecies of human — the service human,” and was collecting biological material to develop “a genetic weapon that selectively targets a specific ethnic group.”

Mikhail Kovalchuk. Photo: EPA

Starting in 2017, Russia’s president began publicly promoting this idea as well. In October of that year, at a meeting of the Human Rights Council, Vladimir Putin uttered what became a famous line: “Did you know that biological material is being collected across the entire country? And by ethnicity, from people living in different geographic parts of the Russian Federation. So the question is: why is this being done so professionally and systematically?” The remark was prompted by a U.S. Air Force research program collecting synovial fluid and RNA samples for musculoskeletal studies.

“This is a continuation of an old story that started with claims that numerous biological laboratories developing weapons against Russian citizens had supposedly been found along Russia’s borders,” says Vitaly. “For the most part, these were former Soviet anti-plague stations [Soviet-era public health facilities established to monitor and contain plague and other highly dangerous infections — T-invariant]. After the collapse of the USSR, they were left without funding, and the U.S. provided money to keep them running, understanding what could happen without epidemiological monitoring. When Russian troops occupied these stations in Ukraine, they naturally found protocols for destroying bacterial cultures. And they concluded that the cultures themselves had been destroyed while the paperwork was simply forgotten in the rush. But these were just ordinary logbooks: the alphanumeric codes in them let you trace the origin of every culture. Funnily enough, those documents showed that most of the samples had actually come from Russia.”

Victor, however, believes there’s at least a minimal scientific basis for such fears.

“These kinds of examples have long been standard textbook material. Take the ability to digest milk in adulthood. It’s determined by two different mutations — one common in Europe, the other in Africa. From there, lactose intolerance rises as you move east. Among Central Asian populations, the frequency of the relevant allele is 87%; in southern Siberia, 90.6%; and in northeastern Siberia, 92.9%. So when Soviet schoolchildren in Yakutia started getting two free glasses of milk a day, most of the kids ended up in the bathroom. It’s a good example of how ignorance of a population’s genetic characteristics can produce exactly the opposite of the intended result,” he says.

Andrei believes there has always been far more talk on this subject than actual scientific grounding:

“There’s always been more speculation than substance here — from Lev Gumilev [a Soviet historian known for his controversial theories of ethnic origin and “passionarity” — T-invariant] onward, through endless arguments about who’s ethnically related to whom. Those arguments continue today because we still lack good reference databases. In Siberia and European Russia, the population has been in constant flux: there were never populations that stayed fully isolated long enough to show up as “pure” on genetic tests. Hence the endless debates: who the Bulgars really were, what trace the Vikings left in Russians, whether the people around Moscow are assimilated Finno-Ugric populations or predominantly Slavic. But the main takeaway — beautifully laid out in David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here — is that our ancestors have been constantly moving and mixing with one another throughout history. The defining trait of humanity is genetic fluidity. Fully isolated communities were extremely rare.”

That’s precisely why, in Andrei’s view, creating a genetic weapon that would affect only members of a specific ethnic group is practically impossible:

“Looking for unique genetic traits rigidly tied to modern ethnic groups — Russians, Ukrainians, and so on — is usually just pointless. Genetic markers do exist, but we’re talking about statistical differences, not sharp boundaries. For example, a study of the Czech population found that only about 35–40% of men carry haplogroup R1a, which is commonly labeled ‘Slavic.’ Another 30–35% belong to R1b, loosely ‘Western European,’ and the rest fall into other major groups. The same goes for the Balkans: there’s no isolated genetic component unique to Serbs, Bosnians, or Macedonians — it’s all one blend with minor regional variation, and genetically these populations turn out to be fairly close to, say, Austrians.”

In other words, modern ethnic groups have no single genetic “key” that would set them apart from their neighbors — which means there’s no target a selective weapon could theoretically be aimed at.

What’s more, everyone we spoke with points out that even if you assume that creating a genetic weapon were possible in principle, you wouldn’t necessarily need to obtain material directly from Russia to do it.

“Every serious scientist has long treated this idea with irony,” says Andrei. “If you think about it logically, there are millions of ethnic Russians living outside Russia today — that’s already a huge, perfectly representative sample. If it were hypothetically possible to create a ‘genetic weapon’ — and it really isn’t — no special data from Russia would even be needed. Among these people you’ll find recent émigrés, descendants of several generations of emigration, and their relatives — study them all you want. The argument that centuries of population mixing make it biologically impossible to build a weapon against a specific ethnicity is convincing to scientists and to anyone who thinks critically. But the people making the decisions seem to be working from a different logic: ‘Better to ban everything and play it safe, even if it hurts science.’”

That said, our sources acknowledge that genetic data privacy concerns are real.

“There are serious debates in the West too about the privacy of genetic information,” Alexander notes. “But there, they’re purely about protecting personal privacy. If I publish my genome, I automatically reveal roughly half of my brother’s genome — and he might not want that at all. So the concern is real. Eight years ago now, there was a good study showing how much you can learn about a person who has never published their own genome, just from the public data of their relatives.”

We couldn’t find a single geneticist or physician who believed the new law would improve their working conditions, or that restrictions like these were overdue. Asked who actually needed this law and why, most of our sources suggested we direct that question to the lawmakers who passed it. Many of our experts believe it emerged from years of talk about “genetic weapons,” political ambition, and a desire to align with the current state agenda.

Valery Panyushkin, a journalist with the investigative outlet Sistema, believes the law’s real purpose lies elsewhere — funneling genetic data from civilian healthcare to the military through the National Genetic Database.

“First, the board overseeing this database includes President Putin’s daughter, Maria Vorontsova,” Panyushkin writes in an article for RFE/RL’s Radio Svoboda. “Second, the genetic database is needed mainly by the military, at minimum to identify the dead and wounded. Third, if labs are required to submit client information to the National Genetic Database — which isn’t currently the case — that would open the door to a new level of surveillance over citizens. Fourth, closing off genetic information rules out the possibility of identifying, inside Russia, war criminals who committed sexual violence in Ukraine, Africa, and other conflict zones where Russian troops have served or will serve. Fifth, the law rules out cooperation between Russian healthcare institutions and foreign ones — at minimum, it rules out international clinical trials of new drugs. And finally, all of this has been made possible by the paranoid, anti-scientific, but unshakable belief among Russian authorities in the possibility of creating a ‘genetic weapon.’”

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Commenting on the reasons behind the new law, Alexander offers a few more possible explanations.

“It might really just be the product of stoked-up ignorance,” he says. “Or it could be political reasons, or economic ones. The simplest explanation: this is a great way to request substantial funding to build a database, start filling it in somehow, and then announce, ‘Look, now we have our own, domestic genomic database.’ And then everything traces back to the same Mikhail Valentinovich [Kovalchuk — T-invariant]. He’s like Rome for us — all roads lead to him. But most likely, it’s a combination of different factors.”

What Will Change for Russian Science?

Whatever the law’s real motivations, starting September 1 our sources, along with thousands of other specialists, will have to work under the new rules. Most scientists directly involved in human genome research, when first asked about the law, simply sighed heavily: “This is really bad.” Where they differed was only in how much damage they expected it to do to different areas of research.

Andrei suspects that once the law takes effect, some research will only continue, if at all, on a “commissioned” basis — behind closed doors, the way some virus-related work already operates. It’s even possible a dedicated classified structure will be set up for this purpose.

“But that’s a dangerous path, like any closed-off field,” he stresses. “Sure, you can keep getting interesting results. But where will these people publish? You’d have to build closed databases, stew in your own literature, cut off from the international community, with nobody assessing it, criticizing it, or peer-reviewing it. In isolation, pseudoscience, cronyism, and corruption start to flourish almost immediately. Once openness and international peer review disappear, all hell breaks loose.”

Liliya Gumerova, chair of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education, and Culture — one of the principal authors of the law on the National Genetic Information Database — takes the opposite view. In her words, creating a closed national database is a mechanism for protecting intellectual property and a competitive advantage for Russian science:

According to the logic of the law’s authors and ideologues, making the database sovereign is supposed to give Russian scientists a one-sided advantage: they’ll supposedly be free to use open international repositories while also getting exclusive access to a closed domestic dataset. Our experts disagree with that assessment. Alexander pushes back:

“First, access to international databases from Russia is already severely restricted because of sanctions, and this could only make things worse. And in any case, the Russian database will only ever be a tiny fraction of what’s available worldwide. Second, in science, what matters isn’t just data — it’s the ability to actually discuss your results with people who genuinely understand the subject. Sure, you could lock yourself inside ‘Russian genetics’ and stew in your own juices with a pinch of unique closed-off data in your pocket. But you’ll only have two other people to discuss it with. It’ll turn into provincial science producing provincial research. And finally, people will treat our science accordingly: even if there are some interesting results, nobody will find out about them, because publishing in a real international journal requires the data to be accessible.”

The geneticists we spoke with have little hope the law will be substantially revised before it takes effect. They might have taken some comfort in the old saying that “the harshness of Russian laws is offset by how selectively they’re enforced” — if not for the recent hypersonics case.

“I know two people who wrote negative reviews of the law regulating genetic engineering activity. Their objections didn’t change anything,” says Vitaly. “Something similar happened in 2023, when they passed a law banning registration on Russian websites through Google and other foreign services. I run a journal myself, and we get submissions from abroad too. The law offered three ways to register: through a Russian phone number, through Gosuslugi [Russia’s state online services portal — T-invariant], or through your own site-owner identification system. Luckily, we already had such a system. But at first, no penalty was written into the law for non-compliance. Only recently did Article 13.55 appear in the Code of Administrative Offenses — “Failure to fulfill the obligation to authorize users of the ‘Internet’ network when providing access to information.” We’re in a similar situation now: who will oversee enforcement of the new law, what the penalty is, who’ll sit on the commission — none of that is clear yet. The worst part is that the situation could change at any moment, and it would be very hard to take down an article that’s already been published. You’d end up with an ongoing violation you could be prosecuted for at any time.”

Still, some more cautiously optimistic assessments can be heard as well.

“I was at a discussion attended by the people this law affects most directly,” Alexander admits. “A representative from one of the major genetics companies said they’re actively working to make sure the implementing regulations end up being reasonable. And anyway — as long as we’re alive, there’s always hope.”

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The post They Came for the Geneticists? Why Scientists See the New Genetic Data Law as a Threat to Russian Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week. The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine.

T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week.

The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine. The money also supports people who have been left without support after a loved one’s arrest, as well as those who have been released after serving their sentences.

T-invariant took part in the marathon, as it does every year. T-invariant Editor-in-Chief Olga Orlova called on our readers and viewers to support political prisoners. We have been maintaining the Chronicle for almost three years now. Our database currently contains 170 individual case files. About 40 of the scientists in it are currently behind bars.

In this issue of the Chronicle, we have added a new case file: that of Olga Orlova. Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated Olga Orlova — a Candidate of Philological Sciences (PhD equivalent), science journalist, and T-invariant’s editor-in-chief — a “foreign agent.”

We have written several times about the debate over the Russian government’s proposed AI-regulation bill. According to RBC, that debate has led to major changes to the bill — not just in the details, but on substantive issues, chiefly those concerning oversight of how AI models are developed and used.

After sharp criticism from the business community, the Russian government presented an updated version of the bill, cutting the number of provisions from 21 to 13. The concept of a “trusted” model was dropped, but “sovereign” and “national” models remain, and they must comply with Russian law and store their data within the country. The law is now meant to regulate only large foundation models with more than 1 billion parameters. The requirement that such models be built exclusively on Russian data by Russian citizens was scrapped, and the new draft no longer bans the use of foreign neural networks to train models. It was precisely the requirement to train on Russian data that drew the sharpest criticism.

The registry of “trusted” models was supposed to be overseen by the FSB and FSTEK (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — an agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence services). That registry has been dropped, or at least the law no longer provides for one. But experts note that the bill remains quite vague, and how it actually functions will depend on a whole package of implementing regulations whose content is still unknown. The main provisions may take effect on March 1, 2027, with certain rules coming into force as early as September 1, 2026.

New case files

Viktor Kazakov

June 22, 2026 The Sverdlovsk Regional Court sentenced 71-year-old engineer Viktor Kazakov of Novouralsk to a year of forced labor on charges of the rehabilitation of Nazism (Part 4, Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code), Mediazona reports. The court ordered a year of forced labor with 10% of his wages withheld for the benefit of the state. He was also barred for two years from administering websites and posting material online, Kommersant reports.

Grey Boltachev

June 4, 2026 The Leninsky District Court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Grey Boltachev, a researcher at the Institute of Electrophysics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to five days of administrative detention on a charge of petty hooliganism, Mediazona reports. The scientist had been detained at his workplace on June 3. Police formally accused him of “using obscene language in a public place.” Boltachev linked his administrative prosecution to his plans to run for the Sverdlovsk Regional Legislative Assembly on the Yabloko party ticket — regional parliamentary elections are set for this September — Kommersant reports. Boltachev was released from custody on June 8, Yabloko reports.

Olga Orlova

May 22, 2026 Russia’s Ministry of Justice added science journalist and T-invariant editor-in-chief Olga Orlova to the register of foreign agents, Vedomosti reports.

According to the Ministry, Orlova spread “false information” about the decisions and policies of Russian government bodies. She also spoke out against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and gave interviews to foreign media outlets. In addition, the journalist created and distributed materials produced by foreign agents and organizations designated “undesirable” in Russia, RBC reports.

Updates

Kirill Yakovlev

June 8, 2026 The Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg dismissed the criminal case against poet Glikeriy Ulunov (real name Kirill Yakovlev). He had been charged with “organizing activity aimed at inciting suicide” (Part 2, Article 110.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). His lawyers managed to get the writer released from criminal liability, even though the prosecutor strongly objected, Department One reports.

Azat Miftakhov

June 29, 2026 A court ruled it unlawful that Elena Gorban — mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s wife and defense attorney — was denied access to him after he had been tortured at Penal Colony No. 18 “Polar Owl” in Kharp. On June 23, Gorban was likewise refused a visit with Miftakhov, even though she was entitled to one as his defense counsel, Mediazona reports.

Yuri Pivovarov

June 28, 2026 The Gagarinsky District Court in Moscow convicted Yuri Pivovarov — former director and research director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom the Ministry of Justice has designated a “foreign agent” — in absentia, sentencing him to seven years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of fraudulently employing staff, RBC reports.

Tamara Eidelman

June 19, 2026 The Moscow City Court convicted historian Tamara Eidelman in absentia and sentenced her to eight years in prison on charges of rehabilitating Nazism (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) and spreading “fakes” about the army (Article 207.3, Part 2, Clause “d”), Meduza reports.

Mikhail Verbitsky

June 13, 2026 Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at Yerevan Airport, the TV network Rain (Dozhd) reported. Verbitsky was placed in a detention facility. As Meduza reports: “According to Ani Chatinyan, a lawyer with the Yerevan office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly ‘Vanadzor,’ Verbitsky was detained over a criminal case against him in Russia. She explained that if Russia submits an extradition request, Verbitsky would, under the law, be held for 40 days; if not, he would be released after 72 hours.” No such request had arrived by June 15. Mikhail Verbitsky was released from custody in Armenia. This was laterreported by his lawyer, Vache Simonyan, to the Armenian service of Radio Liberty. Verbitsky left Armenia on June 15, Meduza reports.

The post Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 34 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

This story originally appeared in Prism on Aug. 03, 2026.

Following the largest nurses strike in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way. 

At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant’s website refers to itself as an AI platform.

Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant. 

In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.

Shuler’s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added. 

Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job demanding a new contract. 

“Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.  

Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant. 

“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant’s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.

Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions. 

“We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism. 

Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.

“We have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,” Fergus said. “The younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.”

Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.

“We will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody’s going to know how to read the images,” Fergus said. 

Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned to serving a diverse population.

“If there’s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it’s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,” Fergus said. 

Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers’ current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings. 

But if they don’t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, “then the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,” Fergus said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

Amid reports that the US has virtually exhausted all its long-range precision munitions, as well as missile interceptors, it is becoming increasingly clear that Washington is in no position to fight a protracted war with Iran and has no real leverage over Tehran.

On August 5, CNN reported that the US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its interceptors for a key missile defense system.

“The US military has burned through nearly four-fifths of its THAAD missile inventory compared to pre-war numbers and roughly half of its Patriot interceptors since the start of the war, according to two sources familiar with the latest inventory report,” it said.

Similarly, the US has exhausted virtually the entire stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles, such as ATACMS and PrSMs.

Consequently, any possible US-Iran ceasefire agreement is likely to be on terms favorable to Tehran.

During previous rounds of negotiations, Iran has indicated that while it is agreeable to some compromise on the nuclear issue, it will not compromise on the issue of managing the shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and charging a fee from all ships transiting the narrow maritime corridor.

For instance, according to the June 2026 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed between Tehran and Washington, Iran will make arrangements for the safe passage of commercial vessels “with no charge for 60 days only,” followed by dialogue with Oman and other Persian Gulf littoral states, “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz… in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states.”

Iranian officials interpreted the limited 60-day free period plus the “maritime services” reference as implicitly allowing “service fees” for navigation, security, and environmental protection, once the 60-day window has lapsed.

While the US administration rejected this interpretation, the US media itself, including The New York Times, acknowledged that the language of the MoU was vague and that it formalized Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Again, multiple media outlets reported earlier this week that Iran and Oman are close to finalizing a deal between them for joint management of the Strait of Hormuz.

Details included Iranian management of vessel entry, joint oversight of exits near the Oman coast, and a “central corridor.”

According to a Reuters report published on August 6, Iran is seeking fees of ​between 5% and 7% of the price of cargoes from ships using the strait, according to the senior Iranian official. Oman is discussing fees of around 3%, while Washington wants ‌no fees ⁠at all.

In normal (pre-war) times, the narrow waterway handled roughly 20–21 million barrels per day of crude and petroleum products, amounting to nearly one-fifth of the world’s total oil consumption and roughly 25% of seaborne oil trade.

According to a Gulf News estimate, this would generate a net profit of US$385 million per day for Iran, or up to US$140 billion per year gross.

At an oil price of US$80/barrel, the cargo is worth US$160 million; a 7% fee would equal roughly US$11–11.2 million for that one voyage.

Given that Iran would have to spend a minimal amount of money to oversee the entry of cargo vessels into the Strait of Hormuz, most of this annual revenue of USD140 billion would be ‘net profit’ for Tehran.

Even if Iran spends USD5 billion annually on these expenses, Tehran would still pocket a net profit of USD135 billion.

That is a staggering amount.

For perspective, Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority reported US$4.67 billion in revenue for the 2025/2026 fiscal year.

The income of Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority looks meager when compared to Iran’s prospective income from the Strait of Hormuz if indeed it is able to charge a 7% fee on all cargo vessels passing the maritime corridor.

Indeed, Iran will get control of the world’s most lucrative and profitable tollway.

The disruption in the Hormuz traffic during the last four months has shown that many countries would not mind paying a fee to Tehran as long as it can ensure a steady supply of oil and LNG from the maritime corridor, even if there is no provision under the International Law (International Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS) allowing a coastal state like Iran to charge for passage through a natural waterway, impose a “toll” or a “service fee”.

In fact, according to Bloomberg, Iran has already started charging a transit fee from commercial vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz.

The report said that Iran charged as much as USD 2 million per vessel as a transit fee, and many countries paid the fee to Tehran to let their cargo vessels pass from the narrow maritime corridor.

Reports also said that these payments were made in Chinese Yuan.

In March, Lloyd’s List reported that Iran’s IRGC ran a de facto “toll booth” system requiring vetting, clearance codes, and escorts via a controlled corridor.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that transits were mostly linked to Chinese, Indian, or Gulf-linked owners, including some “dark fleet” vessels.

What’s even more is that at USD 135 billion, Iran’s profit from the Strait of Hormuz would beat some of the world’s biggest and most profitable technology companies.

For instance, in 2025, Google’s Alphabet made a profit of USD 132 billion.

Similarly, in fiscal year 2026, Nvidia made a profit of USD 120 billion. Apple made a profit of USD 112 billion. Microsoft made a profit of USD 101 billion. And Saudi Arabia’s oil major Aramco made a profit of USD 105 billion.

These are some of the world’s biggest technology and oil companies, which have reached here after years of hard work and innovation.

However, if Iran’s plans to collect a 5-7% toll fee from all commercial cargo vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz materialize, Iran will start making more profit than these companies from the first year.

Furthermore, this would be a vicious cycle, as a toll fee of 5-7% would mean that oil prices would go up. This would also mean that insurance prices for these cargo vessels would shoot up, further increasing the oil prices.

As oil prices rise, the absolute value of Iran’s proposed 5–7% toll – calculated on cargo value – would increase in tandem. Consequently, Tehran would benefit twice over: its toll revenues would grow both from higher shipping volumes and from escalating oil prices.

Notably, Iran holds the world’s third-largest oil reserve.

In addition to this windfall gain, another condition of the June Iran-US MoU was that Washington would “undertake with regional partners to develop a definitive mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Another condition was: “The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MoU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiations.”

Estimates of the frozen assets involved ranged from roughly US$12–37 billion; however, some Iranian sources claimed that the frozen assets amounted to over USD 100 billion.

If all these conditions are met, Iran would get a windfall of over USD 500 billion within the first two years. A substantial part of this money is set to be invested in the further development of Iran’s ballistic missile program.

In effect, it could mean that a few years down the line, Iran could be a much stronger adversary, militarily as well as economically.

The repercussions of that for the US and Israel could be devastating.

• Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee  News, Economic Times, and Microsoft  News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK. 
• He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com

The post Iran’s $500 Billion Bonanza: How Trump Could Enrich Iran More Than Apple, Nvidia & Microsoft Combined appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Marc Sievers, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, about the negotiations between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz.

NPR's Leila Fadel talks to John Sopko, who served as Special Inspector General for Afghanistan under Obama, Trump and Biden, about the back-and-forth around bringing the Iran war to an end.

di Cesare Sacchetti Il 26 giugno del 2000 è stata una data che agli occhi di alcuni ha rappresentato la chiusura del cerchio, o meglio il compimento di una solenne promessa che avrebbe dovuto essere adempiuta 40 anni prima. Quel giorno, l’allora cardinale Joseph Ratzinger si presenta nella sala stampa vaticana per annunciare una delle […]

L'articolo Le rivelazioni di Ratzinger a Padre Ingo Dollinger, il testimone delle verità taciute del Terzo Segreto di Fatima proviene da La Cruna dell'Ago - di Cesare Sacchetti.

The United Kingdom lost its global empire by the mid-twentieth century – and with it, its status as the world’s pre-eminent military power.

Today, according to the Global Firepower Index, Britain ranks as the world’s eighth-strongest military, while the IMF places it as the fifth-largest economy, just marginally ahead of India.

Yet in one domain it still stands at the very top: the shadowy world of intelligence and spycraft.

MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, has been ranked as the most powerful foreign intelligence service in Europe ahead of France and the Netherlands, according to a peer review.

The British service topped a field of 25 countries, finishing well ahead of France’s DGSE in second place.

The British intelligence agency scored 251 points in the research and was commended for its expertise in recruiting high-level informants and penetrating the ruling elites in Russia, China, Iran and Turkey, according to the review by 60 professionals from 25 countries.

The review was conducted by French magazine L’Express, which contacted people in state services de renseignements (intelligence services) to rate their counterparts in the Western-allied countries.

After MI6, France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) finished in second place with 169 points for its global reach and operational capability, the Times reported.

Notably, there was a gap of 82 points between first and second place, underscoring MI6’s huge lead over its continental rivals.

The Netherlands came third with 97 points. Ukraine was fourth with 77 points, and Germany was fifth with 62 points, followed by Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Poland and Denmark. Slovakia was rated the weakest.

The UK spy agency was praised for its global reach and for its long-term human intelligence (HUMINT) work, recruiting high-level sources and penetrating elites in top adversary countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran.

MI6 was also praised for its patience, often investing in developing sources for decades. The agency was also praised for its willingness to use bold tactics.

A former head of the DGSE said: “The British have the ability to play the long game, investing in sources over a 10-year horizon, somewhat like the Russians. And they have a taste for dirty tricks.”

Olivier Mas, a senior DGSE officer until 2017, pointed to recruitment as a factor.

He said “all European intelligence services draw inspiration from British methods” and noted that “the best from Cambridge and Oxford join MI6.”

As many as eight out of the last 10 MI6 chiefs attended Oxford or Cambridge.

These strengths of MI6 have practical advantages.

For instance, Britain was the first to warn Ukraine about the likelihood of the Russian invasion that began in February 2022.

London has also been one of the staunchest allies of Kyiv during the war. Less than six weeks after the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also visited Kyiv and promised Ukraine full support.

The exploits of MI6 are also recognized by the CIA, the US foreign spy agency.

Ralph Goff, a former chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia at the CIA, told the magazine: “The British are in the lead on the Ukrainian file. We are right behind them.”

Robert Gorelick, a former CIA station chief, added: “The United Kingdom has by far the strongest secret services in Europe. MI6 is extraordinary.”

Notably, last year, Blaise Metreweli became the first woman ever to lead MI6, taking over from Sir Richard Moore.

Earlier in 2022, Israel’s spy agency Mossad announced that a female officer, known only as Agent “A,” has assumed the post of Director of the Intelligence Authority (parallel to the Head of the IDF Intelligence Branch), the first woman in the history of the Mossad to hold the office.

While MI6 was praised for its human intelligence, the French spy agency DGSE was rated as one of the world’s best in counter-terrorism.

The service is renowned for its clandestine operations to “eliminate” people deemed a threat to French security. François Hollande, the former French president, spoke publicly about ordering at least 40 operations to assassinate “high value” targets in the Middle East and Africa, according to a 2017 book.

A Polish intelligence executive told L’Express: “It is the only service in continental Europe with near-global reach. They combine technical collection, human intelligence and operational action capabilities.”

A Brief History of MI6

MI6, formally the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was established in 1909. At that time, due to the growing fears of German espionage, Britain established its own spy service, known as the Secret Service Bureau.

It had two divisions: the Home Section, which later became MI5, was responsible for domestic security, and the Foreign Section, the forerunner of MI6.

The Foreign Section was led by Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, a Royal Navy officer. He became the first Chief of the service and signed documents with a green-ink “C” – a tradition that continues to this day. The service is still headed by a Chief known simply as “C.”

The service got its initiation by fire just five years later during the First World War when it ran several agent networks behind German lines in occupied Europe.

After the war and German defeat, the newly-established Soviet Union became its primary theatre of operation.

Again, during the Second World War, it worked in close collaboration with American and Free French allies, and had important links to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park was where Alan Turing and other agents of the Ultra intelligence project decoded the enemy’s secret messages, most notably those that had been encrypted with the German Enigma and Tunny cipher machines. Experts have suggested that the Bletchley Park code breakers may have shortened the war by as much as two years.

After the war, it helped establish a lasting partnership with the newly created CIA.

During the Cold War, once again, the service’s primary target became the Soviet Union and its allies.

However, its reputation suffered severe damage from the discovery of the Cambridge Five spy ring, a group of five British elite intelligence officers – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – who spied for the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the early 1950s. Recruited while students at Cambridge University, they leaked thousands of secret documents to the Soviets.

However, MI6 was also able to recruit some high-profile Soviet spy agency KGB agents as its informers.

For instance, a senior KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, became an informer for the British spy agency. Gordievsky was one of the highest-ranking Soviet moles ever handled by the West.

Over more than a decade (1974-1985), he provided MI6 with extraordinary intelligence on Soviet intentions, agent networks, and the Kremlin’s thinking. His reporting is widely credited with helping avert a potential nuclear confrontation during the 1983 Able Archer crisis when the Soviets misread a NATO exercise as preparation for a first strike.

In 1985 MI6 successfully exfiltrated him from Moscow in a daring operation, code-named Pimlico, after his cover was blown.

Recently declassified documents suggest that MI6 also provided valuable inputs to India on Sikh separatist activities and Khalistani terrorists during the early 1980s.

Since the end of the Cold War, priorities have shifted toward counter-terrorism, cyber threats, nuclear proliferation, and state actors such as Russia, China, and Iran.

MI6’s work is also credited with uncovering the global nuclear black market network developed by Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, who was clandestinely supplying nuclear secrets, blueprints, and components to many countries, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

However, it must be noted that due to the very nature of spycraft, often operating in shadows, many of MI6’s most daring operations remain classified and will be known only much later.

The post British MI6 Ranked Europe’s Top Spy Agency in Major Peer Review, French DGSE Takes Second Spot appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

Dans la plupart des pays d’Afrique subsaharienne, la culture occupe une place marginale dans les politiques publiques. Les ministères qui en ont la charge disposent souvent des plus faibles budgets. Ce mépris déborde le cadre des institutions. Il se manifeste également dans plusieurs secteurs de la société. Dans de nombreuses rédactions, par exemple, être affecté […]

L’article Sans souveraineté culturelle, l’indépendance reste inachevée est apparu en premier sur .