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 opposition Greens separately submitted a resolution centred on Germany’s historical responsibility towards Ukraine, advocating greater attention to the German occupation in historical education, research and cooperation between memorial institutions.

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.

Every day is scary in Gaza; Trump's Board of Peace makes the future scarier ■ Palestinian killed in West Bank ■ Jewish supremacist parties surge in Israel ■ Hooray for Navi Pillay!

El exanalista de la CIA especializado en Rusia, George Beebe, ha lanzado una advertencia que las cancillerías europeas pretenden ignorar: Kiev está perdiendo la guerra, y los líderes occidentales, incapaces de admitir el fracaso de su estrategia, podrían convertir la derrota en una catástrofe nuclear.

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George Beebe no es un adversario declarado de Occidente. Exanalista de la CIA especializado en Rusia y actual director de estrategia global del Instituto Quincy, conoce la situación rusa desde dentro. Su análisis, publicado por Greater Eurasia, merece aún más atención porque proviene de una fuente incuestionablemente sesgada a favor de Moscú.

Su diagnóstico es inequívoco: la narrativa oficial de una Rusia «estratégicamente derrotada» se está desmoronando sobre el terreno. El ejército ucraniano se encuentra bajo una presión creciente, especialmente por la campaña aérea rusa. Esta realidad militar crea un doble problema para los gobiernos europeos: no solo su estrategia se está volviendo insostenible, sino que además está generando consecuencias políticas internas cada vez más graves.

George Beebe es categórico: una guerra convencional directa entre Europa y Rusia pondría al descubierto profundas debilidades estructurales. Los países europeos carecen de fuerzas terrestres suficientes y presentan importantes deficiencias en logística, transporte, defensa aérea e inteligencia en el campo de batalla. La mayor parte de la infraestructura militar europea depende de Estados Unidos, especialmente en materia de inteligencia y selección de objetivos.

«Si Estados Unidos se mantuviera al margen de una guerra convencional europea con Rusia, Europa se enfrentaría a importantes desventajas militares. Sin embargo, si Estados Unidos interviniera directamente, el peligro sería fundamentalmente diferente, ya que un conflicto directo entre la OTAN y Rusia podría convertirse rápidamente en nuclear. Un conflicto de este tipo sería extraordinariamente destructivo y no tendría vencedor».

Esta ecuación es ineludible: Europa no puede defenderse sola ni soportar las consecuencias de una intervención estadounidense. Está atrapada por su propia dependencia.

El núcleo del análisis de George Beebe reside en lo que él denomina la «trampa rusa»: un sesgo cognitivo occidental que transforma una espiral de seguridad en una profecía autocumplida.

Occidente considera a Rusia una potencia expansionista que debe ser contenida mediante una creciente presión militar. Pero si el conflicto es en realidad una espiral de escalada donde cada bando interpreta las acciones del otro como una amenaza, entonces una mayor presión produce mecánicamente una mayor escalada. Más armas, más despliegues, una retórica más agresiva conducen a respuestas rusas, que a su vez exigen más medidas occidentales.

«El peligro reside en que una política occidental destinada a disuadir a Rusia en realidad exacerbe el problema de seguridad subyacente».

geopoliticarugiente.com

By Philip GIRALDI

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The United States competes with Israel for the “Most Hated” Distinction

It was another horrific week in Washington with President Donald Trump actually succeeding in coming out with an apparently improvised comment that equaled or maybe even exceeded his ghastly performance at the United Nations where he speculated over whether he should “annihilate” Iran and drive it back into the Stone Age. It would seem that ninety plus million dead Persians would satisfy Donald’s blood lust when it comes to killing innocent civilians, but the latest musing by our beloved leader had him addressing a campaign rally in Nebraska, where he appeared to be declaring that he might well consider wanting to continue the war against Iran even if the price to pay from the Iranians were to be retaliation consisting of eliminating some of our cities. He said “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe, and it’s going to be over with very soon. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.”

Trump clearly saw the whole thing as some kind of quid pro quo expecting that even Californians would consider the price to pay worth it if it kept Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but he failed to make any reasonable connection between the nonexistent weapon and the good to come out of annihilation of millions of Americans. The irony is, of course, that since Iran has no nukes and nor is it even developing that resource, a point generally made by US intelligence, it could not in any event destroy either or both of the West Coast cities. But then again, Trump is not given much to deep thinking and what he tends to say is what is roiling around among the three brain cells that might actually be functioning in his oversize head at any moment.

Interestingly, the video recording the gathering shows the Nebraska crowd of MAGA supporters cheering the exchange, seemingly unaware that the war never needed to be fought, that Iran was not and is not any military threat to the United States, and that the whole bloody thing could be ended by Trump repeating his frequent declaration of “victory” before ordering all the troops home and putting an end to it. That way no one “loses” and no more innocents have to die but somehow that does not appear to be an option circulating in the White House.

In the wake of the comment, both California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Diego Republican Mayor Todd Gloria called out President Trump for his willing to see Americans die in large numbers due to bad policies coming out of Washington. Newsom wrote on social media how “After sending the National Guard to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Gloria added “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

The White House inevitably pushed back in support of Trump’s comments, with communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media how “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.” Interestingly, Trump’s communications director, who interpreted the comment backwards by claiming falsely that the president had “stopped” an Iranian nuke, was incapable of understanding what Trump actually said and instead invented what he might have been wanting to say. All of which explains why the White House is as dysfunctional as it is.

Beyond that, something at least veering towards a bit of constructive policy did take place on September 30^th when the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq, which it has been de facto occupying for the past 23 years. The withdrawal, which took place after multiple requests by the Iraqi government, appears to be due to the desire to move US troops out of the effective range of some of the Iranian short range-missiles and drones which could easily reach Iraq. The soldiers and airmen will be moving to next door Jordan which means they will still be near enough to intervene if the Iraqis become naughty and do anything that is not perceived as being in American “interests.”

Some will recall that back in January 2020, then President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qasim Soleimani who had just landed in Baghdad Airport to join in peace talks between his country and the Iraqis. Peace talks are not the sort of thing that Trumpists are good at, particularly if they involve actual or potential enemies of Israel, so Soleimani had to be stopped. The Iraqis are certainly aware that the departure of US soldiers does not mean an end to American intervention, which can indeed be at the point of a gun but which might also be through sanctions and other less kinetic means.

All of which is to suggest that the game is not over yet and Trump is quite capable of doing something very stupid in an attempt to salvage whatever remains from his reputation. What is behind a lot of this nonsense is the evil circle involving Trump himself and his good friends in Israel. Make no mistake that Israel is dedicated to becoming “Greater Israel” while also eliminating its potential enemies in Asia and Africa. And, unlike Iran, it is actually nuclear armed thanks to the material and technology that it stole from the United States before killing President John F Kennedy who tried to stop them. And the witless Donald will do everything in his power to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be reelected, be it because he is being blackmailed or because he loves the man so much. Be that as it may, Trump will cooperate fully with Netanyahu or whoever succeeds him, no matter what. So too will there be the usual consensus on doing everything to please the Jewish state coming from the usual crowd of Israel firsters in Congress, in the mainstream media and among the Foundations that have come to rely on the money and “respect” that comes from inhabiting the same space as those who are beloved by Zion.

For those who have not yet aware of just how deeply the Zionist activists have inserted themselves in the body politic, I would greatly recommend an article put out by the highly respectable Quincy Institute that just appeared this past week written by Kelley Vlahos, the Editor in Chief of Responsible Statecraft. It provides the sordid details of how the Israel Lobby backed up by Jewish billionaires has been able to create and then subvert a conservative movement that originally appeared to support American interests to make them instead do Israel’s bidding. She describes how “The annual confab, [NatCon 2026] ostensibly launched for American conservatives in 2019, is in Jerusalem this week, largely focused on shoring up US support for the Jewish state.” If Israel is successful, it will bring about a proposed US-Israeli integration at the Pentagon and take its place as a “partner” of the United States in defense matters as well as in foreign policy. Make no mistake, Israel will bleed us dry and then discard our carcass without even a backward glance. It will be the end of our country. President Donald J Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have done much to move this process along and it is to them and the cowards in Congress and the media that we the owe the deep hole that we as a once-upon-a-time proud and independent people will soon find ourselves in.

Original article:  www.unz.com

The more technology distances the actor, the more responsibility must increase.

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From person to target

What becomes of humanity when technology becomes capable of recognising, classifying, tracking and ultimately killing human beings without those carrying out the strikes ever having seen them? My friend Mohammad Reza Dehshiri asked this very question, and his answer is a powerful one. The danger, he writes, is not artificial intelligence but artificial inhumanity – that is, the possibility that machines will become more accurate precisely as humans cease to feel responsible for what those machines do in their name.

With this article, I am launching a series that takes Dehshiri’s analysis as its starting point and attempts to take it further. If the problem is ‘artificial inhumanity’, the answer cannot lie in a ‘more ethical’ AI, as if ethics were a module to be installed as an afterthought to a system that has already been designed. We need to reclaim a category that technological jargon has rendered almost unmentionable: human intelligence, understood not as a remnant to be protected amidst the complexities of automation, but as a form of knowledge with its own distinct characteristics, which no increase in computing power can replace.

I shall call it Human Intelligence, and the ambiguity is deliberate. In intelligence service jargon, HUMINT refers to the oldest of the intelligence disciplines: that which relies on people, sources, languages and the patient frequenting of places. In philosophical terminology, the expression denotes the faculty of understanding. The thesis of this first contribution is that these two meanings now converge, and that their convergence has geopolitical implications that extend far beyond the debate on the ethics of weaponry.

We can describe the operational chain of contemporary warfare in seven stages: detect, identify, classify, predict, prioritise, target, strike. Each link can be technically refined without the sequence, taken as a whole, being morally refined. The resulting phenomenon is called the ‘datafication of human life’: the individual reduced to an identity, a location, a behavioural pattern, a threat score.

This is no abstraction. In April 2024, an investigation by Yuval Abraham for +972 Magazine and Local Call described ‘Lavender’, a system used by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza to assign tens of thousands of people a probability of affiliation with armed groups. According to internal sources cited in the investigation, the human verification of each name often amounted to no more than twenty seconds – the time needed to ascertain that the target was male. The Israeli Defence Forces have disputed this account and described Lavender as a database designed to support analysts. Even if one accepts the official version, however, the crux of the matter remains: a human operator was present, and their presence was not sufficient to transform the system’s recommendation into a judgement.

Cognitive psychology has a name for this phenomenon, automation bias: the tendency of those working with an automated system to treat its recommendations as a substitute for their own verification, and to fail to seek out the information that might contradict them. Back in 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum – who had built one of the first conversational programmes in history – already distinguished between the ability to calculate and the ability to judge, and argued that there are tasks that should not be entrusted to a computer even if the computer were capable of performing them. Half a century on, this distinction has become even more pressing. Computation works on what has already been translated into data. Judgement must decide whether that translation has been faithful.

Dehshiri drives the point home with four distinctions: technical precision is not ethical precision; accuracy is not justice; automation is not responsibility; technological superiority is not moral superiority. I would add a fifth, of an epistemic nature, upon which the others depend: correlation is not understanding. A machine-learning system recognises statistical patterns in a dataset. It does not know what a school is, because it does not know what a child is, and it does not even know that it does not know this.

L’iraniano cites an interesting case study: On 28 February 2026, in the early hours of the war, the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province, was struck several times during school hours. The figures provided by the Iranian authorities range between 150 and 175 deaths, the vast majority of whom were girls, along with dozens of teachers and a few parents; the district prosecutor put the final death toll at 156. Washington has never directly acknowledged its responsibility nor published the findings of the Pentagon’s investigation. Amnesty International has described the incident, at best, as a serious intelligence failure.

There is one detail, revealed by satellite imagery, which shifts the analysis from the moral to the factual plane. According to Western media, the school stood next to a naval base belonging to the Revolutionary Guards and had previously formed part of it; among the explanations circulating in US circles is that of out-of-date targeting data. If this hypothesis were confirmed, Minab would not be a case of a machine making a mistake, but of a database that had ceased to correspond to reality. The building had changed. The data had not.

No classification algorithm, however sophisticated, can detect that an old military building has become a school if no one has recorded the change. Everyone living in Minab knew this: the parents who took their daughters to school every morning, the schoolbus driver, the teachers. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that HUMINT gathers and that remote warfare tends to regard as superfluous, because it is slow, costly and difficult to scale. Based on publicly available sources, US responsibility appears highly probable, whilst the exact circumstances remain unclear and confidence on this point is low: a database error, a classification error, or a conscious acceptance of the risk. The three hypotheses, however, all converge on the same question. Who, prior to the strike, checked whether there were people in that building?

Beyond ‘human-in-the-loop’

The international debate has long been content with the principle of human-in-the-loop, whereby a human being is part of the decision-making loop.

This formula is insufficient: a person may be present in the loop yet merely rubber-stamp the algorithm’s recommendation. He proposes replacing it with a more demanding principle, which he calls humanity-in-command: the effective ability to question, reject, override and halt the automated process.

The history of the Cold War offers two examples that clarify what this means in practice. On 26 September 1983, the Soviet early-warning system Oko signalled the launch of five ballistic missiles from the United States. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, dismissed the alarm as a false alarm and did not report it as an ongoing attack, reasoning that a first American strike would never consist of just five missiles. He was right: the satellite had mistaken the sun’s reflection off the clouds for missile launches. Twenty-one years earlier, on 27 October 1962, in the Caribbean Sea, the Soviet submarine B-59, isolated and under fire from signal depth charges, was on the verge of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo. The launch required the consent of the three senior officers on board, and Vasily Arkhipov refused to give it.

In neither case did the man approve a recommendation from the system. He contradicted it. And he did not do so because he had more data: indeed, the data were the problem. He did so because he knew how to ask himself a question that no procedure required him to ask, namely whether what he was seeing made sense in the context of everything else he knew about the world. Petrov was familiar with American nuclear doctrine; Archipov knew the difference between an attack and a threat. It is this ability to compare the signal with the bigger picture, the detail with what is plausible, that I call Human Intelligence. It is worth noting that the Dena was sunk by a submarine. We do not know what its officers were asked, nor what scope they had for judgement.

This proposal needs to be clarified, as there is a risk of reducing it to a generic humanistic appeal. Human Intelligence, as I understand it, is structured across three distinct levels, each of which marks a structural – rather than contingent – limit of artificial intelligence.

The first level is epistemic. The scholastic tradition distinguished between intellectus, the act by which the mind immediately grasps a truth, and ratio, the discursive process of moving from one element to another: for Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 79, a. 8), the two are not distinct faculties but aspects of a single intellect, in which reasoning begins with an understanding and returns to an understanding. Current machine learning systems realise a ratio of unprecedented power, capable of inferring, combining and predicting on scales inaccessible to the human mind. They lack the aspect of intellectus, that is, a grasp of the meaning of what they process. This is a philosophical thesis and must be presented as such, but it has precise practical consequences: a system devoid of understanding cannot know when its own model of the world has become false.

The second aspect is practical. Prudentia, in the Thomist definition, is right reason applied to action, and its specific task consists in applying the universal principle to the particular case. The machine generalises: its value lies in mapping the individual case back to a class. Prudence does the opposite, because it must recognise what, in this particular case, falls outside the class. War, which is the realm of the singular and the unforeseen, is the arena where this difference carries the most weight. The Vatican’s Antiqua et nova note of January 2025 took up this line of thought, emphasising the embodied and relational nature of human intelligence and its irreducibility to a mere processing function.

The third level is relational, and it is here that philosophical meaning meets that of the intelligence services. Sherman Kent, who effectively founded the field of intelligence studies in the post-war United States, defined it first and foremost as knowledge, even before organising or activity. HUMINT is the form of this knowledge that passes through the other as a person: someone who speaks their language, knows their customs, can read a neighbourhood, and can distinguish a festival from a rally. Over the last three decades, the major powers have progressively shifted resources towards technical disciplines, from signals intelligence to satellite surveillance, right through to data fusion platforms. Minab illustrates the cost of this imbalance.

None of this implies a rejection of technology. Human Intelligence does not stand in opposition to AI in the same way that a manual stands in opposition to a mechanic. It establishes a hierarchy: the algorithm as a tool subservient to a judgement it cannot produce on its own. And from this it derives a principle, formulated by Dehshiri, which deserves to become an operational criterion: the more technology distances the actor from the consequences of their own actions, the more the conscious responsibility of the decision-maker must increase, not decrease.

Geopolitically speaking

So far, the issue might seem to be one of moral philosophy. It is not merely that. The distribution of algorithmic warfare capability is a distribution of power, and the rules governing it will be written – if they are written at all – by those with an interest in limiting them as little as possible.

The state of international law confirms this. The group of government experts established under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has been discussing lethal autonomous weapons systems since 2017 without having reached a binding instrument. In November 2023, the United States promoted a political declaration on the responsible military use of AI, which is by definition non-binding; in December of the same year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first resolution dedicated to these systems, whilst the International Committee of the Red Cross has been calling since 2021 for a ban on unpredictable autonomous systems and those designed to target human beings. In June 2024, speaking at the G7 summit in Borgo Egnazia, Pope Francis called for no machine ever to be placed in a position to decide on a person’s life. The gap between these positions and the reality on the battlefields of 2026 is measured in casualties.

There is also a deeper asymmetry. Those who control the data decide who is a target, and the victims of algorithmic warfare are largely found outside the West: in Gaza, Iran, the Sahel and Yemen. For states that do not produce the platforms or control their databases, human intelligence thus becomes a matter of sovereignty. A country that maintains linguistic expertise, regional knowledge and human intelligence networks retains its autonomy of judgement; a country that entrusts its worldview to systems designed elsewhere – often by private companies – surrenders it along with its data. In an order tending towards multipolarity, this distinction will separate the actors who judge from those who are judged.

This leads to a concrete proposal, which I shall develop in future articles. Alongside the general principle of meaningful human oversight, international humanitarian law could codify a specific obligation for human verification of the civil status of every fixed infrastructure included on a list of targets, with an expiry date beyond which the information becomes invalid and must be renewed using direct sources. This is a minimum standard. Applied to Minab, it would have required someone to ask whether that building was still what the records stated it to be.

Technology can determine how a weapon reaches its target, whilst it is up to humanity to decide whether that target should be struck. The question underlying all this is who, in practical terms, exercises that humanity, with what tools of knowledge and within which institutions. In Minab, someone should have known that there was a school there. The fact that nobody knew, or that nobody asked, is the point from which we must start again.

Il controllo iraniano sui passaggi strategici di Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb si trasforma in un’arma economica capace di influenzare i prezzi dell’energia, alimentare l’inflazione e condizionare le decisioni della Federal Reserve. Teheran dimostra così che la pressione militare e il controllo delle rotte petrolifere possono mettere in difficoltà Washington ben oltre il campo di battaglia.

Segue nostro Telegram.

Nei giorni scorsi, Kpler ha quantificato in almeno 16,5 milioni di barili al giorno l’ammontare medio raggiunto nel mese di settembre dalle esportazioni di petrolio dalla regione del Golfo, nell’ambito di graduale ritorno dei flussi sui livelli prebellici. Una quota significativa dell’output è transitata attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz, che la scorsa settimana ha registrato volumi medi di greggio in uscita superiori ai 14 milioni di barili al giorno segando un incremento di oltre il 210% rispetto al minimo di circa 4,5 milioni di barili giornalieri di media toccato nel mese di marzo.

Un risultato strabiliante, ascritto generalmente al danneggiamento e/o distruzione dei radar e dei sistemi di comunicazione iraniani situati nelle zone costiere ad opera delle forze statunitensi. Le operazioni di “bonifica” hanno posto le basi per l’instaurazione di un corridoio di navigazione a doppio senso a ridosso delle coste dell’Oman, di cui i mercantili si sono serviti per entrare nel Golfo Persico, imbarcare petrolio, riattraversare lo Stretto e trasferire il carico su navi in attesa al di fuori del passaggio marittimo, sotto la supervisione della Us Navy.

Di questa “rotta sicura” si è avvalsa anche l’Arabia Saudita, specialmente in seguito al danneggiamento in più punti dell’oleodotto East-West ad opera delle milizie irachene. La conduttura aveva assicurato a Riyadh la possibilità di convogliare parte rilevante (4-5 milioni di barili al giorno) della produzione petrolifera verso il porto di Yanbu, sul Mar Rosso, così da aggirare lo Stretto di Hormuz.

L’Iran, di contro, è stato tagliato fuori dal mercato petrolifero globale dal blocco navale statunitense, che accentua le pressioni economiche sulla Repubblica Islamica esercitate dalle sanzioni annunciate lo scorso agosto dal segretario al Tesoro Bessent.

La Repubblica Islamica, hanno concluso gran parte degli analisti, stava rapidamente perdendo il controllo sullo Stretto di Hormuz.

Lo scenario è cambiato radicalmente a partire dal 28 settembre, quando gli iraniani hanno ripreso le operazioni offensive contro le petroliere che si accingevano ad attraversare lo Stretto di Hormuz senza autorizzazione di Teheran. Kpler ha documentato almeno sette attacchi contro navi mercantili, di cui quattro avevano effettuato due o più viaggi di andata e ritorno attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz a partire da giugno. Nel novero degli obiettivi figurano due Very Large Crude Carrier (Vlcc) gestite dalla Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, in grado di trasportare fino a due milioni di barili di petrolio.

Il 3 ottobre, la divisione navale dei Pasdaran ha lanciato un chiaro avvertimento alle navi intenzionate a percorrere il corridoio allestito dagli Stati Uniti, minacciando di prenderle di mira e distruggerle. «Non fidatevi della Marina statunitense, non utilizzate assolutamente il corridoio meridionale e non mettete a rischio la vostra vita», recitava il messaggio radio trasmesso dalle Guardie Rivoluzionarie su un canale pubblico comunemente impiegato per la navigazione commerciale. Secondo gli specialisti, gli attacchi iraniani starebbero già producendo un impatto negativo, con i primi segnali di un rallentamento dei flussi petroliferi.

La passività con cui Teheran ha assistito alla ripresa dei flussi petroliferi in uscita dal Golfo Persico era quindi frutto di una preciso calcolo politico. Una strozzatura prolungata dell’offerta petrolifera danneggia non soltanto i nemici della Repubblica Islamica, ma anche un grande importatore di idrocarburi alleato come la Cina e la vasta platea di Paesi neutrali che gli iraniani non hanno alcun interesse a inimicarsi.

La riattivazione del traffico attraverso quel cruciale braccio di mare non è per di più coinciso con un crollo delle quotazioni internazionali di petrolio, gas e derivati, i cui prezzi sono rimasti mediamente del 50% più alti rispetto ai livelli pre-bellici. Costi di trasporto elevati (i broker navali stimano che i produttori di petrolio del Golfo Persico sborsino tra i 30 e i 40 milioni di dollari per un viaggio di andata e ritorno attraverso lo Stretto di Hormuz), rincaro delle polizze assicurative, prolungamento dei tempi di riparazione e/o ricostruzione degli impianti energetici del Golfo Persico danneggiati e/o distrutti nell’ambito del conflitto e insufficiente capacità di raffinazione all’interno del sistema globale hanno mantenuto i valori dell’energia sufficientemente alta da imporre conseguenze molto pesanti all’economia globale nel suo complesso e in particolare agli Stati Uniti. Paese in cui i riscaldamenti domestici, i mezzi agricoli, i treni e i camion che percorrono oltre 400 miliardi di miglia ogni anno per trasportare il 73% circa di tutte le merci sono alimentati a diesel. Nella settimana compresa tra il 21 e il 28 settembre, il prezzo del diesel è salito a 6,53 dollari, a fronte dei 3,76 registrati nei giorni antecedenti all’attacco israelo-statunitense contro l’Iran.

Si tratta di un aumento di circa il 74%, che pesa soprattutto sugli agricoltori, chiamati proprio in questo periodo di raccolto a fare maggiore impiego di trattori e mietitrebbie. Devono anche prepararsi alla stagione della semina, accumulando fertilizzanti che provengono in larga parte proprio dalla regione del Golfo Persico. A partire dall’urea, derivato petrolifero il cui prezzo è aumentato dell’80% soltanto tra marzo e aprile.

Anche le compagnie aeree risentono pesantemente dell’instabilità nel quadrante del Golfo, perché le loro flotte consumano carburante speciale derivato dal petrolio. Dopo lo scoppio della guerra, i prezzi del carburante per aerei sono pressoché raddoppiati.

L’inflazione è conseguentemente aumentata, anche a causa del concomitante, frenetico attivismo di Ansarallah. Nell’arco di pochi giorni, la compagine yemenita alleata di Teheran ha strappato al governo internazionalmente riconosciuto di Sana’a il controllo delle aree costiere che si affacciano sullo Stretto di Bab el-Mandeb, imposto il blocco dei porti sauditi, preso di mira petroliere riconducibili al regno e colpito, di concerto con le milizie sciite irachene, il cruciale oleodotto East-West in più punti rendendolo inutilizzabile per quasi due settimane.

L’azzeramento provvisorio dell’export petrolifero saudita si è istantaneamente riverberato sui prezzi internazionali del greggio.

Segno che, controllando i due cruciali punti di strozzatura di Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb, l’Iran e i suoi alleati regionali esercitano una notevole capacità di influenza sulla quotazione del petrolio e, a ricasco, sulle politiche monetarie di gran parte dei Paesi del mondo. A partire proprio dagli Stati Uniti.

Lo ha sottolineato di recente il presidente del Parlamento iraniano Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, attraverso un sottilissimo post sul suo profilo X in cui presentava versione opportunamente ritoccata dell’equazione elaborata nel 1993 dall’economista di Stanford John Taylor e affermatasi rapidamente come una delle formule di riferimento per le Banche Centrali in materia di determinazione dei tassi di interesse.

Nello specifico, l’equazione mette in relazione il tasso di interesse sui titoli di Stato a dieci anni con l’andamento dell’inflazione e l’output gap, raccomandando di innalzare i tassi di interesse quando l’inflazione supera l’obiettivo del 2% e/o la produzione economica eccede il suo potenziale.

La logica è elementare: tassi di interesse più alti rendono più costoso indebitarsi. Quando il costo del credito aumenta, privati ​​e aziende riducono la propria propensione all’indebitamento e riducono la spesa, raffreddando così la dinamica dei prezzi. Ghalibaf ha integrato a questi dati già ricompresi nell’equazione di Taylor due nuove variabili, rappresentate dallo Stretto di Hormuz (denominato “SOH”) e da quello di Bab el-Mandeb (denominato “BM”) .

Nella “Stratis Taylor Rule” – i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*) + α(SOH−SOH*) + β(BEM−BEM*), α,β > 0 – coniata da Ghalibaf, i tassi di interesse statunitensi crescono proporzionalmente alla gravità dell’interruzione dei traffici di idrocarburi in questi due nevralgici punti di strozzatura. Alla formula, il presidente del Parlamento iraniano ha accluso un commento: «vediamo se un rialzo dei tassi contribuirà a riaprire lo Stretto di Hormuz o a produrre una singolo barile di petrolio in più. Non si possono risolvere i problemi di un punto di strozzatura con 25 punti base aggiuntivi».

Tradotto: un innalzamento dei tassi di interesse ad opera della Federal Reserve non garantisce la riapertura dei due stretti, né l’aumento dell’offerta di petrolio. In compenso, chi controlla Hormuz e Bab el-Mandeb influisce indirettamente sulla determinazione dei tassi di interesse negli Stati Uniti in quanto titolare della prerogativa di dettare tempi e modi del traffico marittimo. E, quindi, di aumentare discrezionalmente i prezzi petroliferi. Ovvero di far lievitare l’inflazione.

Le dinamiche belliche che di recente hanno interessato la regione del Golfo Persico avvalorano la tesi di Ghalibaf. Nei dieci giorni antecedenti al 16 settembre, data in cui il direttivo della Federal Reserve si sarebbe pronunciato in materia di tassi, gli iraniani hanno preso di mira alcune petroliere nei pressi dello Stretto di Hormuz, mentre Ansarallah ha bersagliato la raffineria saudita di Jizan e assunto il controllo della costa prospiciente lo stretto di Bab el-Mandeb. Parallelamente, uno sciame di droni lanciato dalle milizie sciite irachene ha colpito l’oleodotto East-West, sospingendo il prezzo del petrolio al di sopra della soglia critica dei 100 dollari per barile. Un copione sostanzialmente analogo era andato in scena poche ore prima della riunione del board della Federal Reserve di fine luglio, quando alcuni missili lanciati da Ansarallah avevano centrato due petroliere saudite facendo anche in quel caso salire il prezzo petrolio sopra i 100 dollari.

Il prossimo vertice del direttivo della Federal Reserve è previsto per il 28 ottobre. Si tratta di una data da tenere d’occhio, visti i precedenti.

Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.

On September 24, 2026, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed Directive No. 2631-r approving the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences in the Russian Federation through 2030 and in the Long Term through 2036 (the Concept). The full text of the document is available here. At a meeting with his deputy prime ministers on September 28, Mishustin explained that the document is meant to “ensure the active application of fundamental research in high-priority, high-tech fields.” In his words, this “will open up additional opportunities not only for industry, medicine, and agriculture, but also for energy, aircraft manufacturing, and the space industry.” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko has been put in charge of overseeing its implementation.

The Concept’s stated goal is “to achieve and strengthen Russia’s position in the mathematical sciences in order to ensure the state’s technological leadership, competitiveness, independence, and security.”

The Concept runs to about twenty pages. It opens with reflections on the role of mathematics in the world, then describes the “current state of affairs” and the tools for achieving its objectives. The main tool is the Program of Fundamental Scientific Research in the Russian Federation for the Long Term (2021–2030), adopted on December 31, 2020, and substantially amended on December 25, 2025 (the Program). In addition, a network of international and regional mathematical centers is expected to play an important role in developing mathematics. The document closes with a table of four indicators under two scenarios: a target scenario and a conservative one.

Negative Growth

If the Concept is to be believed, mathematics in Russia is developing quite normally. There are, admittedly, a few difficulties: “At the same time, unfavorable trends have persisted… In 2020–2024, the number of researchers in the group of scientific specialties 1.1, ‘Mathematics and Mechanics,’ fell by 24.3 percent, including a 20.3 percent drop among holders of advanced degrees. In research training, the share of graduates who defended dissertations among all graduates of PhD programs in field group 01.00.00, ‘Mathematics and Mechanics,’ rose in 2020–2022 (from 10.6 to 17.9 percent), but this growth gave way to a decline in 2023–2024 (to 11.2 percent).”

Apparently, something happened in 2022 that made PhD graduates far less likely to defend their dissertations. But the authors of the Concept have an answer: “The trends described are caused by a combination of factors, including the low level of material support and social guarantees for graduate students, scientists, and faculty, which does not match their actual workload and adversely affects both the quality of teaching and research activity. In addition, access is restricted to scientific and technical information in mathematics and related sciences contained in international citation and analytics databases, including scientific monographs, analytical reviews, and other sources of information.”

The answer is simple: raise salaries and “ensure access.” If such measures were enough to advance Russian mathematics, then it really would be in fine shape. But the Concept warns that unless something changes now, “within the next 10 years the Russian Federation will lose its competitive advantage in training research and teaching personnel in mathematics.” The conservative scenario shows a gradual contraction: mathematicians’ share of all researchers falls from 2.8 percent in 2026 to 1.8 percent by 2036. The Concept admits that unless the salary problem is solved and access is “ensured,” Russian mathematics will shrink by more than a third. So the government had better hurry.

History of Mathematics: The Unwritten Chapters

The Concept includes a section on the glorious traditions of Soviet mathematics. It mentions the November 13, 1986, resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the USSR Council of Ministers On Strengthening Research in Mathematics and Its Applications and Improving the Working and Living Conditions of Scientists. According to the authors of the Concept, implementing this resolution “contributed to steady progress” that has allowed Russia “to maintain world leadership in a number of areas of mathematical research to this day.” True, some problems did arise, but they were successfully overcome: “The Soviet school of mathematics held leading positions in the main areas of the mathematical sciences. The socioeconomic and political upheavals of the late 1980s and the 1990s led to an outflow of scientific personnel abroad and into other sectors of the economy. Nevertheless, the Russian Federation managed to preserve its high potential and global competitiveness in mathematics and related sciences.”

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Anyone who remembers the late 1980s will read this with a bitter smile. Three or four years after the 1986 resolution was adopted, the largest exodus of mathematicians in the country’s history began. Many of those who had made the Soviet school of mathematics famous left for Princeton, Berkeley, Paris, Bonn, and Tel Aviv. Today, every Fields Medalist who came out of the Soviet school — Grigory Margulis, Vladimir Drinfeld, Efim Zelmanov, Maxim Kontsevich, Andrei Okounkov, and Stanislav Smirnov — works abroad. The only Fields Medalist who stayed in Russia, Grigori Perelman (awarded in 2006), has not published any new work in twenty years.

The second historical episode is just as telling. The Concept cites as an example Kolmogorov’s 1957 theorem on representing continuous functions of several variables as superpositions of functions of one variable and addition. According to the Concept’s authors, the theorem “created the theoretical foundation for the effectiveness of neural network architecture.” That is a gross exaggeration. Together with Arnold’s result, Kolmogorov’s theorem settled Hilbert’s 13th problem — a remarkable achievement, but one only indirectly related to neural networks. The real theoretical grounding for neural networks comes from entirely different theorems that appeared much later, in the 1980s. Interest in Kolmogorov’s construction revived only in 2024 with the emergence of the KAN neural network architecture, and its practical value is still an open question.

Yet Soviet and Russian science has made genuine contributions to machine learning. These include Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory and Nesterov’s accelerated method, both widely used in today’s neural networks. Vladimir Vapnik and Yurii Nesterov are both still working — but not in Russia. In 2024, Vapnik received RASA-America’s George Gamow Award. Nesterov, a professor at the University of Louvain, received the Gauss Prize this summer and delivered a special plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Their contributions to machine learning are beyond dispute. Yet for some reason, the Concept points to a decades-old result by Kolmogorov.

Invisible Supercomputers

The section on supercomputers is a frank admission of how far behind Russia has fallen. The best academic machine named in the Concept, Lomonosov-2, no longer appears in the current TOP500 list (as of June 23, 2026). The document says Lomonosov-2 ranks 451st, but that stopped being true long ago: all of the TOP500 data it cites are from 2025 or even earlier and do not reflect the list as it stands today. All of the Russian machines on the TOP500 belong to private companies — Yandex and Sber. The most powerful of them, Chervonenkis, has a peak performance of 29.4 petaflops (ranked 101st). The Concept speaks of the need to develop “Russian computing resources based on open hardware architectures.” This can be read as an admission that modern Nvidia processors are hard to come by in Russia: they are not supplied legally, and gray-market channels are unreliable and cannot meet demand.

Among the countries ahead of Russia on the TOP500 list (Russia has slipped to the bottom of the top 20) is the Netherlands. Listed under the Netherlands are two machines owned by Nebius, the company led by former Yandex head Arkady Volozh: ISEG and ISEG2, with a combined peak performance of about 425 petaflops. By the Concept’s own figures, the five Russian machines on the TOP500 together deliver less than 100 petaflops of peak performance. In other words, Arkady Volozh’s company alone has more computing power than all of Russia’s TOP500 systems combined.

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The TOP500 is a list of machines (and not all of them, only those whose developers have submitted their systems) ranked by high-precision performance on the Linpack benchmark. It is a good “yardstick” for comparing computing power for climate modeling or numerical solutions to fluid dynamics problems. Neural networks, which the Concept’s authors keep bringing up, run today on low-precision arithmetic, and for such computations the same GPUs deliver orders of magnitude more operations. AI workloads are handled by other machines. The world’s largest AI clusters, owned by xAI, Meta, OpenAI, or Google, do not appear on the TOP500, and neither do the largest Chinese AI clusters. The document invokes the AI race to justify developing Russian supercomputers, but it talks about machines that are only indirectly relevant to that race: they were not built for it.

Among the priority problems listed in the Program is this one: “Differential equations are essential for modeling all physical, technical, or biological processes, from celestial motion to bridge design and interactions between neurons. The central problem in this field remains the global existence of smooth solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes system, which describes the motion of a viscous Newtonian fluid and underlies fluid dynamics. It is also one of the ‘Millennium Prize Problems.’” A team of mathematicians, engineers, and AI agents working on an AI cluster owned by OpenAI has proved the opposite: rather than existing globally, a solution can “blow up” even under a smooth external force. This was a huge step forward in the study of the Navier–Stokes equations. Yet the Concept didn’t even notice these machines (after all, they aren’t on the TOP500): it cares only about classical supercomputers traditionally used for mathematical modeling, and today that is no longer enough.

Just Give Us Access

Several times, almost word for word, the Concept repeats the same formula: Russian scientists must be guaranteed “access… to scientific and technical information… contained in international citation and analytics databases.” Once, it says that this access is “restricted.” By whom, when, and why it was “restricted” is never specified.

But on the whole, mathematicians don’t suffer much from this “restricted access.” Many results are published open access, preprints are posted on arxiv.org, and authors upload their papers (and even monographs) to academic social networks. Colleagues working in the same area also rarely refuse to share their papers with one another.

What Russian mathematicians really do need is legal “access” — but not to papers. Vladimir Arnold wrote: “Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.” One can argue about whether mathematics is part of physics, but the claim that mathematical experiments are cheap no longer holds up: they simply aren’t. What’s more, with the rise of neural networks, mathematics is becoming a very expensive science. The 88 hours of work by 10,000 AI agents searching for a solution to the Navier–Stokes equations, plus another 17 hours spent verifying the results, cost OpenAI (by its own estimate) millions of dollars. And that was just one problem, albeit a great one. This is the kind of “access” Russian mathematicians lack. Russia has no “sovereign” AI clusters comparable in power to OpenAI’s machines — and, as the work of Arkady Volozh’s Nebius shows, it would have them, were it not for the events the Concept never mentions.

The Concept portrays global science as a warehouse to which “access must be ensured,” rather than as a community to take part in: publishing in top journals, attending conferences, working with leading mathematicians from other countries. Yet this is precisely where Russian mathematicians face their biggest problems: they can’t pay open-access publication fees, their coauthors have scattered around the world, a Russian affiliation makes things awkward, and traveling to a conference is risky.

As one of its development tools, the Concept names a network of mathematical centers, above all four “world-class international mathematical centers”: the Steklov Mathematical Institute, the Moscow Center for Fundamental and Applied Mathematics, the Euler International Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg, and the “mathematical center in Akademgorodok” (oddly, not capitalized as a proper name). There is nothing “international” about how these centers are described today. Their mission, according to the Concept’s authors, is “to promote the interests of the Russian school of mathematics worldwide,” not to engage in active collaboration.

The Russian Academy of Sciences is mentioned in the Concept many times and is given a separate section on its “role in the development of the mathematical and related sciences.” There, the Academy is described in the present tense and exclusively with active verbs: it “develops,” “takes into account,” “participates,” “carries out.” Among the Concept’s objectives is “scaling up the system of scientific and methodological guidance” — in other words, expanding the powers of the Academy itself. Universities are barely mentioned.

Yet three of the four “world-class centers” are consortia with universities. The Moscow center includes Moscow State University (its Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, and Research Computing Center) together with two institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Euler Institute’s lead institution is St. Petersburg State University. The Akademgorodok center brings together the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and Novosibirsk State University. The document lists the centers but carefully “erases” any mention of universities, even when a university is the lead institution.

An Unenviable Share

All four of the Concept’s target indicators are shares: mathematicians as a share of all researchers, the same share for computer science, and two ratios of dissertation defenses to the number of students admitted to PhD programs. There is not a single absolute number, and no quality indicators either. Perhaps the Concept’s authors mean that some absolute numbers and quality indicators (including the percentage of publications in White List journals [Russia’s official list of recognized academic journals — T-invariant]) can be found in the Program, but that should have been stated explicitly.

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Shares have a well-known property: they grow not only when the numerator goes up, but also when the denominator goes down. Cut the number of physicists and chemists, and the share of mathematicians will “grow” even if not a single mathematician has been added. The share can rise even as the number of mathematicians falls, as long as everyone else is declining faster. A document that promises “accelerated development” has chosen a metric by which the shrinking of science can look like a success for mathematics.

Mathematics, meanwhile, has a “yardstick” that can’t be gamed by cutting chemists: the number of invited speakers at the International Congress of Mathematicians. At the 2026 congress in Philadelphia, according to our count based on the official list, there were three sectional talks with a Russian affiliation and not a single plenary.

In 2022, the International Congress of Mathematicians was supposed to take place in St. Petersburg. Many Russian mathematicians were involved in preparing it, and the bid had been championed by Fields Medalists Stanislav Smirnov and Andrei Okounkov, who were then actively working in Russia. But the congress was relocated and held online. Smirnov and Okounkov removed their Russian affiliations from the congress materials. Even so, HSE University and the Steklov Institute fielded five speakers, two of them plenary. In addition, Nikolai Andreev received the Leelavati Prize for popularizing mathematics, and there were invited speakers from St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. Overall, Russian mathematics was well represented at the congress. But four years have passed, and a lot has changed.

How many Russian mathematicians were invited to the 2026 congress but declined is unknown: the International Mathematical Union does not publish refusals. But consider the climate in which Russian scientists were deciding whether to attend. Since 2022, Article 275.1 of the Russian Criminal Code has made “confidential cooperation” with a foreign state or organization a crime. To bring charges under this article, it is enough to establish the mere fact of contact. According to data from Mediazona, 82 people had been convicted under this article by fall 2025. On January 26, 2026, half a year before the congress, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Konstantin Mogilevsky sent out a letter. It advised scientists to “carefully assess the nature of events for possible politicization,” to weigh the “advisability of participating” in events held in “unfriendly” countries [Russia’s official term for states that have imposed sanctions on it — T-invariant], and to inform the ministry. The 2026 congress was held in the United States. In a climate like this, you’d think long and hard before accepting even an invitation as prestigious as speaking at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

The Concept does contain some things that are unquestionably right. It calls for a “decent salary” for mathematicians and teachers, and for stipends that let graduate students study and do research “without having to take” side jobs. It acknowledges the shortage of math teachers and identifies math circles and olympiads as the core of the tradition, to be made accessible regardless of family income. Any mathematician would sign on to that. But young mathematicians don’t leave the country just for the pay. They go where they can publish freely, attend conferences, work with the best people in their field, and not worry about what an email exchange or a meeting with a coauthor from another country might cost them.

Impersonal Sentences

The strongest impression the Concept leaves is not any particular figure or error, but the document’s style. The number of researchers has “declined.” Access is “restricted.” The competitive advantage may be “lost.” All of this just happens on its own, like fog rolling in or the weather turning bad. The Concept contains no war, no sanctions, no post-2022 emigration, no criminal cases, no relocated 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians. There is only a “combination of factors,” chief among them low salaries.

It is impossible to believe that the document’s authors are unaware of all this. It is equally clear that a 2026 government Concept cannot name the causes, and impersonal phrasing makes it possible to ask for money by blaming “bad weather.” The document records the decline but leaves out what caused it. And so it seems as though the decline can be fought with higher salaries, stipends, and new Kolmogorov prizes. But that won’t work.

T-invariant has been keeping its Chronicles of the Persecution of Scientists for three years now. Instead of studying in Paris, the young and gifted Leonid Katz is sitting in pretrial detention. Azat Miftakhov, instead of talking with colleagues at international conferences, is writing his study of Chui’s conjecture in a prison in Dimitrovgrad. Andrey Dymov, an associate professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at HSE University who was named best teacher in 2022 and 2024–2025, is now awaiting transfer to a penal colony to serve a three-and-a-half-year sentence instead of teaching students. Distinguished Professor Mikhail Volkov has been dismissed from the department where he had worked for half a century and ordered to pay a fine. The Concept is deeply worried about Russia falling behind in supercomputing, yet Sergei Abramov, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a leading expert in parallel computing, has been barred from working, ordered to pay a fine, and stripped of his civil rights, and he waits for hours for his own pension to be released from his own account so that he doesn’t starve. These are far from all the mathematicians in our files. It is no surprise that their names are absent from the Concept. What is strange is that it reads as if their names were absent from its authors’ memory as well. And yet its authors are mathematicians, too. Some of them are even real ones.

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The post Access Restricted: What Russia’s Concept for the Development of Mathematics through 2036 chooses not to see appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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