Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Branko Marcetic

“The war in Ukraine has been defined by periodic bursts of certainty that Russia is on the back foot, if not close to collapse, and that Ukraine, conversely, is inches away from victory. We appear to be in the middle of one of these moments of euphoria now. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has declared that Ukraine is ‘on top’ and ‘in a much better place than it has been at any stage in this horrific war’, charging that Russia is unable to recruit enough soldiers to make up for those it’s losing. Ukrainians have ‘a growing self-confidence’ on account of the territory they have supposedly retaken, as one former U.S. ambassador put it, and their growing confidence over military advances ‘is strikingly higher today than a year ago’, charged another. A spate of reports have it that the walls are closing in on Russian President Vladimir Putin.” (05/13/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-forced-conscription/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Julia R Cartwright

“The United States has reached a milestone, and unfortunately, it’s not one to celebrate. For the first time outside a genuine crisis, America’s national debt now exceeds the size of its entire economy. There is nothing magical about the 100% line; it’s more of a psychological threshold than a hard cliff. Indeed, debt hawks have sounded alarms for years, and the economy has not yet collapsed. But the absence of collapse is not the same as the absence of consequences. Like other developed nations that have drifted into high debt territory, cracks in the American economy are beginning to show, structurally and with compounding force.” (05/13/26)

https://lawliberty.org/americas-new-debt-milestone/