A mounting standoff over allegations of covert Chinese nuclear testing and rapid arsenal expansion has collided with an intensifying domestic debate within the US over whether it must abandon its decades-long test moratorium. US officials are pressing China in confidential diplomatic talks over suspected low-yield nuclear testing and a rapid strategic expansion across at least […]
The post US challenges China on secret nuclear tests as arms race looms appeared first on Asia Times.
North Korea’s recent hypersonic test signals an evasive theater nuclear strike capability aimed directly at Japan—a proxy warning backed by Russia and China as Japan rethinks its nuclear taboos. This month, multiple media outlets reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw the test launch of an upgraded hypersonic missile system from the country’s […]
The post N Korea’s hypersonic test a check on Japan’s nuclear ambitions appeared first on Asia Times.
Tragedy in Rhodes: A firefighter who participated in an operation to rescue tourists, died on Tuesday, after he fell from a relative high height. The 52-year-old man fell from a height and was fatally injured during an operation to provide assistance to two tourists, hikers, in an area near Sianna on the island of Rhodes. […]
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T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36, dated August 31, 2026. Azat Miftakhov has published a paper in the French quarterly La Revue de la filière mathématiques (June–August 2026). The paper was written at the suggestion of French mathematician Bernard Randé, a member of the journal’s editorial board and of the international association Solidarité FreeAzat. Miftakhov completed the work while held in prison in Dimitrovgrad.
Azat Miftakhov’s paper is titled “La conjecture de Chui dans un cadre hilbertien” (“Chui’s Conjecture in a Hilbert Space Setting”). Unfortunately, we have not been able to read it. The paper was not posted on arXiv.org, and the journal itself is available only by subscription. However, The Insider published the first page of Miftakhov’s manuscript, which gives a sense of both the subject of the paper and his approach to the problem.
The problem Miftakhov tackled concerns a variant of Chui’s conjecture. The conjecture came about in 1971, more or less by accident. In a short note, the well-known American mathematician Charles Chui asked how to place N unit point charges on the unit circle so that the average strength of the field they generate inside the disk is as small as possible. More precisely, he asked whether this quantity is bounded below by an absolute constant — one that holds for any number of charges in any arrangement. The answer came a year later: in 1972, Donald Newman published an elegant solution — yes, such a constant exists, and π/18 will do.
The conjecture itself is a remark Chui dropped in that same note. It is plausible, he wrote, that the minimum is attained by the most natural arrangement: the charges placed at the vertices of a regular N-gon. Chui offered no proof and moved on to entirely different things. The conjecture remains unproven to this day.
Even the case of two charges turned out to be hard. The proof was found in 2023 by Fedor Nazarov, a professor at Kent State University in Ohio. He posted his answer on MathOverflow, a forum where mathematicians put questions to one another, and where Nazarov has been answering his colleagues’ questions for many years under the username fedja.
Mathematicians have tried reformulating Chui’s conjecture for Hilbert spaces (that is, spaces equipped with an inner product). In this setting, there has been significant progress. In 2020, Evgeny Abakumov (Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée), Alexander Borichev (Aix-Marseille University), and Konstantin Fedorovskiy (Bauman Moscow State Technical University and St. Petersburg State University) posted an important paper, “Chui’s conjecture in Bergman spaces.” They proved Chui’s conjecture in weighted Bergman spaces for a broad class of weights: the minimum is attained if and only if the charges are evenly spaced. But some cases remained open, and the authors listed them explicitly at the end of the paper.
It was precisely this set of problems that Randé proposed to Miftakhov. The first page of his manuscript opens with the words “Let us assume” and contains the statement of the theorem and the beginning of the proof. He looks at the case where the charges lie strictly inside the disk rather than on the circle itself. And what he proves is not an inequality but an exact equality: the energy of any configuration equals the energy of the regular-polygon configuration plus an explicit nonnegative term that vanishes only when the charges form a regular polygon. If Miftakhov has indeed proved this, then Chui’s claim (for Bergman spaces) follows as a corollary. The original Chui conjecture, however, remains open.
On March 5, 2026, three mathematicians from the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute — Evgueni Doubtsov, Anton Tselishchev, and Ioann Vasilyev — posted the preprint “Weighted Chui’s conjecture.” Their work follows Newman’s line of attack: they generalize his bound to arbitrary positive charges and to spaces of any dimension. At the end of the paper, the authors pose several open questions, the first of which is what happens when the charges lie not on the circle but inside the disk.
On March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received Miftakhov’s manuscript, in which the charges likewise lie inside the disk. These are different problems, but the setup is the same — and so is the timing.
The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “In October 2025, Solidarité FreeAzat, together with the Navalny France team and the organization La Libre Pensée, held an evening in Paris devoted to writing letters in support of Russian political prisoners. Among the participants was Bernard Randé, a mathematician, a former teacher in the preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and a member of our association. Instead of an ordinary letter of support, he decided to give Azat what he misses most — a real mathematical problem.”
Getting mathematical formulas into facilities run by the FSIN [Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service — T-invariant] is a challenge in its own right: such letters often never reach their recipients. A long wait followed, and on March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received a reply from Azat via Solidarité FreeAzat. The letter opened with the words: “And so your problem, which brightened my days and cost me many hours of sleep, became a breath of fresh air for me. Thank you so much for that!” Attached to the letter were six handwritten pages containing the solution to the problem Randé had posed.
The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “Azat worked under exceptionally harsh conditions. Over four months in detention — with no scientific library, no internet access, no chance to discuss mathematics with colleagues, and only a few hours a day with pen and paper — he managed to solve a problem that was open at the time.” Here we have to take their word for it, since we have not yet seen Miftakhov’s paper. Still, the fact that the paper was published is a strong signal in itself.
Averil Aussedat, a member of Solidarité FreeAzat and a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the University of Pisa, proposed that her university officially invite Azat to present his result. On July 23, 2026, Azat Miftakhov’s wife, Elena Gorban, received an official letter from the University of Pisa inviting Azat to speak at a research seminar to be held in April 2027. If Miftakhov is not allowed to present his work in Pisa in April 2027, one can only hope that on September 3, 2027, when his latest sentence ends, he will be released and able to engage with colleagues and work under normal conditions.
Chui’s problem has been around for 55 years. Today it is being worked on by Abakumov in Paris, Borichev in Marseille, Fedorovskiy in Moscow, Doubtsov and his colleagues in St. Petersburg, and Nazarov in Ohio. Now one more participant is joining the conversation — from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, from the Polar Owl penal colony [a special-regime prison above the Arctic Circle — T-invariant], in a letter written on FSIN letterhead. Not as an object of pity or a media story, but as a colleague — with a new theorem.
The post Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
The European Parliament has backed calls for an EU-wide strategy to tackle worsening shortages of healthcare professionals, including an ambition to increase the health workforce by one million, as doctors, nurses, pharmacists and dentists urged the European Commission to turn the recommendations into concrete action.
The own-initiative report, led by MEPs Loucas Fourlas (EPP, Cyprus) and Ruggero Razza (ECR, Italy), warns that shortages of doctors, nurses, carers and other professionals are becoming structural, driven by ageing populations, rising demand for care and persistent burnout...
Four years ago, I read Roberto José Andrade Franco’s ESPN story about Tess Mata, one of the students killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, and I’ve never forgotten an image in it: a determined Tess outside in the Texas heat, aiming her softball pitches at a target on a tree in her family’s yard. That’s what Franco does so well. He creates moments that linger—about sports, Texas, loss, and identity and in-betweenness—and makes me care about the people he puts on the page.
Franco grew up on the El Paso-Juárez border. In a 2020 National Magazine Award-nominated essay that he wrote one year after the El Paso massacre, he reflects on the lifelong pull to this paradox of a place: “It’s where things make the most sense. Where it’s easy to love, even if it’s difficult to live.” I love that he writes from this borderland even when he’s somewhere else. During Mexico’s first World Cup match earlier this summer, he was in Woodburn, Oregon, a small town where Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the population and own nearly every business downtown. Residents had been shaken by last fall’s ICE raids, but they showed up to watch and celebrate. There, thousands of miles from El Paso, Franco found something familiar: a hardworking, resilient community with deep Latino roots and a fierce sense of pride.
I also credit Franco with piquing my interest in wrestling stories, including his piece on WWW star Eddie Guerrero, which also explores family and legacy. Whether he’s writing about sports heroes or ordinary people, or tracing the history of Texas or his own, Franco never fails to move me.
Below, he explains why enrolling in community college at 28 was the most meaningful journey he’s taken, tells us his favorite meal (and the ideal season to eat it), and recognizes a fellow sports writer who inspires him. When asked to name three publications he enjoys reading, he gives a shout-out to Texas Highways, a magazine we love—and it just so happens that he’s the guest editor of its October 2026 issue, focused on El Paso. After spending time with Franco here, read his feature on the city’s historic Smelter Cemetery, and then explore the rest of the magazine.
Several places, but mostly on the El Paso-Juárez border.
I was born in Chicago, but we lived in Juárez, Mexico, until I was about 6. Then we moved across the border to El Paso, Texas, before my father joined the Army. That’s when we lived in Chicago for a short time, then Colorado and Germany before we briefly returned to Juárez. I was about 13 when we moved to El Paso again.
Anywhere I hear the Spanish of the US-Mexico border. These areas are often ignored and underserved so it’s a working-class Spanish. Because of its location, some words are a mix of English and Spanish that other parts of Mexico don’t use.
The decade between graduating high school and enrolling at El Paso Community College. I spent most of it working in construction and bouncing around between El Paso and Phoenix, along with a few bad months in Tucson.
The early morning when everyone is asleep and the sun’s yet to rise. And it’s so quiet that, almost always at the exact same time, I can hear my neighbor’s footsteps as they walk out of their home, open and close their car door, start it, and then drive away, presumably on their way to work.
Building things. I find it almost therapeutic to do some sort of work with my hands as I sweat and listen to music. I also enjoy the feeling of seeing something finished within a few hours.
I don’t remember who I got the idea from, but years ago I heard or read a suggestion to interview your children during different phases of their lives. Just take out the voice recorder and ask them basic questions. When they’re younger, you can ask about their favorite animal, color, movie, etc. As they get older, the questions can be more about their friends, hobbies, and aspirations.
I’ve been doing this every few months with my now 9-year-old daughter. Occasionally, I’ll listen to the first recordings from when she was 3, and I can hear how much she’s changed—from her voice and interests to the clarity of her words and thoughts. It’s like a short visit with a different version of who your child once was.
That suggestion to interview your children has been the best gift.
My mom’s pozole. It’s a Mexican pork and hominy stew accompanied with radishes, cabbage, and bolillo bread. She’ll sometimes make it in late October, on the Saturday closest to my birthday. The weather will be colder by then and a college football game will be on in the background—both of those make it even better. Then a good cigar afterwards.
It’s become silence. I used to write with music in the background. It almost didn’t matter what kind, and sometimes it’d be the same song on repeat for hours. That was also when I’d do most of my writing during the day and into the early evening. But now, I’ve fallen into a routine where I do most of my writing early. Sometimes I’ll wake up naturally as early as three in the morning. With that change, I now write in silence.
But maybe it’ll change back to music one day.
It just happens so there’s no specific place. And so long as I’m not on deadline, whenever I feel like I can’t think anymore I just try to do something else for that day.
I’ve gotten ideas while driving, listening to podcasts and music, or in the middle of watching a movie. I’ve even woken up during the middle of night with a thought that helps unlock something that I had been stuck on.
Earning an associate degree.
I was a nontraditional student who first enrolled at El Paso Community College at 28 years old. It had been about a decade since I was in school. I was full of self-doubt and worry that I was too old or not a good enough student to be there. With that, I also worried that I might be wasting my time.
But I quickly realized I was a much better student in college than I’d ever been in high school. I was motivated, disciplined, and having worked in construction for the decade before then, I had a different perspective of what college could be. Whenever I felt like complaining, I’d remind myself (as I’ll still occasionally do) that reading and writing is a lot easier than doing manual labor outdoors, especially during the summers.
I ultimately transferred and graduated from a four-year university, and later even finished a PhD program. But that associate degree was the most meaningful because it’s where I started to find outlets for my intellectual curiosities and people who encouraged me.
I don’t have any specific place. At home it’s usually in my office, bed, or on the couch. Away from there, I’ll read while waiting. I’m an anxious flyer, so I’ve also recently found myself saving longer reads for when I’m at the airport or on a plane. It lets me focus on something else while also helping pass the time.
The World Cup.
Texas Highways to read about the parts of Texas that aren’t chaotic or depressive. De Los to keep up with some of what’s happening with Latinos outside of where I live. The Good Fight to stay current with boxing.
Michael Paterniti’s “The House that Thurman Munson Built.” It’s got everything that interests me as a reader and writer: tragedy, memory, and examining what athletes mean to us at different ages.
Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. It’s an excellent book.
I don’t know if “proud” is the right word for it since it’s such a heartbreaking story. But “‘She made us happy’: The all-star dreams of Uvalde’s biggest José Altuve fan” is the first thing that comes to mind.
Go for a walk or drive. Either of those help me get away from what I’m doing without completely separating me from it.
Wright Thompson, who I’m fortunate to call a colleague.
I’ll sometimes listen to a chapter or two from The Cost of These Dreams on audiobook before I start writing a story. Wright is among the best sports writers ever, but the story of his that I’ll most often return to is the one he wrote for The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till.” The small part where one of the main characters says he doesn’t think of the past but has a dog named Dixie is perfect.
“Practically,” “essentially,” “actual(ly),” “that,” “even.”
And in first drafts, I start too many sentences with “so,” “because,” and “since.”
Watching mindless, and at times dumb, dating shows with my wife.
The ability to not get distracted by my phone.
Stray dogs who largely mind their own business and hang out in the same general area without terrorizing it.
If it’s early in the day, I’ll take a nap.
My phone full of photos and videos, a drawing from my daughter, my box full of sports cards, my voice recorder, and a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl XXX champions hat because I increasingly fear that’ll be the last one they’ll win.
I’ve turned a room in our house into my office. It has a wall-to-wall bookcase. On the opposite side of it is my desk. It has plenty of space, a filing cabinet attached to it, and a shelf for my speaker and printer. Yes, a printer. It’s nothing fancy, but practical.
On the wall above the desk is a dry-erase board where I’ll write reminders and a few words that are story ideas. Once those ideas become a story, I have a corkboard, on the wall to the left of where I sit, for the three-by-five cards I use to outline and organize sections. Above the corkboard are reminders of what I need to focus on when I write. Below it is a calendar for deadlines and travel dates. To the right of where I sit is a small couch. The walls have framed boxing fight posters, work of local artists, photos of my wife and daughter, and random things that mean something to me, like mini football helmets from the University of Texas-El Paso.
Roberto José Andrade Franco is a feature writer with ESPN and a Writer-at-Large with Texas Highways. His work has been anthologized four times in The Year’s Best Sports Writing and nominated for the National Magazine Award. He’s also a four-time finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
Three PETA activists were attacked by donkey drivers in the island of Santorini. The attackers insulted the animal activists and one of them hit one of the women in the face. The outrageous incident took place at the Karavolades straits on September 5, 2026, and the shocking images and footage were wide spread on social […]
The post Santorini: Donkey owners beat activists protesting the animals exploitation (Videos) appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
The government has formed a committee to negotiate with Jamaat-e-Islami over its ongoing sit-in.
The post Jamaat-e-Islami calls nationwide shutter-down strike on Sept 3 over taxes, fuel prices appeared first on BOL News.
Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose to 8.7% year-over-year in August, up from 8.4% in July.
The post Pakistan’s inflation rises to 11.15% in August 2026 appeared first on BOL News.
ISLAMABAD: The leaders of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) on Sunday warned of staging sit-ins in Rawalpindi and Islamabad if authorities refuse to grant permission for a public gathering in the garrison city, as the party escalates pressure on the government over rising fuel prices and inflation. Hafiz Naeemur Rehman, the emir of Jamaat-e-Islami, told a news ... Read more
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Northwest Arkansas has been changing. Walmart, which has been rooted in Bentonville for more than 75 years, has reshaped the small town, and now that growth is spreading into the surrounding countryside. With that change, writes Jordan P. Hickey in this poignant essay, come wealthy newcomers looking for a country lifestyle and gravel cyclists riding thousands of unpaved rural roads. And then there are the dogs—who have been here longer than any of these transplants—caught in the midst of it all. Hickey calls them “yarddogs,” finding in them a metaphor for a region in the process of transformation. (Subscription required.)
Downtown Bentonville, so carefully planned, feels surreal today—”Disneyfied,” “Pleasantville,” “gentrification” are the apt words of the critics.And not that it needs to be said, but there are no yarddogs in Bentonville. Not anymore. Here, there are only good dogs. Dogs on leashes, dogs that have been to school, dogs that listen, obey, behave, and will not lunge at every passing jogger.
But, of course, this is not really about dogs at all.
I was sad last fall when I read and recommended Jaya Saxena’s final story for Eater. Saxena is a food writer the Longreads editors have followed for years, and a journalist I’ve always counted on for food writing that both informs and entertains; she goes deep on aspects of cuisine, dining, the restaurant industry, and food culture in a way that’s relatable and unpretentious. (She’s also the series editor of The Best American Food and Travel Writing anthology; you can preorder the 2026 edition now.) So I was glad to hear, earlier this year, that Saxena and other former Eater writers were cooking up something new.
That something is Ravenous, a worker-owned, subscriber-supported food and culture site founded by Saxena, Amy McCarthy, Ashok Selvam, Courtney E. Smith, and Frances Dumlao. The five journalists are “sick and tired of the conversation around food being reduced to AI-generated pablum, ‘best of’ lists, and influencer-driven trends,” and are building a home for the kind of thoughtful, curious reporting that’s become harder to publish in a broken media landscape. Or, as they put it: food media with teeth.
Next week, Ravenous launches a monthlong fundraiser, so now is the perfect time to support the site. Seven dollars a month, or $70 a year, gets you access to everything they publish; higher-tier plans come with more perks. (Sign up for the Regular plan—$25 a month, or $250 a year—and you get to give the Ravenous raven a nickname, which they include in their Sunday newsletters.)
If anyone can build a publication around engaging, relevant food reporting and storytelling, it’s Saxena and this crew. Have a look around Ravenous and consider subscribing. But be warned: Don’t browse when you’re hungry.
I was born and raised in New York City, and aside from a brief stint in New Orleans for college, I’m still here. Except now I’m over in Queens instead of my hometown of Manhattan.
Aside from my actual apartment and the one I grew up in: Various NYC beaches, the backyard of my local bar, a punk show, Ray’s Pizza & Bagel Cafe on St. Mark’s Place, and one specific rock in Central Park.
For high school I went to a Quaker school in Manhattan, and though I don’t consider myself religious in any way, Quaker values began shaping my future politics then. It’s where I first started learning about the value of consensus-based community decision making, and given that this was in the early 2000s, anti-war and anti-violence politics. I even remember a teacher making the case that cars should be banned in Manhattan. It was a big influence on my politics and value systems.
To work, right after I wake up, around 8 a.m., when my mind hasn’t filled with the noise of the day. Otherwise, early evening when it’s still light out, and everything is just beginning.
Untangling necklaces.
One year my wife bought me a Cameo of the cow from First Cow, whose handler fed her a treat in my honor. The video is one of my most prized possessions.
Of course as a food writer this is tripping me up, because are we talking about a single great meal I’ve experienced, or a dish I could eat every day? If it’s the former, it’s the time my wife and I walked into a random seafood counter in Valencia, Spain, and spent the night eating sardines in garlic oil and sparkling wine from ceramic cups. If it’s the latter, my mom’s mac and cheese.
I’m a city kid, so too much silence scares me. I need the background noise of people on the street to get anything done.
In the shower or walking around listening to music.
In 2018, my wife and I traveled with my dad to his hometown in India. It was the first time he had been back since before I was born, and being able to experience that with him was so important. We also ate absolutely the best kebab I’ve ever had in my life. Maybe I should have put that as my favorite meal.
On the subway.
My friend recently introduced me to the case of Judy Smith, a woman who went missing during a trip to Philadelphia and was discovered murdered in the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina. I have now spent a lot of time reading conspiracies about what happened to her.
Defector has fantastic culture coverage, I love every issue Cake Zine puts out, and some of the best money I’ve spent recently is on the monthly print issue of The Onion.
This piece in The New Yorker by Lauren Collins about El Mordjene, an Algerian hazelnut spread that white French people are being very racist about. It’s just such a good exploration of how something innocuous becomes the center of a culture war. I was also thrilled to find the spread at an Egyptian grocer in my neighborhood, and sorry white French people, it is better than Nutella.
I had somehow never read Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice, but after watching the TV series my friends and I decided to read it together.
“The Food That Makes You Gay,” for Eater. I had editors that really trusted me to follow my instincts, and I managed to thread together some things I had an inkling were related. I’m also just glad I could get a full throated defense of bodily autonomy and the right to change one’s body in a piece that started out talking about straight men being afraid to eat bananas in public.
Walk away from the computer. I just need to do something else, anything else, for a while.
Reading just about anything will definitely help me, but I love Helen Rosner’s food writing. And I tend to listen to a lot of music when I need inspiration, so as far as lyricists go, probably Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, Prince, and Paul Simon.
I write pretty conversationally, so I sprinkle in a lot of “just” and “of course” and “perhaps” that I usually have to go back and delete.
I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a “guilty” pleasure (unless it’s like, continuing to read Harry Potter after J.K. Rowling has made it clear that doing so supports her transphobic work). No one should feel guilty about doing something that brings them joy. But in terms of indulgences that make little sense to others, I love a Hershey’s Cookies ‘N’ Creme bar.
Generously, the power to instantly heal others. Selfishly, the power to have three cocktails and sleep through the night.
Any time I see a photo of a magpie standing on its nest made of shiny, pretty things, that’s me.
Unfortunately, I’m probably looking on my phone. I have a very dumb “project” where I am trying to train my Instagram algorithm to show me the absolute worst videos out there. But I am trying to get better about doing things like taking a walk to the river, or practicing a new hobby (my latest one is trying to learn some card tricks).
A copy of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a bootleg Knicks champion shirt, a fortune teller fish, a bottle of 4711 cologne, and a DVD of Velvet Goldmine.
You should know for this photo I am standing directly against my bed, which my cats sit on all day and scream at me from. You should also know half the time I’m not even here, and instead writing with my laptop on the couch.
Jaya Saxena is an IACP Award-winning, James Beard Award-nominated writer and editor, and a lifelong New Yorker. She enjoys covering the intersections of food and immigration, business, history, policy, queerness, and just about every way we use food to say something about ourselves. She is the series editor for The Best American Food and Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in Eater, Slate, Gourmet, GQ, The New York Times, Defector, and more. You can email her at jaya@weareravenous.com.
T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 35, dated July 31, 2026. Russia’s State Duma has passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say it is effectively a citizenship-stripping law. The Russian authorities are expanding the practice of freezing bank accounts outside of any specific case, on the basis of “suspicion” alone. Extrajudicial persecution is becoming ever more widespread.
According to First Department [a Russian human rights organization that defends people accused of treason and espionage — T-invariant], on July 22, 2026, Russia’s State Duma passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say the law drastically curtails the rights of Russians who have left the country and been found guilty in criminal or politically motivated administrative cases. As lawyers describe it, this is a de facto citizenship-stripping law: “For now, lawmakers aren’t proposing to confiscate the passports of people named in political cases — but they are proposing to strip them of many key civil rights.”
“Under the text of the law, anyone named in a criminal case or a political administrative case will be unable to obtain a new foreign-travel passport, execute a power of attorney, access government services online, dispose of their property, register a vehicle, or use a digital signature. These are only some of the basic rights that people persecuted by the state will lose,” First Department reports.
Our database tracks scientists, university teachers, and research engineers persecuted in Russia. A large group of them have been labeled “extremists” or “extremists and terrorists” by the state — that is, entered in the registry kept by Rosfinmonitoring [Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service — T-invariant]. For the repressive machine, this is a very convenient form of persecution. Rosfinmonitoring puts a person on the registry, and the banks do the rest: they freeze the accounts — and the freeze takes effect at every bank at once — which makes that person’s life extremely difficult. This applies both to those living in Russia and to those living abroad who keep an account at a Russian bank, to receive a pension, for example.
As a rule, putting someone on Rosfinmonitoring’s public registry required that a case first be opened against them under an “extremism” or “terrorism” article. A conviction was not necessary; not even formal charges were necessary. An investigator would send a letter to Rosfinmonitoring, the person would be added to the registry, and the banks would freeze the accounts. But the existence of an administrative or criminal case, or of inclusion in the Rosfinmonitoring registry, is a matter of public record: it is easy to find out about, and the decision can be appealed.
Back in 2013, Federal Law No. 115-FZ, On Countering the Legalization (Laundering) of Criminally Obtained Income and the Financing of Terrorism, was supplemented with Article 7.4, expanded in the summer of 2025 to cover sabotage. It provides for another way to freeze accounts: with no case opened at all — on the basis of “suspicion.”
On July 21, 2026, Meduza reported: “The Russian authorities have quietly begun freezing the accounts of well-known cultural figures who have left the country. The first to report this was political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, on her show ‘Status,’ back on July 14. According to her, this is being done on the basis of an unofficial ‘secret list,’ without any notification whatsoever. Schulmann said the freezing decisions are made by the Interagency Commission for Countering the Financing of Terrorism and Extremist Activity.”
This kind of covert freezing appears not to have been used before 2026, at least not on a mass scale. Meduza writes: “First Department lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told Agentstvo [an independent Russian news outlet — T-invariant] that the commission’s decisions are supposed to be published under the law, but they are impossible to find, since the commission does not even have a website. Smirnov said that lawyers have been running into cases like these over the past six or seven months.”
We know of accounts frozen in June–July 2026 that belong to people who are not currently in the Rosfinmonitoring registry. It may well be that the Interagency Commission really is compiling a “secret list” of its own, as Schulmann suggests.
A specific charge, a specific article of the code, specific evidence — all of these can be appealed. But a decision by the Interagency Commission, which never discloses what the “suspicion” consists of, is very hard to contest. Formally, the law does provide a right to judicial review (Article 7.4, paragraph 3). In practice, though, to appeal a decision you first have to learn that it exists and read it — and according to attorney Evgeny Smirnov, the decision cannot even be located.
The Russian authorities continue to expand the machinery of extrajudicial persecution, and the emphasis has now shifted to those who have left the country. Until now, we have been able to track persecuted scholars who ended up in the Rosfinmonitoring registry and faced banking restrictions. If a “secret list” exists, that kind of monitoring is incomplete. The registry gives us only a lower-bound estimate, which we can supplement with the testimony of those affected.
New entries
July 29, 2026. The Moscow City Court sentenced science journalist Darya Shipacheva to 12 years in prison on a charge of treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). This is the same term the prosecution had requested. The court also confiscated 1.5 million rubles from her and imposed a fine of 300,000 rubles, Politzek-Info [a Telegram channel that tracks political prisoners in Russia — T-invariant] reports. The trial was closed to the public. The defense asked the court to take into account her guilty plea and her cooperation with investigators. T-invariant reports that the treason charge grew out of a money transfer to Ukraine.
July 22, 2026. The Central District Court of Volgograd ordered Roman Melnichenko, a lawyer and former lecturer at Volgograd State University, held in pretrial detention. He will remain in custody at least until September 20, Politzek-Info reports. Melnichenko was detained in a criminal case over repeated “discrediting” of the Russian armed forces (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code) [the criminal charge applies to those who have already been penalized once for the same offense under administrative law — T-invariant]. The prosecution was triggered by a post on VKontakte and a video on another, unnamed video platform, both published in September 2025.
July 19, 2026. It became known that a criminal case had been opened against Maxim Kravchuk, a physicist from Shchyolkovo, under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code (high treason). Kravchuk was detained on June 24, but this only came to light on July 19, Politzek-Info reports. According to Mediazona, citing Kravchuk himself, he is accused of sending photographs to a relative abroad. “Sergey Nikolaevich Kazimir is my uncle; the only thing between us is a family relationship. I do not agree with the charge brought against me. I’m ready to swear that I never sent any photographs. The investigation will figure this out,” Kravchuk said. According to his attorney, Kravchuk is accused of ties “with people from the near abroad, specifically with Kazimir” [“the near abroad” is the standard Russian term for the other former Soviet republics — T-invariant]. His attorney also pointed out that the law does not prohibit communicating with relatives.
Updates
July 28, 2026. A new case has been opened against Valery Kachin over alleged justification of terrorism, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. Rights advocates have learned that the new case rests on a few remarks Kachin made a year ago, when he compared Ukrainian special forces units to fighters from the Wagner private military company. What exactly he said is not known in detail. So far this is the only episode in the case, but a second may be added, over some comment Kachin made about the Network case during a walk while he was being held in a punishment cell.
July 21, 2026. Mikhail Volkov has been removed from the Rosfinmonitoring registry, Politzek-Info reports.
July 15, 2026. The Labytnangi City Court ruled unlawful the Investigative Committee’s refusal to open a criminal case in response to mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s complaint of torture at penal colony IK-18, known as Polar Owl. Investigators are now required to conduct an additional review within 30 days, Politzek-Info reports.
July 14, 2026. Prosecutors appealed Maxim Kruglov’s earlier sentence. Prosecutor Yulia Guznyaeva filed an appeal asking that the sentence be vacated and the criminal case sent back for a new trial. On June 24, 2026, Kruglov was sentenced to seven years in a general-regime penal colony, but the prosecution was not satisfied with the sentence and wants Kruglov punished more severely, Politzek-Info reports.
February 18, 2026. The Paninsky District Court in Voronezh Region sentenced Severin to three years in a strict-regime penal colony under the law on public “discrediting” of the armed forces, SOTAvision reported. On July 6, 2026, the Voronezh Regional Court reduced Severin’s sentence from three years to two years and ten months in a strict-regime colony. This was reported from the courtroom by a correspondent for SOTAvision.
July 4, 2026. The Northern Fleet Military Court sentenced activist and journalist Olesya Krivtsova in absentia to six years in a general-regime penal colony under the articles on “justifying terrorism” (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) and “repeated discrediting of the Russian armed forces” (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). On top of the prison term, she was barred for three years from administering online resources, Politzek-Info reports.
June 27, 2026. Dmitry Bogmut fainted for the second time during roll call at his penal colony, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He had lost consciousness once before, on June 9, also during roll call. His blood sugar was elevated after the first episode and higher still after the second. An endocrinologist has yet to examine Bogmut, because the doctor is on leave. He was excused from morning roll calls for six days. “For now they’ve chalked it up to vegetative-vascular dystonia, some type or other,” his support group writes [vegetative-vascular dystonia is a catch-all diagnosis common in post-Soviet medicine and not recognized internationally — T-invariant].
June 22, 2026. Prosecutors asked that the case of Kirill Yakovlev (Glikery Ulunov) be sent back for a new trial. This was reported by First Department, citing attorney Anastasia Pilipenko. Pilipenko writes: “Prosecutors don’t like it when young, happy, and utterly harmless poets go free. <…> On the plus side, for the first time the prosecution managed to call a poem a poem, rather than ‘textual material.’”
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T-invariant releases the latest issue of the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists: No. 32, dated April 30, 2026. At the end of April, the Russian government agreed to revise and soften the draft law on artificial intelligence published by the Ministry of Digital Development in March. The bill was restrictive and prohibitive in nature, and its enforcement, especially in its original version, could have led to numerous prosecutions of developers, companies, and even users by the FSB. T-invariant wrote about this in its commentary. However, active criticism of the bill led the government to retreat.
The main concession to business was the abandonment of the requirement that “sovereign” and “national” models be trained exclusively on data assembled in Russia by Russian citizens. Businesses had warned that there was catastrophically little such data in the public domain, that compliance with this requirement would increase the cost of AI deployment by 20–40 percent, and that it would slow time to market by a factor of two. The authorities agreed. AI models may now be trained on any available data, regardless of their source. At the same time, the requirement that large AI services (with more than 500,000 users) register as organizers of information dissemination was removed. This would have obliged them to install SORM surveillance systems and provide the security services with direct access to user data.
Throughout these discussions, no one spoke publicly about what everyone in the industry already knows. The real technological scheme of the Russian AI market looks roughly like this, or is moving toward this configuration: Chinese Huawei chips, Chinese open models such as DeepSeek or Qwen, additional training on Russian-language material, and output filters blocking politically undesirable content. (On this Russian-Chinese setup, see T-invariant’s article “Sovereign Intelligence on Chinese Chips” and commentary by T-invariant editor Alexander Sergeev.) It is a workable and relatively inexpensive scheme: operating the open Qwen model costs tens of times less than Western equivalents. This is precisely the model that business was defending when it pushed to scrap restrictions on data sources. And in the end, it is this model to which the authorities adapted.
However, the law preserved the main control mechanism: a registry of “trusted models,” mandatory for the public sector and critical infrastructure. Certification is to be carried out by the FSB and FSTEC (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — the agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence). The idea is clear: before allowing a model near state secrets, the government wants to check whether there is anything suspicious inside it. The problem is that, in principle, this is extremely difficult to verify.
Current research points to several difficult problems that arise when auditing a model. Here are just a few of them. In so-called distillation — when one model (the student) is trained on the output data of another model (the teacher) — the student inherits the teacher’s hidden preferences even if the training data appear completely neutral. Anthropic researchers called this effect “a love of owls.” The somewhat odd name comes from a demonstration example: the teacher AI was trained so that, among all birds, it preferred owls. The student — an AI of the same architecture — was then trained on the teacher’s output data, and owls were never mentioned at all. Nevertheless, the student retained the teacher’s preference. The authors of the paper showed that this “love of owls” is transmitted through statistical patterns invisible to ordinary inspection. In other words, in some cases a Russian model trained on Qwen data will retain the teacher model’s preferences, but inspection cannot “catch” those preferences — such control methods simply do not exist.
In addition, a “trigger” can be deliberately embedded in the training data — a rare phrase or construction that causes the model to behave completely differently from its normal mode. Standard testing will not reveal such a trigger. To find it, one simply has to know the phrase. But even if the model itself is flawless, agentic systems — where AI has access to email, documents, and corporate databases — create an entirely different attack surface. Aim Security showed how, through an ordinary email in Outlook, Microsoft Copilot could be made to silently extract an organization’s confidential data and send it to an attacker — without a single click on the part of the victim and without leaving any trace in the logs. No model certification could have prevented that. The model is fine; the vulnerability lies in the system architecture.
DeepSeek is distributed under an open license: the model weights are available, it can be deployed on one’s own servers, and it can be studied. This creates an illusion of auditability. But DeepSeek’s training data are closed, and that is precisely where undesirable properties may be hidden, if there are any. FSTEC understands this no worse than anyone else. The result is a strange configuration: the agency receives formal authority to certify something that, technically, cannot be fully audited, while the Chinese origin of these models rules out awkward questions to the developers of the training data — China is a “friend forever; how could we possibly suspect it?” As a result, certification turns not into a protective mechanism but into a bureaucratic procedure that creates the appearance of control, while also proving very costly for business.
Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on State Building and Legislation and head of the Presidential Council for the Codification of Civil Legislation, sharply rejected the bill: “The Civil Code is a foundation, and trying to build separate structures on top of it for every new technology, in ways that contradict it, is a path to legal chaos. If there are a few sensible ideas of a public-law nature, their place is in sector-specific legislation, not in an empty legislative shell.”
But there is also something worth noting that is rare in today’s Russia. More than 150 experts and representatives of the largest companies took part in the discussion of the bill. Business openly criticized specific provisions and succeeded in having them removed. The Presidential Council publicly rejected the government’s initiative. The law was genuinely debated, and real amendments were made. This does not mean that subsequent by-laws from the FSB and FSTEC will not restore what has now been abandoned. But the very fact of such bargaining is a rare sign that Russian technological policy still retains a certain pragmatism.
Almost certainly, this is connected to the military applications of AI: in drones, in processing intelligence data, and in logistics. This is no longer theory; it is a real war. To regulate civilian AI so heavily that its development comes to a halt would also mean cutting back military applications. This argument almost certainly came up in closed-door discussions. It may well have been the decisive one.
New Cards
April 10, 2026. Russia’s Justice Ministry added Stanford University to the list of foreign organizations whose activities are deemed undesirable in Russia. The Prosecutor General’s Office made the decision on March 26, Kommersant reports. Media reports did not provide the reasoning behind it.
April 17, 2026. Russia’s Justice Ministry added Russian-American chemist Alexander Kabanov — a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a professor at the University of North Carolina — to the foreign agents register. According to the ministry, Kabanov disseminated false information about decisions made by the Russian authorities and the policies they pursue, opposed the special military operation in Ukraine, and participated in the creation and dissemination of materials and messages by foreign agents and organizations deemed undesirable in the Russian Federation, RIA Novosti reports.
April 9, 2026. The Central District Court of Krasnoyarsk placed Academician Nikolai Testoyedov under house arrest — the former director general of JSC Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems, Russia’s principal satellite manufacturer, according to the joint press service of the courts of Krasnoyarsk Krai. Testoyedov was charged with large-scale fraud (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code), Vedomosti reports.
Updates
April 22, 2026. Novaya Gazeta reported that “Azat Miftakhov is being transferred to serve his sentence in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug,” according to his support group. “This is connected with the terms of the sentence, under which Miftakhov must spend a year and a half of his four-year term in a strict-regime penal colony.” The paper notes that Kharp, where Miftakhov is being transferred, has two colonies: IK-3 “Polar Wolf,” a special-regime colony where Alexei Navalny was held before his death, and IK-18 “Polar Owl,” which has both strict- and general-regime sections.
The post Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 32 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week. The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine.
T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week.
The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine. The money also supports people who have been left without support after a loved one’s arrest, as well as those who have been released after serving their sentences.
T-invariant took part in the marathon, as it does every year. T-invariant Editor-in-Chief Olga Orlova called on our readers and viewers to support political prisoners. We have been maintaining the Chronicle for almost three years now. Our database currently contains 170 individual case files. About 40 of the scientists in it are currently behind bars.
In this issue of the Chronicle, we have added a new case file: that of Olga Orlova. Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated Olga Orlova — a Candidate of Philological Sciences (PhD equivalent), science journalist, and T-invariant’s editor-in-chief — a “foreign agent.”
We have written several times about the debate over the Russian government’s proposed AI-regulation bill. According to RBC, that debate has led to major changes to the bill — not just in the details, but on substantive issues, chiefly those concerning oversight of how AI models are developed and used.
After sharp criticism from the business community, the Russian government presented an updated version of the bill, cutting the number of provisions from 21 to 13. The concept of a “trusted” model was dropped, but “sovereign” and “national” models remain, and they must comply with Russian law and store their data within the country. The law is now meant to regulate only large foundation models with more than 1 billion parameters. The requirement that such models be built exclusively on Russian data by Russian citizens was scrapped, and the new draft no longer bans the use of foreign neural networks to train models. It was precisely the requirement to train on Russian data that drew the sharpest criticism.
The registry of “trusted” models was supposed to be overseen by the FSB and FSTEK (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — an agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence services). That registry has been dropped, or at least the law no longer provides for one. But experts note that the bill remains quite vague, and how it actually functions will depend on a whole package of implementing regulations whose content is still unknown. The main provisions may take effect on March 1, 2027, with certain rules coming into force as early as September 1, 2026.
New case files
June 22, 2026 The Sverdlovsk Regional Court sentenced 71-year-old engineer Viktor Kazakov of Novouralsk to a year of forced labor on charges of the rehabilitation of Nazism (Part 4, Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code), Mediazona reports. The court ordered a year of forced labor with 10% of his wages withheld for the benefit of the state. He was also barred for two years from administering websites and posting material online, Kommersant reports.
June 4, 2026 The Leninsky District Court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Grey Boltachev, a researcher at the Institute of Electrophysics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to five days of administrative detention on a charge of petty hooliganism, Mediazona reports. The scientist had been detained at his workplace on June 3. Police formally accused him of “using obscene language in a public place.” Boltachev linked his administrative prosecution to his plans to run for the Sverdlovsk Regional Legislative Assembly on the Yabloko party ticket — regional parliamentary elections are set for this September — Kommersant reports. Boltachev was released from custody on June 8, Yabloko reports.
May 22, 2026 Russia’s Ministry of Justice added science journalist and T-invariant editor-in-chief Olga Orlova to the register of foreign agents, Vedomosti reports.
According to the Ministry, Orlova spread “false information” about the decisions and policies of Russian government bodies. She also spoke out against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and gave interviews to foreign media outlets. In addition, the journalist created and distributed materials produced by foreign agents and organizations designated “undesirable” in Russia, RBC reports.
Updates
June 8, 2026 The Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg dismissed the criminal case against poet Glikeriy Ulunov (real name Kirill Yakovlev). He had been charged with “organizing activity aimed at inciting suicide” (Part 2, Article 110.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). His lawyers managed to get the writer released from criminal liability, even though the prosecutor strongly objected, Department One reports.
June 29, 2026 A court ruled it unlawful that Elena Gorban — mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s wife and defense attorney — was denied access to him after he had been tortured at Penal Colony No. 18 “Polar Owl” in Kharp. On June 23, Gorban was likewise refused a visit with Miftakhov, even though she was entitled to one as his defense counsel, Mediazona reports.
June 28, 2026 The Gagarinsky District Court in Moscow convicted Yuri Pivovarov — former director and research director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom the Ministry of Justice has designated a “foreign agent” — in absentia, sentencing him to seven years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of fraudulently employing staff, RBC reports.
June 19, 2026 The Moscow City Court convicted historian Tamara Eidelman in absentia and sentenced her to eight years in prison on charges of rehabilitating Nazism (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) and spreading “fakes” about the army (Article 207.3, Part 2, Clause “d”), Meduza reports.
June 13, 2026 Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at Yerevan Airport, the TV network Rain (Dozhd) reported. Verbitsky was placed in a detention facility. As Meduza reports: “According to Ani Chatinyan, a lawyer with the Yerevan office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly ‘Vanadzor,’ Verbitsky was detained over a criminal case against him in Russia. She explained that if Russia submits an extradition request, Verbitsky would, under the law, be held for 40 days; if not, he would be released after 72 hours.” No such request had arrived by June 15. Mikhail Verbitsky was released from custody in Armenia. This was laterreported by his lawyer, Vache Simonyan, to the Armenian service of Radio Liberty. Verbitsky left Armenia on June 15, Meduza reports.
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Tax authorities in Greece uncovered a smugglers ring illegally extracting and collecting protected red corals around the island of Skopelos. The value of the illegal cargo is estimated at 800,000 euros. The perpetrators who collected the precious corals had rented a pleasure boat. Their movements were suspicious and were arrested by inspectors of Independent Public […]
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