No dia 7 de setembro, um colono foi ferido com arma branca no norte da Cisjordânia ocupada. O ministro israelita da Defesa, Israël Katz, ameaçou então a Autoridade Palestiniana com uma «guerra total» se viesse a acontecer um ataque de grande dimensão contra o exército ou um colonato. «Na eventualidade de (…) ficarmos a saber com certeza que eles se preparassem para lançar um ataque “terrorista” semelhante ao de 7 de outubro [de 2023] contra as forças da “Tsahal” e a população judaica das (…)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The Secretary of Defense will visit Colorado Springs over the weekend.

According to the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth will visit Colorado Springs on Saturday as a part of his Send Me Tour.

In a press release, officials said Hegseth will deliver an address to 3,500 cadets, and will also administer the oath of enlistment to new recruits at the Air Force vs. Navy game.

The game is set to kick off at 10:00 a.m. at Falcon Stadium.

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The New York Times and the rest of the legacy media are in mourning after President Trump axed Biden's pro-EV fuel economy standards. But real fuel efficiency shouldn't need a mandate, says Dr Tilak Doshi.

The post Legacy Media Weep as Trump Axes Biden’s Fuel Economy Diktat appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The Houthi takeover of parts of the Red Sea gives the armed group a new platform to challenge global shipping. The group has taken over the port of Mocha, the island of Mayyun, and the Zuqar and Hanish archipelago about 160km north of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. These areas were previously controlled by Yemeni government […]

The post African Red Sea states’s risks grow as Houthi rebels expand reach appeared first on Asia Times.

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The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic has sentenced philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. Zyuzev, who holds both Russian and Canadian citizenship, is one of the best-known scholars of the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. He left Russia after the war began, but in the summer of 2025 he returned to his native village in Komi [a republic in northwestern Russia — T-invariant], where he was arrested. According to the FSB, the scholar was training leaders of national liberation movements among Russia’s small Indigenous peoples and receiving funding for his project from foreign organizations. T-invariant looks at what Zyuzev worked on, why he kept coming back to Russia, and what his friends and colleagues make of the treason charges.

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A Classic Liberal

In the summer of 2025, philosophy professor Nikolay Zyuzev traveled from Europe to his native village of Podyelsk in Komi to visit relatives. And then he vanished.

“After the war started, he left Russia, just like I did. Sometimes he came to see me in Europe. I was expecting him again in the fall of 2025. But that summer he went to Russia, even though we begged him not to. There was no way he wasn’t going — his relatives were waiting for him. I guess he figured he’d get away with it, that they wouldn’t touch him. He left. And one day he just stopped responding,” Zyuzev’s friend and former student Alexander (his name has been changed at his request) told T-invariant.

For about a month, there was no word from him. His relatives refused to talk, and his acquaintances had no idea what had happened to him.
“I started sounding the alarm. Mutual friends said he was probably off fishing in his village again. Then one night I snapped, grabbed my laptop, and did a little investigating. On a Komi court website, I found a record showing that his pretrial detention had been extended. So it turned out they’d taken him even earlier, sometime around the middle of the summer,” Alexander says.

The court record didn’t say why Zyuzev had been detained. In September 2025, the website of the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic posted a notice that a criminal case had been opened against the scholar under Article 275.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, “Confidential cooperation with a foreign state or an international or foreign organization.” As Komi Daily reported, investigators searched Zyuzev’s house in the village of Podyelsk, in the Kortkerossky District, in the summer of 2025.

Zyuzev spent more than a year in pretrial detention. According to Alexander, his cell had a refrigerator, and he was taken out for an hour-long walk every day. In his free time, he read books from the prison library and solved chess problems. At the same time, Alexander says, the scholar went through bouts of depression brought on by loneliness and uncertainty. On June 10, 2026, Zyuzev marked his 70th birthday in his cell.

“We write to each other — I’ve gotten five letters so far. He’s in a fighting mood, though one letter was pretty sad. He jokingly calls his imprisonment a cultural-studies expedition to pretrial detention,” Alexander says.

His friends still can’t understand why the scholar decided to go back to Russia. His former colleague, journalist Nikolai Vokuev, has a guess: “I suspect he thought nobody was particularly interested in him and that he could spend the summer in his village. Besides, he’d frankly grown tired of other countries. He complained that he didn’t like the climate in Canada and that things there generally weren’t much to his liking. So he went to do some fishing and spend the summer in his village. And yet back in 2020, he was the one who strongly urged me to leave Russia — he said you can’t stay here. And then he went back himself. I don’t understand why he did it. After all his English-language publications, where he openly condemned the war and the regime’s policies in general, how could he take a risk like that? And whether he was even aware of the risk, I can’t say.”

Nikolay Zyuzev holds a Doctor of Sciences degree in philosophy [Russia’s higher doctorate, above the Candidate of Sciences — T-invariant]. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he taught at the Komi State Pedagogical Institute, Syktyvkar State University, and Ukhta State Technical University, where he chaired the philosophy department. Much of Zyuzev’s scholarship is devoted to the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. Like Zyuzev, Sorokin was ethnically Komi. After the 1917 revolution, he opposed Bolshevik policies, and in 1922 he was expelled from the country. Sorokin later moved to the United States and founded Harvard University’s sociology department. Zyuzev wrote both his Candidate and Doctor of Sciences dissertations on Sorokin’s legacy and published several books about him. Two of them, Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin and Pitirim Sorokin: Teachings and Life, came out in Syktyvkar in 2019.

Nikolay Zyuzev’s books on Pitirim Sorokin. Source: ESKOM publishing house website

In 2005–2006, Zyuzev was a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he gathered material for his book Pitirim Sorokin’s Roller Coaster. “In America, Sorokin started almost from scratch and fairly quickly ended up at Harvard — and that ‘roller coaster’ is exactly what Nikolay Zyuzev studied,” Alexei, a historian who specializes in the history of the Russian scholarly emigration, told T-invariant (his last name is withheld at his request).

In 2009, Zyuzev moved to Canada, where he taught at Massey College at the University of Toronto, and in 2015 he became a Canadian citizen. That same year, he returned to Komi and resumed teaching at Syktyvkar University.

“Nikolay was my professor when I was doing my master’s at Syktyvkar State University. An amazing teacher, one of those people who make you want to learn — he got me hooked on the humanities right away. His liberal views were close to mine — a classic liberal,” Alexander recalls.

The FSB’s Show-and-Tell Video

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zyuzev left the country. Even so, he kept returning to his native village of Podyelsk from time to time. According to people who know him, Zyuzev missed home and the chance to teach in his native language.
“Nikolay speaks, teaches, and writes beautifully in English — he has no problems with it whatsoever. But I know from my own experience, having lived in Germany for more than 30 years: you can feel completely at ease in a foreign language, like a fish in water. And yet that cozy, at-home feeling you get when you speak your native language may simply not be there in another language,” Gasan Guseinov, a professor at the Free University [founded in 2020 by academics forced out of Russian universities — T-invariant] and a Doctor of Sciences in philology, told T-invariant. “Pitirim Sorokin reflected on his emigration, wrote a great deal about it, and was a bilingual Komi-Russian person. And although he was completely integrated into American life, he never became trilingual, even though he wrote in English. Nikolay sensed this. On the one hand, it’s a very personal topic, and on the other, a politically charged one these days.”

On September 16, 2026, news broke that the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic had sentenced Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony. By then, the charge had been reclassified as high treason. Media outlets cited the FSB’s Public Relations Center, which said the scholar had been “training leaders of movements for the liberation of Russia’s small peoples and developing a project directed against Russia’s sovereignty,” with funding from foreign foundations and organizations designated as undesirable in Russia. According to the FSB, the defendant pleaded guilty. In a video released by the FSB, Zyuzev says he originally planned to create an educational website for teaching the humanities, but European sponsors showed no interest in the project. What interested them far more, Zyuzev said in the FSB video, was “spreading false information about what is happening in Russia, inciting interethnic hatred, criticizing the policies of the Russian authorities, and destabilizing Russia as a whole by developing national movements.”

“In the video, he mentions that he wanted to do an educational project — we corresponded about that too, but it didn’t work out. What he says after that is obviously a script written by ‘Comrade Major’ [a sardonic nickname for a security-service officer — T-invariant]. Those aren’t his words, you can tell — all that stuff about him supposedly wanting to destabilize the country and so on. That’s just not how he puts things,” Vokuev says.

According to the FSB, Zyuzev received a total of €2 million from 12 foreign organizations. They reportedly included German, Czech, Swedish, French, and British foundations designated as undesirable in Russia.

“Anyone who knows what life is like for people like us abroad these days understands that the grant amounts attributed to him in the indictment are absolutely astronomical — seven figures, literally the budget of an entire research center. It’s a bit like those confessions from the 1930s about a tunnel that people from Central Asia were supposedly going to dig to India or Japan to hand over secret information about the Soviet state’s defenses. Utterly unbelievable nonsense. And there were lawyers, even defense attorneys, who added all this to the case file, sat through it, and raised no objections,” Alexei notes.

“It’s a show-and-tell video about what great guys we are, what a fine job we’re doing. Here’s this terrible professor, a Canadian citizen: look, he’s got euros, he’s got a Canadian passport, while you’re living here in poverty, and they’re over there in their Canada trying to destroy our great Russia. Somebody’s getting another star on his shoulder boards for this,” Alexander says. “They say he received two million euros. That’s laughable. I wouldn’t call him a poor man, but his finances are clearly not those of someone who’s received two million euros in grants. I don’t buy it.”

Small Peoples Tearing Russia Apart

According to Zyuzev’s colleagues, preserving the languages and cultures of Indigenous peoples has always been important to him.

Nikolay Zyuzev. Photo: Radio Liberty

“His project may have been aimed, roughly speaking, at developing regional identity, supporting the Komi language, supporting small peoples. But to the FSB, that doesn’t sound so impressive. Whereas training separatist squads… Sorry, but that makes it sound like they caught some foreign superspy engaged in subversion. I think that even if the project was about developing national identity and preserving these peoples’ languages and cultures, the FSB simply recut it into its own propaganda,” Alexander says.

According to Nikolai Vokuev, after the full-scale war in Ukraine began, the situation of Indigenous peoples started getting noticeably more attention in Komi.

“When the war started, this became a common theme. A kind of wave took off, a realization that this war is also a war against the Indigenous peoples who live in Russia. In that context, there was a lot of talk about the Buryats, who were being sent to the front en masse. I work for Komi Daily. Once, for an anniversary of the start of the war, we did a story trying to figure out how many people from different Komi municipalities had been killed. And we concluded that, proportionally, more people were sent from the villages where Komi is predominantly spoken. In other words, the war hits Komi speakers wildly out of proportion,” Vokuev notes.

Vokuev suspects that Zyuzev’s interest in the situation of Indigenous peoples may have been one of the reasons he came to the FSB’s attention:

“Here’s the thing — separatism. That’s what the FSB guys love. It’s what lets them build nice careers and show how hard they’re working. They didn’t want to pass up a chance like that. They don’t have to make anything up. Here you go, a case — attempts to break up the country. And their worries probably aren’t groundless. Starting in 2020, people began rethinking their relationship with Moscow. The Shies affair had a big influence on that [mass protests against the construction of a landfill at Shies station in Arkhangelsk Oblast that began in 2018 — T-invariant]. And you could easily hear people arguing that Moscow’s policy is a colonial policy. In the 2010s, that was an extremely marginal view, but after Shies, that’s exactly how people came to see their relationship with Moscow. So I think the FSB sank its tentacles into this for a reason.”

“Komi is going through total Russification, of course. Under the republic’s constitution, we have two state languages — Russian and Komi. But there was a case where a young guy was detained at a rally in support of Navalny, back in what were, relatively speaking, less bloodthirsty times. And he tried to speak Komi in court. The judge answered him pretty rudely, something like: you went to a Russian school, what is this circus? But where else am I supposed to speak Komi, if not in Komi?” Alexander recalls.

Guseinov believes the Zyuzev case poses a threat to all scholars who work on the languages of small peoples.

“When the Soviet Union was being built, the Bolsheviks destroyed the independence of small nations, from Georgia to Tuva. But back then, the official ideology was one of bilingualism: the national language plus Russian. Russian scholars worked on the so-called young written languages. That is, languages were given writing systems, then they got their own writers, some publishing houses, films were made. These languages were built up and even brought back to life. And in nine cases out of ten, this was done artificially — in the sense that the language wouldn’t have survived on its own; it needed help, it needed education. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and that official doctrine fell apart too. And suddenly, overnight, in 2018, people are told that small languages are of no use to anyone [that year, Russia amended its education law to make the study of the national republics’ languages optional — T-invariant]. And when someone like Nikolay Zyuzev swims against the current and comes back home to educate people, to work on his own language, they throw him in prison for God knows what,” Guseinov notes.

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What May Have Caught the FSB’s Attention

According to Alexei, regional security services began taking an interest in humanities scholars long before the full-scale war in Ukraine: “The first talk I remember about local security officials in the regions actively calling humanities scholars in for ‘chats’ and narrowing their eyes knowingly whenever international research collaboration came up goes back to around 2007–2008. You’d think these were just distant clouds on the horizon, but it had already started: who are you working for, guys, whose money is paying for your publications — come on, let’s just have a little talk. This had been rolling through the regions for a long time and clearly started earlier than in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And it was aimed specifically at humanities scholars — historians, ethnologists, and sociologists.”
Zyuzev had laid out his views on the situation of the Komi people and on relations between Russia’s regions and the federal center in public. In January 2023, the Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s published a first-person account by Zyuzev, “I fled Putin’s Russia for Canada. It opened my eyes,” as told to journalist Adnan Khan. The piece also features in the FSB video about the Zyuzev case. In it, the scholar explained why he had left Russia, criticized Vladimir Putin’s policies, and wrote about the war in Chechnya and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

“Politkovskaya’s murder was a warning to dissidents, and the crushing of the Chechen uprising was a warning to members of Russia’s Indigenous and ethnic minorities. I was both. I’m from the Komi minority, a Finno-Ugric people whose own republic, with a population of nearly one million, lies 1,000 kilometres northeast of Moscow. The Komi people have a distinct language and culture dating back at least two millennia, but under Putin’s rule, we face cultural and linguistic extinction. Like all of Russia’s nearly two dozen republics and four autonomous districts, the Komi Republic is supposed to have some degree of autonomy; in practice, it has none,” Zyuzev wrote.

In the same essay, Zyuzev recounted that in 2015 he was offered the chance to head a new research center at Syktyvkar State University. By then his daughter was already in her teens, his marriage had fallen apart, and he had failed to find an academic position in Canada — so the scholar decided to go back to Russia. According to him, the center’s mission was to build ties with scholars in Europe, North America, and other parts of the world. “So in the fall of 2021, I approached two friends—one a sociologist and retired politician, the other a linguist studying the Komi language — and brought to them a radical new idea: to establish an online Finno-Ugric University. It would offer high-quality social sciences education to Komi youth, help them think more critically and, importantly, raise awareness about the injustices suffered by the Komi people.” Zyuzev wrote.

According to Zyuzev, businessman Leonid Zilberg invited him to work with the outlet 7×7. After the war began, the project’s team left Russia and relocated to Lithuania. In May 2022, Zyuzev also moved to Vilnius and began looking for funding for the Indigenous Russia Information and Education Center.

“We sense an opportunity in the aftermath of Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine: Indigenous peoples have been disproportionately affected by the war, both on the battlefield and as conscripts to Russia’s army. Minority groups in the republics are waking anew to the threat the Kremlin poses. Our hope is that demands for decolonization will become stronger, and the Kremlin will lose its grip on the republics. There may be a rare window of opportunity now to change the conversation in Russia — one we can’t waste,” Zyuzev argued. In closing, he wrote: “The only way to course-correct now is to repudiate Putin’s vision, and to embrace the diversity and vitality of [Russia’s] many peoples.”

“And the real tragedy is precisely that he, in the grip of a deep love for his homeland, came back to his part of the world to educate and enlighten. And now these brutes are pinning God knows what on him. Because the way they see it: we’ve got our own life here, everything’s under control, we don’t give a damn about this Komi language. And you’re just spoiled rotten. You went off to the West, picked up some ideas there, came back, and now you’re trying to lecture us — well, we’ll put you in your place, you lousy intellectual. It’s a kind of revenge for their own indifference, for their own wretchedness. Nikolay came back to a country that had already turned thoroughly fascist, where it was clear they would do something to him, some vile thing. Living under the rule of law had spoiled him. He couldn’t imagine they could do something like this to him. That’s the kind of naivety it was,” Guseinov emphasizes.

[[socialnetworks]]

Zyuzev’s arrest came shortly before searches at Syktyvkar’s Revolt Center, an independent cultural space whose founders included Leonid Zilberg. In the summer of 2025, the center was designated a “foreign agent” and shut down, and one of its founders, Pavel Andreev, was later charged with treason. However, according to Andreev, Zyuzev had no connection to the Revolt Center team and had only spoken at its venue a few times.

Zyuzev’s friends are now trying to draw the international academic community’s attention to his case. “Right now we’re looking for prominent Canadian sociologists and philosophers who could bring the Zyuzev case to the attention of politicians. Maybe, with Canada moving closer to Europe, they’ll take an interest,” Alexander says.

Zyuzev is not the only Russian humanities scholar to receive a long sentence in a criminal case in recent years. Among others, sociologist and political scientistBoris Kagarlitsky, convicted under the law against justifying terrorism, is serving time in a penal colony.

“Quite a few people I know are in prison right now. Boris Kagarlitsky, whom I’ve known since childhood — we lived in the same building. It’s absurd. These are people who are in prison for being smart. That’s the tragedy. It’s the same kind of persecution we saw in the ’30s, the ’40s, and the ’50s: oh, you think you’re too smart — well, here’s what you get. Sociology is a science that makes it possible to improve society. Or to destroy it, if it gets snuffed out. And we’re watching the second process. These cretins don’t even understand what Nikolay Zyuzev’s work is about. They simply don’t understand what intellectual work is for. Because their brains just don’t work. What works are their jaws, which chew people up. And what’s especially painful with Nikolay is that no voice coming from the West, or that could come from there, from Canada, say, will ever reach his jailers’ ears. Maybe there will be some kind of prisoner swaps. There’s no other way he’ll be freed,” Guseinov says.

Alexei also sees the Zyuzev case as a warning to other scholars working on politically sensitive topics:

“Right now, any Tatar, Karelian, or Bashkir historian or ethnologist, say, who back in the 2010s traveled freely to Turkey or Finland, studied figures from the Civil War era and the emigration, and, God forbid, worked with some Germans on sensitive topics like wartime collaborationism, I think, feels like they’re in the crosshairs. For them, the Zyuzev case is an unmistakable signal that anything and everything can be held against them, now and in the future. It seems to me the goal right now is clearly to intimidate scholars. I hope there were no informers involved in the Zyuzev case. But in other fields, unfortunately, they may turn up: self-appointed guardians and pseudo-patriots from within the scholarly community itself.”

“The only thing we can count on is that scholars with an instinct for self-preservation, and people who would like their children to become scholars, will simply leave. Mobility today is completely different from what it was in the 20th century. People are highly mobile and can cross borders relatively easily. And if we prepare for this kind of movement, then young people, at least, can and should be taken out of the Russian Federation — so they can get a normal education and integrate into a more or less humane society,” Guseinov concludes.

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The post An Expedition to Prison: Why Philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev Was Sentenced to Seven Years appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

We, the members of the Russian-American Science Association (RASA), strongly condemn the drone attack on the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine which caused serious damage and, according to reports, resulted in casualties.

Even against the background of the years-long and devastating war, an attack on a national academy of sciences is particularly horrifying. We express our solidarity with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and with our Ukrainian colleagues, and we extend our deepest condolences to the families and colleagues of those who were killed.

[[socialnetworks]]

Scientific institutions are part of the shared heritage of humanity. They are places where knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted across generations and across national borders. 

The international scientific community has a responsibility to uphold the principles of protecting human life, scientific freedom, international cooperation, and respect for institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.

We reaffirm our commitment to the protection of science as a sphere of international cooperation and human progress, even in times of war.

The post Statement of the Russian-American Science Association in Support of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Two American charities recently announced a new fund to fight forest fires. They want to raise US$100 million to help countries find fires faster and put them out sooner. But the fund, announced at the UN General Assembly, is limited to South America, home to the Amazon rainforest. Southeast Asia is left out, and so […]

The post Indonesia should have a seat at new forest firefighting fund appeared first on Asia Times.

At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that China take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI open-source community. His proposal envisaged cooperation in developing and applying large language models, conducting AI training and seminars and constructing a more open AI ecosystem. He also called for a broader international […]

The post In BRICS open-source AI, China and India will make a good team appeared first on Asia Times.

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This story is a part of the weekly newsletter about security, defence, and tech in the eastern flank of Nato, How we cee it.

Over the past few weeks, a new wave of fear has engulfed Europe. A number of intelligence and government officials have spoken out, saying Russia could possibly attack a Nato country within months, not years.

On 18 September, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warned that Russia is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries that support Ukraine, such as Poland.

Two days later, Czech intelligence chief Michal Koudelka told the Guardian that, as well as increased drone activity, a small-scale invasion of Nato territory bordering Russia could be part of the Kremlin’s plans.

Then, last Thursday, Denmark’s defence intelligence service said that Russia is likely to intensify its hybrid war against the West in the coming months, with more frequent attacks against Nato countries.

On the same day, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said, according to TVP World: “We are receiving information … that Russia is preparing something big this year.”

This is not the first time a wave of comments like this has appeared. A similar situation arose last year, when various officials in Europe took turns escalating their rhetoric about the Russian threat.

It is possible that they are speaking out again because new information has surfaced within the intelligence community. The communication goal could be letting Russia know that they know. Much like CIA director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow last month, this could be an effort to make sure Russia doesn’t miscalculate.

The warnings also come in a different context from last year, when the Baltic countries were sounding the alarm. Russia has noticeably been turning up the temperature of its activity around Europe.

Back in July, a cruise missile crashed in Poland. According to experts, it was not a misguided missile, but one deliberately aimed at Poland. Then, in early August, a drone carrying an explosive device was discovered at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany, close to Ukrainian cargo planes.

Germany’s interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said the Leipzig airport attack followed the “well-established pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe,” the BBC reported.

According to German investigators, who spoke to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the incident was also connected to other events, such as an attempted arson attack on a drone manufacturer in eastern Slovakia, and an arson attack in Munich on September 3, when several incendiary devices were thrown from a passing car onto a construction site near the headquarters of defence firms Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing.

In fact, there have been so many different incidents recently that the semi-regular drone incursions into Romania and the Baltics have become almost normalised and struggle to make headlines anymore.

Hypothetical scenarios abound

Scenarios of where Russia could take its hybrid attacks next are as abundant as onlookers’ creativity allows. They range from small attacks on factories, through the seizure of a small piece of land by an elite drone unit, all the way to the capture of the Suwałki corridor – a strategic piece of land between the Baltic states and mainland Europe.

Most recently, the CIA warned that while all eyes had so far been on the Baltics, Russia may be preparing a drone strike against Spain, France, and Italy.

According to Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, the snowball of speculation about an imminent Russian attack on Europe is gathering pace.

But as he sees it, isolated facts are being mixed with wishful thinking, worst-case scenarios and, at times, little more than the need to grab attention.

As he wrote in an opinion piece for the Estonian news agency ERR: “Russia understands that it can confuse and paralyse us through information operations alone. Constant speculation about the Baltic states and Poland risks creating the impression that this is primarily a problem for two or three countries on Russia’s doorstep, while the rest of Europe can somehow remain untouched.”

According to Mihkelson, Russia’s campaign against the West would not necessarily begin with a conventional attack.

It could start by undermining Nato from within: interfering in elections, amplifying polarising narratives, exploiting political divisions, and spreading fear. It could seek to isolate Ukraine by limiting Western support, and then test Nato’s willingness to stand together.

As for worries that Russia will attempt to grab land from the Baltics or Poland, there are no significant material or military changes to note along the borders.

Belarus did hold a four-day military exercise near its border with the Suwałki corridor in mid-September, but that is nothing close to the signals we were getting from Russia just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Back then, physical military infrastructure was being constructed ahead of the attack.

There are also no significant changes in the Russian military’s posture to launch a land attack against the Baltics.

Estonian government officials confirm this. According to Estonia’s minister of defence, Martin Herem, its assessment of the Russian threat remains unchanged.

That means Russia’s main effort remains focused on its war in Ukraine, and neither Estonia, Denmark, nor other Nato allies currently see a threat requiring raised military readiness.

Military experts in Lithuania also see no signs of new escalation. This doesn’t mean Russia won’t continue to be dangerous. It means that Russia has been engaged in provocations against Nato countries for years already, and similar behaviour will continue.

“No one is currently planning to conquer us – not at this moment, nor this year. In this case, specific, very precise attacks or provocations are more likely, designed not so much to cause physical damage as to sow serious panic in people’s minds,” Deividas Šlekys, a professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of Political Science and International Relations, told the Lithuanian wire LRT on Monday (28 September).

And so, while last autumn it was the Baltic states sounding the alarm about a potential Russian attack, now their officials are looking to calm the panic about their aggressive neighbour.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

The White House recycled material from President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for a new taxpayer-funded ad that aired nationwide this past weekend, just weeks before the high-stakes November midterms.

The 30-second black-and-white ad features Trump walking down a hallway to audio of him vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers from our government,” even as the president wages an illegal and deeply unpopular war on Iran that has killed thousands and driven up prices at home and around the world. During the final 10 seconds of the ad, white text appears at the bottom of the screen stating, “Paid for by the US government.”

The ad is just the latest taxpayer-funded, explicitly pro-Trump spot that the White House has launched in recent days, prompting alarm from lawmakers and government watchdog organizations who say the administration is using public funds to flood airwaves with the president’s campaign ads shortly before an election.

Watch the newly aired ad:

Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said the taxpayer-funded campaign ads “could be an impeachable offense,” noting that “Congress has expressly prohibited government-sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”

The federal government appears to have spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in recent days, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing an estimate from AdImpact.

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the White House launched a taxpayer-funded ad in which Trump declares that “America will never be a communist country” and promotes tax cuts he signed into law, delivering a massive windfall to the rich and large corporations.

Norm Eisen, former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, told the Times on Sunday that “the president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.”

“The prior ad was bad enough,” said Eisen, “but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”

US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that Republicans shouldn’t be taken seriously when they claim to care about “waste, fraud, and abuse” as the president and leader of their party runs campaign ads with taxpayer money.

“What a cult this party has become,” Murphy added.

Climate Week NYC is packing its tent after another week of green grandstanding, empty promises and soaring energy bills, says Dr Tilak Doshi. Same circus, same clowns, same time next year.

The post New York’s Climate Circus: Same Clowns, Emptier Promises appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Andrei Klepach — one of Russia’s leading economists and a high-ranking economic official of the Vladimir Putin era — has published several academic works over the past six years that are packed with cosmist imagery. His drift into “energy-information cosmism” went unnoticed until Klepach was fired as chief economist of the state corporation VEB.RF — after he publicly offered a bleak assessment of Russia’s ability to compete with the West and with Ukraine. T-invariant traced the economist’s academic evolution into a cosmist and looked into the background of his mentor on the road “toward a cosmoplanetary civilization.” It also turned out that, even after Klepach’s dismissal, VEB.RF has no shortage of people developing alternative “theories of everything”: the “wave hypothesis of life,” the idea of a “Fifth Russia,” and a “noosphere economy.”

On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization is the title [access to eLibrary requires free registration] of a monograph edited by Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, who has been Klepach’s regular co-author for the past six years. Bushuev spent many years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JIHT RAS) and, in the 1990s, served as Russia’s deputy minister of energy.

Andrei Klepach. Photo: RIA Novosti

Research into the path toward a cosmoplanetary civilization, carried out by a team of authors from the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise, leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MGIMO University, and other respected academic institutions, may now be cut short: in August 2026, Andrei Klepach was fired from VEB.RF. According to media reports, Klepach was dismissed after a phone call from the Kremlin, following the uproar over a speech in which he described Russia as falling behind across the board. His words that spread most widely were:

We’re losing both the technological and the economic competition globally. And we’re losing it not just to China and the US — in some respects, we’re losing it to Ukraine, however unpleasant that is, even for me… In this war of attrition, we won’t win the competition…

After Klepach’s high-profile dismissal, many economists and business journalists recalled his professional expertise and his constant willingness to comment for the media. Soon, the outlet Sota pointed out that the economist and official, who from 2004 to 2014 served at the Ministry of Economic Development as a department director and then deputy minister, had put out publications speculating that life on Earth was brought by aliens.

After carefully studying Andrei Klepach’s publications, T-invariant concluded that once the COVID pandemic began, the economist — in parallel with his analysis of the structural and monetary factors of Russia’s economic growth, the sovereign economy, and macroeconomics — moved on to a broader level of generalization: together with a new circle of co-authors, he set out “to discern, beyond the current pandemic and military-political apocalypse, the future of our common cosmoplanetary civilization.”

The scale of the project becomes clear from the abstract of the 688-page monograph, published in 2023 by Energiya Publishing House — a now-defunct publisher co-owned by Bushuev, among others. Klepach himself wrote several chapters, the preface, and the conclusion. Two other employees of the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise are also listed among the monograph’s 12 authors. Here is the abstract in full.

The collective monograph of the authors – representatives of various organizations, specialists in various fields of knowledge (economists and energy specialists, information scientists and sociologists) united a common desire to show that the general hype around global warming, the Covid-19 virological pandemic, and the world military – the political crisis in Ukraine, threatening to turn into the 3rd world war of the early 20s of the 21st century, is not an accidental phenomenon, not a “black swan”, but a natural transition from the former material dominant and the dominant of the unipolar world of social development to a new ideological models of eco-socio-humanitarian civilization. At the same time, the transition is considered as a certain regularity of the turbulent (wave) development of history. This periodicity connects cosmic phenomena, known in the ancient Vedic understanding of the world, with the cyclical nature of solar activity and its reflection in the socio-natural and political processes of human society. It is shown that the current reality also corresponds to the next 35th SA [solar activity] cycle, which, by analogy with the previous history, can be called the beginning of the formation of a “new thinking” and a new policy in the field of domestic and international problems of civilizational development. This new discourse is of particular importance for the formation of the pre-election programs of the leading world powers (USA, China and Russia) in the light of the expected renewal of their leadership.

The preface to the monograph was written by Andrei Klepach himself, as indicated in the “Authors” section. We quote it at length, with some cuts. It is the text of the preface that suggests Andrei Klepach at the very least shares all the core ideologemes of his new co-author, Vitaly Bushuev. These include not only Russian cosmism but also “ancient Aryan world-knowledge,” as well as the idea that life was brought to Earth by aliens from the constellation Ursa Major.

The authors, who include economists and energy experts, sociologists and political scientists, have attempted to solve (or at least to formulate in a well-grounded way) the foresight problem of a new post-COVID world of partnership and struggle between civilizations, using methods based on the turbulence of world history, the cyclicity of socio-natural processes and technological innovation, and the unity and commonality of the energy-information laws of the Earth and the Cosmos. The relationship between solar activity cycles and people’s social passionarity (activity) [a concept from Lev Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis — T-invariant] takes on special importance in our research… At the same time, we view Russia not as a crossroads between East and West, North and South of the earthly oikoumene, but as a bridge between the Earth and the Cosmos, from which we came and to which we are bound to return.

The structure of this collective monograph (and it is indeed a unified, coherent work rather than a collection of separate authors’ articles) encompasses both a statement of the global challenges facing humanity today on the eve of a new “apocalypse” and the grounding of a new metasystemic scientific and methodological approach to studying humanity’s natural habitat, as well as a figurative, goal-oriented vision of the new world that is being born before our eyes and will tomorrow become our common cosmoplanetary Home — Ecos (from the Greek oikos — house, dwelling place). Here we proceed from the premise that “Russian cosmism” is not our invention, nor even a philosophical term introduced by proponents of Eurasianism at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, but our ancient Aryan world-knowledge, which has come down to us from the depths of the ages. The myths of many peoples of the world (not only the Slavs and the Aryans) have preserved the legend that people descended to Earth from various constellations of the firmament and brought into our world the common cosmic laws of existence that governed and still govern humanity.

We believe that the cause of the current crisis of human civilization may lie not on Earth but in the Cosmos. For man himself is a product of cosmic evolution, not earthly evolution. It is precisely by looking at our existence from cosmic heights that we can understand the true goals and essence of humanity’s development.

Honored Power Engineer, Energologist, Energy Cosmist

T-invariant analyzed Klepach’s profile on eLibrary and found that a lot has changed in the economist’s academic trajectory since 2020: first, Klepach developed an interest in “cosmoplanetary civilization” and the “energy-information cosmism of Russia”; second, he acquired a regular co-author — the aforementioned Vitaly Bushuev.

Vitaly Bushuev. Photo: Syg.ma

Bushuev is 86. He has more than 60 years of serious work in science and the energy sector behind him. He spent almost 40 years at the Siberian Research Institute of Power Engineering (SibNIIE) of the USSR Ministry of Energy and Electrification, was a People’s Deputy of the USSR serving in the Supreme Soviet, and in the 1990s built a career at the Russian Ministry of Fuel and Energy. Later, together with his former boss at the ministry, Yuri Shafranik, he founded a private company called the Institute for Energy Strategy. In addition, Bushuev worked for more than 10 years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures (JIHT RAS).

Along the way, Bushuev also found his calling as a poet and writer. Back in 1998, the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) published his book Energy Cosmism of Russia, which, in his words, “develops the finest traditions of the luminaries of Russian cosmism.” Over the nearly 30 years since, Bushuev came to the conclusion that his field of knowledge should be called “energology,” and he kept churning out texts on Russia’s energy cosmism, gradually shifting toward “cosmoplanetary development.”

In recent years, Bushuev has also taken up writing for children. His website, for example, features “WORLD-LORE (VEDAS FOR OLDER YOUTHS AND TEENAGERS),” later included in the short story collection The Olympiad of the All-Knowing. It was probably somewhere around this stage that the creative energies of Vitaly Bushuev and Andrei Klepach crossed paths. And Vedic themes, as it later turned out, surfaced in their joint works as well.

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2020. A New Noospheric World-System or a Break with Our Natural Cosmic Roots?

Klepach and Bushuev’s first joint paper was titled “Analysis and Forecast of the Cyclicity of Socio-Natural Phenomena in the First Half of the 21st Century.” According to the abstract, the authors, “drawing on statistics of anomalous socio-natural, political, and economic phenomena collected from various sources, treat all crisis events as manifestations of a certain cyclicity, largely driven by periodic processes of solar activity.” “In this article, the authors not only analyze the rhythm of these events in the past but also, using a specially developed neural model, forecast their cyclical manifestation for the coming period — up to 2030–2050,” the paper states.

The co-authors were Bushuev’s then-colleagues at JIHT RAS: Dmitry Solovyev and Vadim Sokotushchenko. The first pandemic year offered plenty of reasons to worry about the future, but the team of three power engineers turned “energologists” and one economist turned “energologist” also found grounds for optimism. Using cross-wavelet analysis and neural-network modeling (JIHT RAS has a supercomputer called Fisher for such tasks), the authors arrived at the following forecast: “The results of the comparative forecast of solar activity, temperature anomalies, and the US and Russian economies suggest that from 2020 to 2050 a calmer situation is expected both in economic dynamics and in the dynamics of climate change.”

The “Conclusions” section reveals that, at the time of writing, the planet was “at the end of the stagnant 24th cycle, which in 2020 is giving way to the new 25th solar activity cycle, with an expected predominance of a new political cycle in the development of world civilization.” And while the authors generally stuck to the scientific terminology customary for analyzing correlations between numerical series and for mathematical modeling, cosmological imagery creeps into the conclusions:

New global challenges are associated not only with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity, geopolitical confrontation, the “bubbles” of the virtual economy, and the transformation of the structure of global energy, but also with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity [sic], as well as the influence of the Cosmos, for which the Earth is a sentient grain of sand on the waves of the cosmic ocean. The overlapping and intensification of all these factors point to an impending change in the World-System in the medium term. To what extent is the human mind, embodied in machines, social ties, books, and now digital information systems, capable of adapting to these natural and cosmic changes? Will we create a new, renewed noospheric and cosmic World-System, or will modern civilization follow the path of a widening break with its natural cosmic roots? Finding the answers to these questions is the most important task facing humanity today and the key to its future.

2022. How the Star Ancestors of Russian Hyperborea “Fertilized” the Earth’s Film

The year 2022 disproved the forecast Klepach and his team had made in their 2020 paper about a relatively calm global situation in the new phase of solar activity. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the confrontation between Russia and Europe, and the coalition of Western countries escalated, and new wars and conflicts broke out in various parts of the world.

In May 2022, Bushuev and Klepach released a text titled “Energy-Information Cosmism of Russia.” Russian civilization, the authors wrote, “occupies not only a special place in the history of Eurasia and the whole world, but also bears clearly pronounced features of a cosmoplanetary world. The hypothesis of the Aryan origin of many peoples of the northern continent (for all the debatable and controversial nature of various racial theories) confirms our special relationship with the cosmos as the ‘ancestral home’ of all russkie (by language) and all rossiyane (by spirit)” [ethnic Russians and citizens of Russia, respectively — T-invariant]. Bushuev and Klepach go on to quote Alexander Tulupov’s book The Clan of the North: Russian Hyperboreans, written in the genre of “Russian fantasy”: “Man traces his roots to his ancestors, but the roots of all that exists lie in the heavens”:

Nature (priroda), kinship unity (rodovoe edinstvo), homeland (rodina) — these are words sharing a common root, reflecting our deep essence, which goes back to the times of Arctida and Hyperborea… this is our earthly oikoumene, our habitat, our Eurasian home, “designed and built” according to cosmoplanetary laws and proportions. And Russia is what has come down to us as an inheritance both from the ancient cosmic settlers and from the pre-pagan tribes.

Another passage from the article is worth quoting — on how, in the authors’ view, this Eurasian Hyperborea came into being:

The earthly oikoumene… was settled by “migrants” from various star systems: the yellow race in Lemuria came from the constellation Leo, the black race in Africa from Sirius, and the white race in the polar expanses of Arctida from the Great Bear. It is no accident that this constellation (hyper — great; bor — bear) became our cosmic symbol, and the entire territory of the settled northern lands came to be called Hyperborea. These “migrants” did not fly to us on physical spaceships; they “fertilized” the Earth’s film holographically (in the form of plasma-like “angels”), giving rise here to a generation of intelligent Aryans. Representatives of the various races have preserved their original cosmic genes, inherited from their stellar progenitors.

Notably, this article was published in the journal Economic Strategies, issued by the autonomous nonprofit Institute for Economic Strategies, which is on the Higher Attestation Commission’s first-category list of peer-reviewed journals [the official Russian register of journals approved for publishing dissertation research — T-invariant]. By the time the article came out, Andrei Klepach had already been chief economist and deputy chairman of VEB.RF for eight years. He was also the academic director and chairman of the board of the VEB.RF Institute.

2025. Galactic Walls and Geotories in Space, Siberia, and the Far East

In recent years, Andrei Klepach has published several articles on the development of territories in Russia and, more broadly, in Eurasia. Among them was an entirely mainstream paper on spatial economics, “Space as a Factor of Economic Development,” which appeared in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2025. That same year, several publications came out on so-called “geotories” [a coinage from “geo” and “territory” — T-invariant] (see 1, 2). Klepach borrowed the term from his co-author Bushuev. To mark his 85th birthday, Bushuev released the six-volume series Energy of Russia (2025). In the sixth volume (Energy Cosmism of Russia), he published a chapter titled “Geotories as Earthly Analogues of Cosmic Structures,” in which he laid out a theory of how cosmic processes influence terrestrial phenomena, drawing on the works of the biophysicist and Russian cosmist Alexander Chizhevsky and the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (read it starting on page 393).

The cosmos and its objects, such as galaxies, stars, and planets, are characterized by vortex-like motions and structures. Galactic walls are cosmic structures resembling the interweaving of neurons in the human cerebral cortex. Vortices play an important role in the distribution of energy and matter in space, ensuring dynamic equilibrium and sustainable development. Spiral galaxies rotate in a vortex-like manner — for example, the galaxy M74 in the constellation Pisces, located approximately 30 million light-years (9.2 million parsecs) from Earth. Geotories can be viewed as “vortices” on the Earth’s surface, where natural resources and energy potentials are concentrated and redistributed. Like cosmic vortices, geotories ensure the cyclical use of energy and resources, supporting the economic and social development of the surrounding regions. Geotories play an important role in the infrastructural representation of Eurasia, since they are territories with special conditions for human life and activity. They are often remote and sparsely populated regions where access to energy, transport, and information links is limited.

From the Nooscope to the Noosphere Economy

At least two more people at the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise took part in developing the theory of a “cosmoplanetary civilization.” What’s more, each of them has his own, probably competing, “theory of everything.” Both hold the title of advisor at the Institute.

Oleg Dobrocheev. Photo: Oleg Dobrocheev’s personal website

Oleg Dobrocheev, for one, has spent many years developing a “wave hypothesis of life,” and on top of that he offers his own concept of Russia’s development and a forecast of its future. The theory currently goes by the name “Fifth Russia,” and back in 2006 Dobrocheev published a book of the same title. On his website, Dobrocheev presents himself as a leading research fellow at the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, lists numerous other titles, and makes a point of noting that he is the author of “seven books, a Calendar of Changes, and more than 200 articles on turbulence, history, and economics.” Most recently, he described his “wave” theory in an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in August 2026.

Valeriy Muntiyan. Photo: St. Petersburg State University of Economics website

The other advisor, Valeriy Muntiyan, can’t match Dobrocheev in the scope of his theories but outdoes him in the scope of his career. Muntiyan is from Odesa and is even a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In Ukraine, he previously served as deputy minister of defense (December 2003–October 2004) and deputy minister of economy (2007–2009; his interview after stepping down can be read here). His main academic affiliation today is the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University, where he holds a professorship. In recent years, Muntiyan has been developing a theory of the noosphere economy; for example, two of his articles were included in a book published by Moscow State University in 2022.

The roles Dobrocheev and Muntiyan play at VEB.RF are unclear, whereas Andrei Klepach’s role in shaping Russia’s economic policy was far more visible for many years. In that sense, his drift toward alternative theories is genuinely a matter of public concern. That said, Putin’s entourage has traditionally included plenty of people who subscribe to pseudoscientific theories, among them Kremlin Chief of Staff Anton Vaino with his nooscope and Mikhail Kovalchuk, who has accused the West of creating “service people.”

Klepach (whose h-index in the RSCI core [the core collection of the Russian Science Citation Index — T-invariant] is 10) publishes articles and monographs featuring cosmist and “energological” theories alongside solid expert work in academic journals. And for at least six years, neither his colleagues in the academic community nor the leadership of Russia’s largest state corporation paid any attention to the economist’s drift into cosmism.

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“Andrei Klepach belongs to the group of economists who, from the early 1990s, were critical of the liberal market reforms of that era. Unlike Soviet academicians (such as Leonid Abalkin and a few others), he didn’t try to argue with Yegor Gaidar and the other reformers in the media. He worked with numbers and tried to use data to talk to the people who were actually implementing economic policy,” says Andrei Yakovlev, a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin who served for many years as vice rector of HSE University, describing the economist. “In 1998, Klepach briefly became director of the Central Bank’s research department, and then, together with former Central Bank deputy chairman Sergei Aleksashenko, he founded the ‘Development Center’ economic research foundation. For a long time, it was an expert center independent of the state, including financially. It produced a huge amount of analysis that was in demand not only by the government but also by actual businesses. Aleksashenko was always a liberal, while Klepach leaned more toward dirigiste views, with a strong emphasis on structural and industrial policy, but he always considered the role of the private sector very important. And when Herman Gref invited him to the Ministry of Economic Development in 2004, arguing, ‘Well, you keep criticizing us — so come and try to implement your ideas here,’ Klepach joined the civil service precisely for that purpose — to do something for the country. As far as I know, he still commands great respect in industry, including the defense sector, because he really did try to do a lot of useful things. At the same time, he always argued with his bosses and said what he thought. Many people may not have liked that, but he was respected. He left government service in 2014 — the formal order was signed in June 2014, but, as was reported at the time, the decision had been made in March. I think it was connected with Crimea, since Klepach, who dealt extensively with the defense industry, was never a supporter of war. Nevertheless, VEB gave him a prestigious position as deputy chairman and board member. But he was always an awkward person to deal with: when something had to be decided, it was hard to ‘cut a deal’ with him, and so he was later shunted off to do research at the separately created VEB Institute. Klepach understood and spoke about the dead ends of the existing model a very long time ago — before the war and before COVID. And he raised them many times at internal government meetings, at the Nikitsky Club, and at similar expert forums — though never linking them personally to Putin. Still, he believed it was necessary to stay within the system in order to do something for the country — as was once the case with the ‘bourgeois specialists’ or ‘military specialists’ [prerevolutionary experts and former tsarist officers recruited by the Bolsheviks — T-invariant] in the 1920s, who worked for the Soviet government not for the sake of positions but for the sake of the country. It seems to me that his shift in worldview and his fascination with strange theories in recent years may be explained by the fact that understanding the dead ends of Putin’s system, together with the impossibility of doing or influencing anything, is exactly what led him to cosmism. It’s a purely psychological defense mechanism against being unable to change the reality around him.”

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A T-invariant source who knows Klepach well and worked in the Russian government at the same time as he did, though in a different ministry, explains the transformation this way: “He’s basically a nerd, and has been since childhood. But in recent years, a lot of nerds have been stewing in their own juices — they’re not allowed into international [scientific] conferences. Nerds crave depth. But globally — they’re banned. So the nerds drift toward the fringe. The fringe, Dugin, and all that stuff — it becomes the only outlet for thinking people.”

“At the Ministry of Economic Development, Andrei Klepach was treated with respect. He had a reputation as someone willing to make sensible compromises but not willing to play the ‘yes, sir, whatever you say’ game,” recalls the head of one expert group who worked with Russia’s economic ministries for many years.

“How could such a drift have happened? Technocratic types, IT people, often lack a humanities culture. And the reverse is true too, by the way — humanities people may lack a mathematical culture. And technocrats like that sometimes don’t understand the simplest things in life. Every other one of them has these blind spots. Scratch a technocrat and you’ll find all sorts of surprises,” the T-invariant source reflects. “It’s just that Klepach is a public figure who has been speaking out for decades. Unfortunately, he was unlucky: he publicly waded into a subject he knows nothing about, and the result is fantastical nonsense. That makes you feel sorry both for him and for all of us, because our society hasn’t built barriers to keep such things from being published as ‘scientific findings’ at all, so that they stay in the inner worlds of people who lack competence in these areas and are uncritical about the limits of their own incompetence. It’s astonishing that people with intellect and professional expertise in their own field generate ideas and constructs based on primitive conspiracy theories and magical thinking. Outsiders who aren’t part of their circle can’t even imagine what delusional ideas often get voiced there. And if you express any doubt, they’re more likely to feel sorry for you: you don’t understand simple things — for example, that the cosmos rules us.”

In the source’s view, the Klepach phenomenon isn’t about his fascination with mythological cosmist ideas per se: “it could just as well have been conspiracy theories instead of harmless cosmos.”

“The phenomenon is that technocrats haven’t received a solid education and grounding in the humanities — and there’s no expert barrier to the spread of such texts and ‘ideas.’ Look at Western, especially American, higher education.

“At good universities, the liberal arts principle usually applies to undergraduate programs: students get their specialization but are also required to earn ‘credits’ outside their major. STEM students take humanities and social science courses, while humanities students take natural sciences and math. Klepach did study mathematics, of course, but a bit of critical thinking probably wouldn’t have hurt,” the T-invariant source believes.

What Do the Monograph’s Authors Themselves Say?

At the time of publication, T-invariant had not received comments from either Klepach or Bushuev, but did receive a brief comment from their regular co-author Dmitry Solovyev:

These publications were prepared at V. V. Bushuev’s request. My role was limited to designing the illustrations and technical editing of the text. The principal author of the concept and text of all these publications was V. V. Bushuev. As far as I know, these are popular science publications. Obviously, they are not used in the work of government bodies. I don’t know what A. N. Klepach’s role was; I don’t know him personally, but I think he is not the author of these works either. V. V. Bushuev included him among the co-authors for reasons of his own.

T-invariant has sent inquiries to the personal email addresses of Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, as well as to the VEB.RF Institute and the press office of the state corporation VEB.RF, and is awaiting a response.

Update, October 9, 2026. The title and abstract of the monograph On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization have been replaced with the authors’ own English translations.

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The post Simply Out of This World: How Andrei Klepach Made His Way Through the Thorns of Structural and Monetary Factors to the Stars appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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