George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Ukraine President Zelensky's open letter to Russian President Putin, Putin's response to it and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's increasingly harsh tone toward the Trump administration--a striking contrast to that of the complaisant Kremlin.

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Germany's failure to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council, and explain its global significance.

China is trying to export its way through a domestic balance sheet problem.

Europe is trying to stop its industrial base from being hollowed out.

Both are acting out of necessity. Not strategy. That is the trade war.

China built too much industrial capacity. The world never grew the way it expected. Now it is left with factories that produce far more than anyone can absorb.

From Beijing's perspective this is not a mistake. It is a national development strategy. Dominate the industries of the future. Hold on to the industries of the past.

From Europe's perspective it is an existential threat.

Chinese producers get subsidies, state backed banking, and sell at prices European companies cannot match.

The result is not lower consumer prices. The result is industrial destruction.

Europe already watched this happen in solar panels.

And China has no choice but to keep going. If exports slow, factories idle, profits fall, employment suffers, banks break.

Exports are the only release valve...

https://open.substack.com/pub/slavlandchronicles/p/cyperpunk-2026-sberbank-edition?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=o786d

I recommend reading the New York Times piece “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files,” by Haberman and Swan. Briefly, it documents how the Epstein files triggered an internal crisis in the Trump White House: Vance calling it a “huge problem,” senior aides holding repeated Situation Room meetings (often without Trump) over a political scandal, officials pushing transparency moves like unsealing grand jury records that they privately knew would produce nothing new, discussions about deploying the imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell to publicly defend Trump, and internal warfare between Bondi, the FBI and others over messaging. Throughout, the dominant fear was losing the MAGA base, not anything Democrats might do. 

And here is what struck me reading it. Across all those Situation Room meetings, in a room normally reserved for wars and terrorist ...

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Where did the “savior of the Russian economy” disappear? Has Nabiullina decided to leave the sinking ship?

At a meeting with Putin where inflation and a possible key rate cut were discussed, Central Bank chief Elvira Nabiullina and her deputies were absent.

Nabiullina used to regularly attend such meetings, so her absence is noticeable.

She has not appeared in public for about a week. She also missed a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and a NAUFOR conference. The Central Bank said this is due to illness.

Did the “wise geopolitical strategist” decide to take inflation into his own hands? This is a rather troubling signal for the Russian economy, which is rapidly sliding into decline.