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Vice President Vance said Ukraine is a “partner” but has some “divergent interests” from the U.S. amid tensions between Washington and Kyiv. “Well, they’re certainly a partner in some ways, but I think we, you know, have some divergent interests from time to time,” the vice president said in an interview with 2WAY, talking about…
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “should be careful” with “reckless” comments about the U.S. slowing down Starlink. “President Trump and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio have categorically said that no one in the Trump administration did that. And I think it is very reckless for President Zelensky to make…
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday called for President Trump to restore sanctions on Russia and condemned his recent diesel agreement with President Vladimir Putin. “President Trump’s decision to waive sanctions against Russia as Putin continues his brutal war of aggression against Ukraine dishonors the legacy of the late Senator Lindsey Graham and is…
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Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on Russia overnight Sunday, striking a major oil terminal in St. Petersburg and a data center, knocking out power to thousands of residents and causing fires. Russian state media described the attack as “one of the biggest drone attacks of the year,” according to a translation from Russian. One…
Ukrainian attacks set an oil export terminal ablaze in St. Petersburg on Sunday, as Kyiv launched more than 1,000 drones across Russia in one of its largest ever aerial bombardments.
Zelenskyy called Trump's decision unfortunate but avoided directly criticizing the U.S. leader despite deepening tensions between Ukraine and Washington in recent days.
John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, said Thursday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lecturing the president won’t end well for him, “given Trump’s difficult political position here at home.” Appearing on NewsNation’s “On Balance,” Bolton told host Leland Vittert that Zelensky’s criticism of Trump would “end well” for him. “Let’s face it, everything…
The deal is being criticized by both Republicans and Democrats as fueling Russia's war against Ukraine, violating existing U.S. laws and drawing the U.S. closer to Russia.
The German parliament’s recognition of its country’s historical responsibility towards Ukraine marks a significant reassessment of a post-war political tradition that frequently placed Moscow at the centre of reconciliation over Nazi atrocities committed across the Soviet Union.
Germany’s Bundestag has formally recognised the country’s particular historical responsibility towards Ukraine for atrocities committed during the Nazi occupation, adopting parliamentary resolutions commemorating the 85th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre near Kyiv.
The decision, taken on 9 October, has implications beyond historical remembrance. For decades, Germany’s responsibility for the destruction inflicted on the Soviet Union during the Second World War was frequently interpreted through its relationship with Russia. Moscow occupied a privileged position in German efforts at reconciliation, although some of the Nazi occupation’s worst atrocities took place in territories belonging to present-day Ukraine and Belarus.
The Bundestag’s parliamentary debate and resolutions reflect a different emphasis. Germany’s historical obligations are now being connected explicitly to Ukraine’s sovereignty and its defence against Russia’s invasion, challenging an interpretation of the past that had long influenced Berlin’s approach towards Moscow.
How Russia became the principal beneficiary of German historical responsibility
Following German reunification, reconciliation with Russia became a central element of Berlin’s eastern policy. The Soviet Union’s immense wartime losses, officially estimated at approximately 27 million people, were frequently invoked to explain Germany’s special obligation to maintain constructive relations with Moscow.
That historical argument became intertwined with political and economic considerations, contributing to the belief that Russia should remain closely integrated into Europe’s security and economic arrangements, even as relations with its neighbours deteriorated.
The difficulty lay in the frequent conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany invaded a multinational state, not the present-day Russian Federation. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Jews and numerous other peoples suffered under an occupation whose policies included mass murder, starvation, deportation and the systematic destruction of communities.
Ukraine was among the principal territories where the German war of annihilation unfolded. The Holocaust by bullets, the destruction of entire settlements, the exploitation of occupied agricultural regions and the deportation of civilians for forced labour were central features of Nazi rule there.
Nevertheless, German political discourse often approached this history primarily through the framework of German-Russian reconciliation. The suffering of Ukraine and Belarus was acknowledged, but neither country occupied a comparable position in Berlin’s strategic thinking.
This imbalance has been examined by German scholars of foreign policy, who have argued that the historical justification for rapprochement with Russia sometimes obscured the distinct wartime experiences of other former Soviet republics.
Babyn Yar and the geography of Nazi extermination
The anniversary of Babyn Yar provides a particularly direct illustration of the historical problem.
On 29 and 30 September 1941, German SS and police units, with assistance from local collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women and children in a ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was among the largest single mass shootings of the Holocaust.
Killings continued at the site throughout the German occupation. Approximately 100,000 people were murdered there, including Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and other civilians persecuted by the Nazi authorities.
Babyn Yar was not an isolated atrocity. Similar mass executions occurred across occupied Ukraine, while millions of people suffered under German military occupation. The country’s experience formed a substantial part of the wider catastrophe conventionally remembered in Germany as the war against the Soviet Union.
The geographical distinction matters because the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 did not transfer the historical experiences of its constituent peoples exclusively to Russia. Nor did Moscow’s position as the principal diplomatic successor to the USSR confer ownership of their wartime suffering.
Recognition of Ukraine’s separate experience therefore requires more than acknowledging the location of Nazi crimes. It involves reconsidering the political assumptions that allowed Russia to become Germany’s principal partner in commemorating a history shared by several nations.
Historical responsibility acquires a contemporary meaning
In its resolution on the Babyn Yar anniversary, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU and its Social Democratic coalition partner explicitly connected remembrance of Nazi crimes with Germany’s present obligations towards Ukraine.
The document declares that responsibility for German atrocities does not end with commemorating their victims. It requires opposition to antisemitism, racism, historical revisionism and imperialist violence.
The parliamentary motion calls for continued political, economic, financial, humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine, together with support for its European integration and efforts to secure the return of children transferred to Russia.
The development does not mean that Germany has only now recognised Ukrainian victims of Nazi persecution. German officials have previously acknowledged responsibility towards Ukraine alongside Russia and Belarus. In 2016, then foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier explicitly referred to the suffering of all three countries in an address marking the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
What has changed is the political weight attached to that recognition. The historical relationship with Moscow can no longer be treated as the principal expression of Germany’s obligations arising from the war, particularly when Russia is conducting a war of territorial conquest against another country devastated by Nazi aggression.
The consequences for German policy towards Moscow
The reassessment also exposes a contradiction in Germany’s earlier Russia policy.
Historical responsibility was among the arguments used to defend engagement with Moscow, including economic cooperation and efforts to accommodate Russian security concerns. Such reasoning remained influential even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The Nord Stream pipeline projects exemplified the wider policy of maintaining substantial economic ties with Russia despite objections from Ukraine and several Central and Eastern European governments. Those projects had commercial and geopolitical motivations, but they developed within a political culture in which reconciliation with Moscow carried particular historical significance.
Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 fundamentally undermined that approach. Germany subsequently expanded military assistance to Ukraine, while President Steinmeier acknowledged serious errors in his previous assessment of relations with Moscow.
The Bundestag’s latest resolution adds a historical dimension to that policy correction. Rather than regarding restraint towards Russia as the principal lesson of Germany’s wartime conduct, parliament has articulated a responsibility to assist Ukraine in preserving its independence.
The two positions are not necessarily incompatible as matters of historical remembrance. Germany retains an obligation to commemorate Russian victims of Nazism, just as it does Ukrainian, Belarusian and other victims. The distinction concerns whether responsibility for past atrocities should influence contemporary policy towards the Russian state when that state itself is violating another nation’s sovereignty.
That question has become increasingly important as German political parties debate the duration and extent of military assistance to Kyiv. Calls for renewed accommodation with Moscow continue to feature in domestic politics, including among those opposed to further weapons deliveries.
The Bundestag’s recognition of Ukraine’s particular historical experience does not resolve those disputes or establish a new military commitment. It does, however, challenge one of the historical arguments that shaped Germany’s previous relationship with Russia.
The significance of the Babyn Yar anniversary therefore extends beyond the commemoration of crimes committed in 1941. It concerns a belated adjustment in Germany’s understanding of where its wartime responsibilities lie, and the extent to which those responsibilities should inform its conduct towards Ukraine today.
More than 50 Russian companies could default on their bonds this year, the most since 2009, a rating-agency analyst told Russian newspaper Izvestia, which reported it on 6 October.
Russia's wartime economy is straining under high interest rates, and the budget is too: the 2026 deficit has nearly doubled from the earlier forecast to a record $88 billion, with more deficits planned for the next three years as Moscow raises taxes to fund the war and plans its biggest defense budget since the full-scale invasion began.
A default is a situation in which a company cannot make promised interest payments to investors on time or repay borrowed money. If a payment is not made by the agreed deadline, the company becomes delinquent, which under certain conditions is recognized as a default.
So far this year, 20 companies have defaulted for the first time, compared with 24 in all of 2025, said Mikhail Nikonov of the Expert RA rating agency. Most of the companies that missed payments are small issuers of high-yield bonds, Izvestia reported.
In 2026, Russian companies have missed payments totaling 41 billion rubles (about $490 million), compared with 34 billion rubles (about $410 million) the previous year, according to investment bank Sinara.
Russia faces a new wave of corporate defaults
By the end of 2026, the number of Russian companies unable to service their ruble-denominated debt on time could reach 40–50, the highest level since 2010, said Pavel Zholobov, junior managing director at the NRA rating agency.
The number of bond defaults in 2026 has already reached its highest level in a decade, Zholobov said. Similar figures were recorded in the mid-2010s: in 2014, 35 companies missed payments; in 2015, 52 did so; and in 2016, there were 44 issuers. This occurred in part after Western sanctions were imposed on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and its war in Donbas, as well as amid a halving of oil prices and a sharp weakening of the ruble.
So-called "little green men" (the Russian occupation troops comprised special forces who removed insignia, wear face masks to prevent identification and call themselves a "Crimean self-defense force") surround a Ukrainian military base in Perevalne, Crimea, during the Russian annexation of the peninsula in February-March 2014.
There were more defaults only in 2009. At the time, amid the fallout from the global financial crisis, more than 100 issuers faced payment problems, while the volume of distressed debt reached nearly 200 billion rubles, Zholobov noted.
High interest rates put pressure on companies
This time, the main reason for companies' difficulties in making bond payments has been the prolonged period of high interest rates, which has continued since 2023. Companies are raising financing at high interest rates but are unable to refinance their debt on more favorable terms, explained Ekaterina Sidorova, head of the Foreign Exchange, Commodities and Debt Markets Department at SberCIB Investment Research.
At the same time, the situation does not yet resemble a systemic debt crisis: defaults are primarily being recorded among companies with low credit ratings and high debt burdens, Sidorova said.
If a company fails to repay bond debt, it is given 10 business days to meet its obligations. If it fails to do so, the company may offer investors a restructuring—for example, by postponing payments in exchange for a higher interest rate.
The number of defaults will remain high in 2027, Sidorova believes.
High interest rates were a response to accelerating inflation in Russia. Domestic demand was outpacing production, Russia's Central Bank said in October 2023. Sanctions over the war and rising defense spending had also hit the economy and the ruble, which had lost about 25% against the dollar that year. The bank raised its key rate from 7.5% in the first half of 2023 to 15% by the fall.
Ukraine targets Russia's oil industry to weaken its war economy
Ukraine is also seeking to weaken Russia's economy as part of efforts to reduce its ability to finance the war. In particular, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said strikes on oil refineries are aimed at "bleeding the Russian war machine" and destroying its military and economic potential. According to the ministry, the attacks have knocked out more than 51% of Russia's oil refining capacity.
In the first half of July, Russian oil refineries processed about 3.9 million barrels of oil per day—the lowest level since March 2005. Due to the production cuts, Moscow was also forced to restrict fuel exports.
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