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Israel is considering sending Soviet and Russian-made weapons captured in Lebanon to Ukraine, with signs transfers may be under way.
Israel reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomats on Tuesday to discuss a weapons transfer. Since then, US military cargo planes have been tracked flying from Israel to an airbase in eastern Poland.

“There are signs that Israel has begun supplying Ukraine with Soviet and Russian-made weapons,” Two Majors, a pro-Russia military blog on the Telegram social messaging site, told its 1.2 million subscribers on Sunday.
It posted photos of dozens of shoulder-mounted missiles laid out on hard-baked ground, as well as two screengrabs of a US military plane flying from Ramstein airbase in Germany to Hatzerim airbase in Israel and then to Rzeszów in Poland, near the border with Ukraine.
Around 60 per cent of the weapons captured by Israel during the fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024 were made by the Soviet Union and Russia.

A South Korean politician who grappled with an armed soldier in a show of defiance outside the country’s National Assembly on Tuesday night said she felt like the “last line” of defense in preventing security forces from entering parliament.

One of the most defining scenes to come out of South Korea’s political chaos this week was video of An Gwi-ryeong grabbing a soldier’s gun as lawmakers faced off against troops who had blocked their way into the building.

It came hours after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in a shocking televised announcement that surprised even those within his own party and plunged the country into uncertainty.

“I asked them, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’” An, a spokesperson for the main opposition Democratic Party, told CNN while standing outside the National Assembly building Thursday.
“Even if they were following orders, armed soldiers pointing guns at citizens in the National Assembly and interfering with lawmakers’ proceedings is undeniably il

Donald Trump wants to divide US rivals Russia and China.

The region contains rare-earth mineral resources that several countries want to access.

At the Valdai forum last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin was keen to tamp down rumors of simmering tensions with his closest global ally, China's leader Xi Jinping.

The source of the perceived tension is China's growing assertiveness in Central Asia. The region is the latest area in which Xi has launched an audacious bid to increase China's political and economic authority and cement its dominance in rare-earth minerals.

"What is happening in Central Asia? Many expected it to be a site of conflict or clash between China and Russia," Putin said "This has not happened."

But the reassurances will not convince everyone, and among those on the lookout for signs of division between Putin and Xi is President-elect Donald Trump.

The power grab over rare-earth minerals in Central Asia could be among the issues he will seek to e

Chinese carmaker Chery has started assembling cars in Russia for sale in the country at three factories vacated by Western rivals including Volkswagen and Mercedes.

Chinese carmakers have grabbed more than half of Russia's car market in terms of sales since most Western counterparts abandoned the country following Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Now, they are extending their reach to account for more of Russia's domestic production, too, highlighting how Beijing is playing a more influential role in Russia's changing manufacturing landscape and economy since the invasion.

In addition to finished car imports into Russia, Chery, which makes up almost a fifth of Russia's passenger car sales, is importing nearly finished cars and completing the assembly in three Russian factories.

China's biggest car exporter is likely to be betting on strong demand in the country as Russia's domestic market struggles with limited output and underused production capacity, the source

Pakistan Adopts 4 New Strategies To Bleed Jammu & Kashmir; Report Hints At China’s ‘Hidden Hand’ In Conflict.

From 2021 till date, Pakistan-sponsored terrorists have made no fewer than 26 cross-border attacks on the Indian army or police posts. From June 9 to 11, there were four terrorist attacks in the Jammu region. The most significant attack was on a bus carrying pilgrims from Shiv Khori in the Reasi district.

Pakistan has added new dimensions to its terror modules for Jammu & Kashmir. First, it has shifted the field of operation from Kashmir to the Jammu Division, with Poonch, Rajouri, Kathua, Doda, and Reasi as the targeted locations.

Secondly, there is a new element in their guerrilla tactics: it involves using caves and deep crevices in dense forests as hiding places. Arms, ammunition, edibles, clothes, medicine, etc, are dumped in advance in these undisclosed caves to which the terrorists have access through local guides.

After attacking security forces or a police patrol party, they return to these caves without being detected. Security forces have to deploy helicopters and drones to locate the elusive terrorists.

The third and rather alarming tactical change is the selection of a new and hitherto unknown route for the terrorists to sneak into the Indian side. China is reported to have dug a tunnel somewhere in Lipa Valley that joins the Kashmir border with the Karakoram Highway. The Pakistan-sponsored terrorists are now using this secret route to move to the border locale to dump arms, ammunition, and other war material.

The fourth tactical change is that the new generation of terrorists are far better trained in guerilla fighting tactics and are provided with China-made ultra-modern weapons, communication devices, bullets, and hand grenades.

What is significant is that China is now directly involved in the Indo-Pak dispute over Kashmir, and it is not only moral support that Pakistan gets from China but also arms and ammunition. A big and dangerous conspiracy has been hatched by the two adversaries in tandem to bleed India with a thousand cuts.

Unfortunately, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has been trapped by its blunders, like harping on India’s determination to take back Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK — an official document of the NDA government referred to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir [PoK] as PoJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) with the plea that these areas belong to India according to the instrument of accession signed by the Maharaja of Kashmir. Does any member of the world community accept that Pakistan-held Kashmir belongs to Kashmir? They argue that once India accepted a ceasefire in J&K in 1948, it indirectly accepted that Pakistan was a party to the dispute.

In 1994, the Indian Parliament passed a unanimous resolution asserting that PoJK was a part of the Indian Union, which had the will and capacity to take it back. Nearly 30 years have passed since that resolution was adopted.

Not a single attempt was made by India to retake it. Merely warning Pakistan to vacate PoJK and return the territory to India — the legal owner — was a crude joke played on the Indian nation.

The Indian Parliament’s resolution has gone into the dustbin because India has not shown the will or the power to take back the territory. During the past three or four decades, Islamabad has brought structural, juridical, and administrative changes in the part of J&K under its illegal occupation. Except for issuing a ‘paper tiger’ warning, India has never done anything that would show it means business in PoJK.

Clear signals were sent from time to time. The grapevine has it that during the six-month-long Kashmir talks between the two foreign ministers (Sardar Swarn Singh of India and ZA Bhutto of Pakistan), they agreed in their penultimate meeting to bifurcate the Valley and make the Wular Lake the watershed. But in the final meeting, in which even an MoU was drafted, Bhutto retracted, and the entire plan ended in a fiasco.

Again, the grapevine has it that it was Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad, then Chief Minister of J&K, who saved Kashmir from the nefarious design of partition. He is alleged to have sent a secret message to Bhutto that “when Pakistan was in a position to grab the entire J&K, why was he settling for only half of it?”.

This was the rumour that was doing the rounds in political circles at that time in Kashmir. The same Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was ignominiously sacked by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1962. I have always said that the day Bakhshi was dismissed was the day Kashmir cancer took its roots.

The plan may have ended in a fiasco. However, it left a lasting impression on the Pakistani rulers that India was aware of its weakness in Kashmir, and they never missed an opportunity to exploit that.

Again, in May 1964, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru entrusted Sheikh Abdullah to go to Pakistan and offer the formula of a Confederation of Three States: India, Pakistan, and J&K.

Pakistan’s Ayub Khan rejected the idea outright. The Sheikh traveled to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, to garner the support of the Azad Kashmir leadership. But before he began his mission, he received the news of Nehru’s demise, and he had to return to India. Nothing was heard of the Confederation proposal after that.

The conclusion drawn by Kashmir experts in Pakistan was that Nehru had acknowledged J&K as a disputed matter.

Today, the ground situation is that China has changed its earlier stand on Kashmir, and the two countries should resolve it bilaterally. Beijing now openly supports Pakistan’s stand. This support is not due to any love for Pakistan but for its interest in using the illegally occupied Aksai Chin and Shaksgam to construct a road and railway that connects with Lhasa.

China is constructing tunnels and bunkers along the Karakoram Highway, potentially enabling Pakistani terror organizations to transport men and materials for conducting terrorist attacks in Kashmir.

Destabilization of India in Kashmir is now Beijing’s priority ever since the Indian top political leadership began doling out warnings to Pakistan that it had finalized plans for retaking the Pakistan-occupied part of J&K. These hollow warnings were directed more towards China than Pakistan. In retaliation, China not only encouraged the Pakistan army to reinforce its border security with heavy military deployment but also provided it with moral support in conducting terrorist forays into the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir.

The Pakistani Prime Minister was on a 4-day-long visit to Beijing, where he held meetings with President Xi. While Pakistan’s sagging economy was the important subject they discussed, an equally important and urgent issue was the security of PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan in the background of the relentless threats from India.

For nearly six months in the past, the people of PoK have been on the streets with multitudes protesting against Islamabad’s hegemony and suppression of the rights of the people. They have demanded nothing less than separation from Pakistan and re-union with the original state of the Maharaja of J&K.

In his recent talks with the Chinese President, the Pakistani Prime Minister is believed to have told Xi that if India succeeded in retaking PoK, it would mean the end of the Karakoram Highway and the blockade of Aksaichin and Shaksgam under China’s illegal occupation. This would change the entire geostrategic chemistry of Central and South Asia.

It is debatable whether India will choose to retake PoK despite the expected resistance from the China-Pakistan alliance. However, India needs to focus on the vicious Sino-Pak axis.

This is the moment when India, playing its most crucial role as the defender of the world’s largest democracy, shuns all inhibitions and comes out openly in diplomatic, moral, and material support of the freedom struggles underway in the South Asian region– particularly in her neighborhood.

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Kidnapped, abused, humiliated – the Ukrainian children stolen by Russia.....(Part1)

Anastasiia Motychak did not know why Irina – the person in charge of her camp in Russian-occupied Crimea – had just slapped her across the face; she just knew she missed her mum and wanted to go home to the Ukrainian city of Kherson.

It had been two months since the then 15-year-old had been put on a bus and moved from the then Russian-occupied Kherson, in southern Ukraine, to a two-week “vacation camp” in Yevpatoria, western Crimea. Kherson was no place for a child, the Russian soldiers had warned.

Days later, Ukrainian forces liberated the city. But by then, Anastasiia was 150 miles deeper into occupied territory, sleeping in a room with barred windows.

Living in areas held by different military forces, she and her mother soon struggled to communicate; the cell lines between the two cities had been cut.

Then Irina showed up.

The short-tempered teacher would glare at Anastasiia and swear at the children. None of them knew why.

One January evening, after Anastasiia had returned from a walk – something she was allowed to do – her roommate pulled her into their room and told her Irina was looking for her.

Confused, the teenager poked her head out of her room to see if Irina was near. She was.

“She grabbed me and took me into a room nearby,” the teen recalls. “She started swearing, telling me that I would never return home. She said she was sick of me. She said that if I did anything like this again, she would call the police and send me to the Ural mountains in Russia. Then she closed the door and she slapped me across the face.”

Anastasiia still doesn’t know what she did wrong.
Roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children have been moved to such camps since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to Ukrainian officials. Nearly a quarter of those who have been taken are orphans or children without parental care.

More than 70 camps for forcibly “re-educating” children have been found, according to the Ukrainian government, including in Belarus, occupied Crimea and even far-east Russia, where the children are three times closer to the United States than Ukraine.

The issue of returning these abducted children to Ukraine is set to be the key issue at a peace summit this weekend in Switzerland, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia has not been invited.

‘We would be punished’
According to reports from the independent Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the so-called camps where the children are taken are anything but a holiday.

When they enter them, the OSCE wrote in May 2023, the youngsters “find themselves in an entirely pro-Russian environment … exposed to a pro-Russian information campaign often amounting to targeted re-education”.

When Anastasiia arrived in the camp in Yevpatoria, she was put into a small, shared room with several other children from Kherson.

She said the pillows on her bed stank and there were cockroaches everywhere, especially in the food hall. “I felt like I was in prison,” she says. “We had balconies in our room but they had bars on them.”

Anastasiia says she was “constantly monitored” during her time in the camp, only ever permitted to go outside under the watchful eye of one of the camp officials, and added that they were often punished for reasons they did not understand.

“We would be punished but we did not know why,” she says. “We didn’t know why they would not let us go. They refused to answer our questions.

“​​They told us that they would not get a bus to take us home and that we had to get our parents to come and collect us. They kept on repeating and repeating that.”

The OSCE paper added that “the Russian Federation does not take any steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children”, despite this being mandated by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of children during war. Instead, the paper said, “it creates various obstacles for families seeking to get their children back”.

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner tasked with negotiating the rescue of Ukrainian children from Russia, told The Independent that Moscow officials do “everything they can to block the return” of these tens of thousands of children.

Moscow has repeatedly denied abducting children and has sought to justify its actions by claiming it was done for the protection of the children. But such denials are dismissed by Lubinets.

“Ever since Russia occupied Crimea and part of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, all this time, Russia has deported Ukrainian children and violated the rights of civilians,” he said. “We have then had eight years of discussions [to return the children]. Did we have any concrete results? No.

“The only real way we can stop the deportation of Ukranian children is the liberation of all occupied territories of Ukraine. We have no other way.”

Anastasiia is one of only 388 children to have been rescued, according to Children of War, a portal created to track young deported Ukrainians. Only 2 per cent of those taken by Russia have returned, largely because their hometowns were liberated from Russian rule.

Three months after Ukraine freed Kherson, Anastasiia’s mother was able to contact Save Ukraine, a non-profit organisation that helps families travel through Russia to recover their relations. It has helped rescue more than 60 per cent of the children freed so far.

After a 15-day circuitous route around the front line in Ukraine, through Poland, Belarus and southwestern Russia, Anastasiia was reunited with her mum four months after she was taken. That was February 2023.

A month later, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, who has bragged about “rescuing” a Ukrainian child of her own, then 17-year-old Filip Holovnya.

Prosecutors at the ICC said they had “reasonable grounds” to believe she bore criminal responsibility for acting “directly, jointly with others and/or through others” to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. Putin, they added, has command responsibility. Russia decried the arrest warrants as politically motivated.

Kateryna Rashevska, a legal expert at the Regional Centre for Human Rights in Kyiv who has been advising the United Nations on the camps where children are being held, tells The Independent that the forced deportations are “a sign of Russia’s intent to exterminate our nationhood”.

“For us, for Ukrainians, it is a direct threat to our identity,” she says. “Russia wants to turn our children into enemies of Ukraine.”

‘Why wouldn’t you go?’
The Independent has spoken to five Ukrainian children recovered from Russia, ranging from 12 to 17 years old when they were taken, about their experiences in these “vacation camps”.

All stayed for at least four months, like Anastasiia; at least three stayed for more than eight, well after the ICC issued its arrest warrants in March last year. They were all rescued by Save Ukraine.

Liza Batsura, 16, says she remembers the moment a Russian official walked into her classroom in Henichesk No 27 Vocational School, near the Crimean peninsula.

Russian authorities moved her from Kherson to Crimea in September 2022, when she was 14. Her school director said he would put her in the basement if she refused. She would not be rescued until May the following year, by her estranged mother, Oksana Halkina.

“The teacher told us someone was coming,” Liza says. “Then we were taken into a room with one big table and chairs, and this woman walked in.

“She said it was not safe in Henichesk because of the war. She said it would be better for us in Russia, where we would have all these advantages.”

The official, flanked by official-looking men, allegedly offered each child 100,000 rubles (£893) “to move to any Russian city we wanted”, according to Liza.

By that point, Liza hadn’t spoken to her mother in more than half a year. The pair had a difficult relationship, so Liza had been living in a children’s home in Kherson prior to being taken by Russian authorities. Her mum was only told where she had been taken a week after she left.

“Some thoughts crossed my mind. What if this is a great opportunity for me?” Liza says. “Some other kids pressed me morally, asking: ‘Why wouldn’t you go?’”

Liza says six or seven children in her classroom took the opportunity – but she declined.

“In the end, I thought, I am closer to Ukraine than I am to Russia,” she says. “The whole atmosphere of Russian propaganda was very annoying as well.”

One of those that accepted the offer, Zorik Ibrian, 17, has stayed in Henichesk, where he infrequently messages Liza to swear at her for supporting Ukraine. He was orphaned a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

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Global rush for farmland could trigger world war, documentary argues........

A global network of powerful entities, fueled in part by Wall Street, is buying up land and water around the world.

This global land rush has led to wrecked wells and lost farms from Arizona to Zambia — and it risks sowing the seeds for future global conflict, according to “The Grab,” a new documentary out today from Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the director of “Blackfish.”

The film follows a seven-year investigation by producer and journalist Nathan Halverson of The Center for Investigative Reporting as he peels back the layers of a deceptively simple question: Why did a state-backed Chinese corporation buy America’s biggest pork producer in 2013?

“The Grab” hits U.S. markets at a fraught time for food policy: Congress remains deadlocked over the farm bill, and critics on both left and right are raising concerns over the impact of corporate consolidation on U.S. agriculture as farms grow ever bigger and more specialized.

Republicans in the House and Senate have proposed freezing food aid at current funding levels to direct tens of billions of dollars in additional subsidies to high-income farmers of rice, cotton and peanuts — crops of which significant percentages are exported to the wider world.

“The Grab” digs into some of the forces driving the consolidation and food exports — and their potential consequences.

When countries like China import food, Halverson notes in the film, they’re often doing so “as a proxy for water,” which the world’s most populous nation is running short of amid population movements and climate change.

The combination of those potential shortages and a rising — and increasingly carnivorous — middle class in China and elsewhere have combined to create a global push to buy up fertile land in places where it is still plentiful.

One critical focus of this push is Africa. Halverson interviewed Brig Siachitema, an activist in the Zambian town of Serenje, where he says foreign investors have been buying up the ancestral land of villagers and kicking them off it.

“What we are seeing is really a new scramble for Africa,” Siachitema says in the interview. “The only difference is, before they were scrambling for minerals. This time around, they are scrambling for land.”

That includes the United States. In 2015, Halverson broke the story that Saudi-owned alfalfa farms were sucking down the groundwater of Arizona to grow feed for cattle — something the kingdom grew itself until it depleted its own groundwater.

For residents of La Paz County, Ariz., for example, that lost groundwater left wells nonfunctional. Landowner Wayne Wade first noticed a problem when the water level in his well went below his pump “and the pump burned up and melted the casing,” Wade tells Halverson in “The Grab.”

“Everybody knows the problem, but no one knows how to correct it,” Wade adds. “You just take and take and take, and pretty soon there isn’t anything to take.”

In making the film, Cowperthwaite told The Hill, she sought to steer away from what she saw as a polarized, dead-end conversation about climate change — and focus on a film “in the context of power.”

“And I think that’s something that sort of every Zambian villager in Serenje will feel — similarly to every Trump-voting farmer in Arizona,” she added.

In part, “The Grab” argues that power is being exercised over individual landowners by a convoluted and opaque network of sovereign wealth funds, national governments and Wall Street.

When Halverson tried to uncover the identities of the white farmers kicking the Zambians off their land, he found “a Russian doll of LLCs within LLCs that could be owned by anyone,” he says in the film. He found the story is often similarly murky in the U.S.

Late in the movie, he presents La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin, a staunch critic of the Saudi alfalfa farm, with evidence that the Arizona State Retirement System — her own pension fund — is invested in the project that is draining the aquifer beneath the county.

In the U.S., Halverson says in the film, “it’s a fight against the same corporations that are taking food globally.” Rather than fighting to protect U.S. land and food from other multinational corporations, “the governments are working for the corporations.”

But the power involved in the land rush scales up to the geopolitical level as well, driven ultimately by the titanic shifts happening within China — a country once so poor that “in 1980, [it] was a country of basically forced vegetarians,” Halverson told The Hill.

Over the back half of the 20th century, he noted, China “did something absolutely amazing”: It pulled 400 million people out of poverty, such that its middle class is larger than the entire U.S. population.

“That’s a huge win for the world — but the unintended consequence is they’re eating diets more like Western diets. Which means more meat,” he said. As part of his reporting, he came across a WikiLeaks cable from an executive at Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, following a tour of China.

“He said straight up: If [all countries] ate as much meat as America, the world would have run out of water in the year 2000,” Halverson said of the cable’s contents.

Now, he said, the government of China — like that of India, or Brazil, or Saudi Arabia — “wants to make sure their people have enough. And if you add climate change on top of that, then what you’re talking about is, increased droughts, increased flooding, more variability in an increasingly tighter global food system.”

That goal leads to a paradox, “The Grab” shows. As experts interviewed in the film emphasize, there are enough calories worldwide to feed a growing global population, even with climate change, and even in 2050. But they say the race to lock down resources, and governments’ panic over the unrest caused by spiking food prices, risks scaling up to a war between great powers.

“I’ll tell you, as a practical matter,” former CIA analyst Robert Mitchell tells Halverson in the film, “while the policymakers are debating, whoever needs water and has guns will go get it.”

Water is a hidden factor in a wide array of geopolitical conflicts. In the Jordan Valley in the Israel-occupied West Bank, for instance, human rights groups have documented that the majority of water goes to a network of Israeli settlements, as Palestinian farms go dry. In the ongoing conflict in Gaza, meanwhile, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights has accused Israel of using access to water “as a weapon of war.”

Water also may have played a significant role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine — the “breadbasket of Europe” — which came after a decade of calls by Russian officials for major food-producing countries wield more power in markets. Russian President Vladimir Putin has for years pushed for a global grain cartel modeled on OPEC.

“Food that has become the second oil — and much more powerful than oil,” the head of Russian meat company Miratorg tells Halverson. In the future, food “will give political strength to Russia, much more than weapons,” he said.

“The Grab” charts how in the aftermath of Putin’s invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the government in Kyiv dammed the principal canal supplying 85 percent of the region’s water — forcing Russia to spend billions of dollars in shipping in water to the peninsula’s cities and slashing the amount of irrigated land in the region by as much as 90 percent.

Halverson stopped short of saying that Crimean water was the cause of the invasion — although he noted that one of the first things Russian troops did after the invasion was blow the dam and reopen the canal.

“But we’re pushing back on the idea that this was just Putin puffing up his chest,” he told The Hill. “The only way [Russia was] going to turn that water back on was by going into that part of Ukraine.”

So as Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine in 2022, “while a lot of people were naysaying the invasion, we were watching it very closely, because we were tracking it through that resource grab,” he said.

The subsequent war in Ukraine has killed half a million people and released a vast plume of planet-heating carbon dioxide — and it could be just the beginning of a new era of open warfare over access to farmland and water, Cowperthwaite contends. She told The Hill that the war in Eastern Europe pushed a potential conflict from the film that was still at a level of “brinksmanship” — but that could, from a geopolitical perspective, be even worse.

In Northeast Africa, she noted, Egypt and Ethiopia are at odds over the latter’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which could potentially block the Blue Nile, the tributary that supplies 85 percent of the river’s flow.

Negotiations to guarantee Egyptians’ supplies in the case of a drought — which would force Ethiopia to open the dam, and let its own water out, to supply its neighbor — have repeatedly broken down.

As part of the reporting by the filmmakers that ended up cut, Cowperthwaite told The Hill, they captured “the head folks in Egypt on a hot mic saying, ‘Well, you know, we may have to take apart that [dam] — we may have to go to war.’ And Ethiopia says, ‘Well, we haven’t lost a war yet.’”

In China’s Backyard, America Has Become a Humbler Superpower....

Far from Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, as the Group of 7 wealthy democracies gathers in Italy to discuss a range of old, entrenched challenges, the nature of American power is being transformed across the region that Washington sees as crucial for the century to come: the Asia-Pacific.

Here, the United States no longer presents itself as the confident guarantor of security, a trust-us-we’ve-got-this superpower. The terrain is too vast, China’s rise too great a threat. So the United States has been offering to be something else — an eager teammate for military modernization and tech development.

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“In the past, our experts would talk about a hub-and-spokes model for Indo-Pacific security,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this month at a global defense conference in Singapore. “Today we’re seeing something quite different.”

In this new era, many countries are doing more, on their own and with U.S. help. For the first time, the United States is building nuclear-propelled submarines with Australia; involving South Korea in nuclear weapons planning; producing fighter jet engines with India; sharing maritime surveillance duties with small Pacific islands; and working with Japan on adding an offensive strike capability.

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials are also testing new secure communications systems with their partners. They’re signing deals to co-produce artillery with allies and to secure blood supplies from hospitals around the region in case of a conflict. They are also training with many more nations in more expansive ways.

These collaborations highlight how the region sees China. Many countries fear Beijing’s growing military strength and belligerence — its threats against the democratic island of Taiwan, its claim to most of the South China Sea and its land grab at the border with India. They are also less sure about China as an economic partner, with the slowing pace of its post-COVID economy and tilt away from pro-growth, pro-entrepreneur policies under Xi Jinping.

But are the countries linking arms with the United States making a long-term bet on America over China? Or are they recognizing their own rising strength and behaving like pragmatists, getting what they can from a fitful superpower where an increasing number of voters want the country to stay out of world affairs?

In interviews with more than 100 current and former officials from the United States and countries across the Indo-Pacific over the past year, many said that the next century was likely to be less dominated by America than the last. No matter who wins the next election or the one after that, they said, the nation responsible for today’s world order has been weakened by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the destabilizing effects of China’s rise on domestic manufacturing and its own internal divisions.

The world is changing, too, with more countries strong enough to shape events. And as the United States shares sensitive technology and prioritizes teamwork, many believe they are witnessing both a global reshuffling and an evolution in American power.

For now, they argue, the United States is adapting to a more multipolar world. It is learning to cooperate in ways that many Washington politicians, fixated on U.S. supremacy, do not discuss — with an admission of greater need and more humility.

America Diminished

The United States does not tower over the world like it used to.

Since World War II, the U.S. share of the global economy has been cut in half. That is mostly because of Asia’s steady economic rise. China alone produces around 35% of the world’s manufactured goods, three times the share of the United States. Japan, India and South Korea have also joined the top seven in terms of output, giving Asia more industrial heft than any other part of the world.

U.S. military superiority has been better maintained, but China, with a smaller budget and sharper focus on the Indo-Pacific, now has a larger navy by number of ships, a likely lead in hypersonic weapons and many more factories to expand military production if needed.

American democracy is also not what it once was, as measured merely by the declining number of bills that presidents have signed into law. The Republican Party has repeatedly held up budgets, drawing the president back from trips overseas, in addition to delaying aid for partners including Ukraine and Taiwan. Recent polls show that most Republicans want the United States to take a less active role in solving the world’s problems.

Yet both parties have struggled with how to tackle and talk about Asia’s shifting power dynamics and America’s limits.

“It goes back several administrations,” said James L. Jones, a retired Marine Corps general who served as national security adviser under President Barack Obama. “We’ve had a fairly long period of time where the United States has sent conflicting messages.”

The Obama administration promised a “pivot to Asia” that seemed to never come. The Trump administration’s foreign policy — with its mix of anti-China diatribes and abandonment of a major trans-Pacific free-trade deal — was seen by some countries as a sign of U.S. insecurity about the challenge from Beijing.

China had already become an economic colossus, the most important trade partner for most nations in the Indo-Pacific, and a major investor.

Countries across the region have also spent the past few decades producing millions of new middle-class consumers and expanding sophisticated industrial production, fueling a surge of regional trade that made the U.S. market less important while allowing more Asian nations to build tighter bonds.

Both confidence and anxiety have emerged from these broader trends. Military budgets across Asia have soared in recent years, and the demand for American defense technology has never been higher.

Yet many countries in the region now see themselves as players in an emerging multipolar order. “We are the main characters in our collective story,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines said during a keynote speech at the conference in Singapore. And as a result, they have turned to the United States less as a protector than a provider of goods (weapons), services (training) and investment (in new technology and equipment maintenance).

Japan has made the sharpest turn. From easing tensions with South Korea to pulling back from decades of pacifism with plans to sharply increase its military budget, to signing troop movement agreements with Australia and other countries, Tokyo has made clear that it now seeks a leading role in protecting regional stability. But even as Washington welcomes the move, Tokyo’s actions grow in part from a critical assessment of the United States.

During a joint exercise with the U.S. Air Force in Guam last year, Japanese commanders said they were expecting to become more active because Japan’s neighbors wanted Japan to do more, implying broad recognition that America’s future role was uncertain.

“The United States is no more what it used to be 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” said a senior Japanese intelligence official, who spoke on a condition of anonymity to avoid offending his American counterparts. “That’s the fact of the matter.”

“No matter who the next president is,” he added, “the role of the United States will be relatively diminished.”

America Adjusting

U.S. officials are aware of the world’s doubts. When told that some counterparts in Asia saw humility in the American response, a handful of Washington officials winced, as if lemon juice had been squeezed into their eyes. It sounded too much like weakness.

But some Pentagon leaders have been open about seeking what analysts describe as “co-everything” with partners — co-development, co-production, co-sustainment. And while U.S. officials have talked for decades about alliances in Asia, their tone and actions over the past few years point to a subtle shift, toward a more decentralized approach to security and greater candor about their concerns.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech in September that called for greater humility in foreign policy to face “challenges that no one country can address alone.”

Gen. David H. Berger, the Marine Corps’ top general until he retired last year, launched a sweeping plan in 2019 to counter China’s strengths by redistributing U.S. forces in Asia, shifting to smaller units that are now more mobile, with access to bases in many countries.

In Singapore, a senior defense official said the formula involves more capable nations, investing in themselves, in partnerships across the region, and in working with the United States, which now accepts that it need not be at the center of every relationship.

Hints of that humbler America can be seen in large, multinational military exercises, where other countries are playing bigger roles, and in smaller projects, such as a Pacific Fusion Center that opened last year in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. A data hub for maritime analysis of threats ranging from illegal fishing to Chinese encroachment, it had been conceived as a purely American operation until local partners demanded a role and U.S. officials backed down and brought them in.

India offers a more layered portrait of America’s evolution, pointing to sustained U.S. interest in long-term, comprehensive plans for working closely with an increasingly confident New Delhi — even if that means quieting down concerns about its democratic backsliding.

In interviews, some Indian officials said that a turning point arrived when the United States pulled out troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving behind scenes of stunning chaos that suggested more input from the region would have been useful.

To be Continued.......

Zelensky to Europe: A Russian victory in Ukraine would lead to the unthinkable..........

First came France’s D-day beaches, then the heart of the once-divided German capital. Starting Thursday: a walled resort in southern Italy, then on to the mountain-ringed shores of Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne.

In Europe this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be everywhere.

There’s a steely calculus behind that ubiquity: nearly 28 months into a brutal war with Russia, as Ukraine is struggling to hold its own against a far more powerful foe, maintaining European backing is considered nothing short of mission-critical.

The Ukrainian leader’s message has been unvarying: His country’s bloody confrontation with Russian President Vladimir Putin is Europe’s fight, too. If Russia were allowed to triumph, Zelensky warned, the continent would face unthinkable consequences.

"It is in our common interest that Putin personally lose this war," he told German lawmakers in an emotional address Tuesday in the cool-gray-toned chambers of the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament.

As always, Zelensky leaned heavily into venue-specific symbolism, invoking Germany’s painful Cold War past.

Only a short distance from the snaking path of the Berlin Wall, which fell almost 35 years ago, he appealed to lawmakers not to accept Russia’s territorial grab in Ukraine, where Moscow lays claim to four provinces and the Crimean peninsula.

"You can understand why we are fighting so hard against Russia's attempts to divide us, to divide Ukraine — why we are doing absolutely everything to prevent a wall between parts of our country," the Ukrainian leader said. He received a sustained standing ovation at the speech’s end.

At first glance, European support for Ukraine seems solid. Together with the United States, EU member governments and the NATO alliance have thrown billions of dollars worth of weaponry and other aid into the battle. Since the start of this extended visit, the Ukrainian leader has been met with pledges of solidarity — and new infusions of cash.

But some cracks have emerged. In the run-up to European Parliament elections last week, far-right political parties denounced expenditures for the Ukraine war as fruitless, counterproductive and warmongering — and found a measure of electoral success with that refrain.

In Berlin, Zelensky’s Bundestag speech was boycotted by two parties — the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which became the country’s second-ranked political party in the European elections, and the populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW.

The AfD’s national leaders — noting Zelensky’s attendance this week at Berlin conference focused on reconstruction and other assistance for Ukraine — derided him as a “begging president.” The BSW, meanwhile, accused him of abetting “a highly dangerous spiral of escalation” that could lead to nuclear disaster.

For some of Ukraine’s most important European supporters, these are not the best of times. National leaders in Europe’s two most influential states — France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz — suffered stinging setbacks in the European vote.

Macron called snap national parliamentary elections in response to a big defeat for his party at the hands of the far-right National Rally. Scholz declined to accelerate next year’s parliamentary election timetable after his party was more narrowly outpolled by AfD, and much more substantially by his main conservative opponents, but he faced needling from rivals who demanded a fresh start.

“On Ukraine, we could start to see indecision in both Paris and Berlin,” said Matthias Matthijs of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Macron is going to be preoccupied. Scholz is going to be preoccupied.”

For Ukraine, not all the news coming out of polling across the 27-member European Union was bad. The far-right party of autocratic-minded Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has consistently sought to undermine support for Ukraine, fared poorly.

But Hungary next month assumes the rotating presidency of the EU Council, giving Orban an opportunity to throw anti-Ukraine spanners into the bloc’s policymaking process.

Beginning Thursday in Italy, Zelensky is expected to be in attendance as a guest at the Group of 7 summit in Puglia, in southern Italy. During their meeting at the plush resort of Borgo Egnazia, the G-7 leaders were reportedly set to unveil loans to Ukraine that make use of profits from frozen Russian assets, a plan that has already drawn howls of protest from Moscow.

On the sidelines of the Italy meeting, President Biden and Zelensky were to sign a bilateral security agreement, but national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters traveling with the president that the pact would not directly commit any U.S. troops to Ukraine's defense.

Unlike at the G-7, where participants will be dealing with a range of issues including immigration, China, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Ukraine will be center stage at a weekend Swiss-hosted peace summit, held at the initiative of Zelensky’s government.

Switzerland said representatives of nearly 90 countries and organizations would be in attendance — but not Russia's. Putin's government was not invited, but said it wouldn’t have come anyway, because the conference’s main underpinning is a list of Ukrainian peace proposals it has spurned.

Despite Ukrainian hopes, though, little of real substance was expected to emerge from the Swiss gathering.

In all likelihood, the emotional center of gravity of Zelensky’s European sojourn came at its onset. The Ukrainian president joined leaders gathered in Normandy, France, last week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, a key turning point in the Allied battle against Nazi Germany.

At Omaha Beach, Biden drew an explicit linkage between that long-ago fight for freedom and democracy and Ukraine’s struggle for survival today.

"The autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine," Biden said.

On the ceremony’s sidelines came a moment that was captured by cameras and subsequently went viral online. Zelensky encountered an 99-year-old American World War II military veteran, identified by a relative as Melvin Hurwitz of Frederick, Md., who reached out to the Ukrainian leader from his wheelchair.

Grasping Zelensky’s hand, Hurwitz made as if to kiss it, calling him “the savior of the people.” Leaning in and bending down for a warm embrace, Zelensky demurred.

“No, no, no,” he responded. “You saved Europe.”

Zelensky to German lawmakers: Putin's defeat is our common interest:-..........
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on his country's supporters to work together to successfully end the Russian war against his country in a speech to Germany's parliament in Berlin on Tuesday.

Russia must not be allowed to continue its march through Europe, Zelensky told German lawmakers in an emotional speech on Tuesday. He said Putin has become used to subjugating others but must be broken of that habit.

"It is in our common interest that Putin personally lose this war," Zelensky said.

The war must be ended in such a way that there is no doubt who has won, said Zelensky, whose speech was repeatedly interrupted by applause. Three large flower arrangements in the Ukrainian colours blue and yellow lay in front of the lectern.

At the end, he was hailed with a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.

Russia must take full responsibility for unleashing the war and by forced to "pay for all the damage caused by this aggression," Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian President was greeted with prolonged applause from members of Germany's parliament, the Bundestag. He entered the packed plenary chamber alongside German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz and ministers from his coalition government also attended the speech.

The Ukrainian president thanked Germany for supporting his country, particularly acknowledging Germany's supply of Patriot air defence systems, which he credited with saving "thousands" of lives.

Vladimir Putin is testing Nato borders for weak spots, security chiefs warn...........

Russia has begun probing the borders of Finland and Estonia for weaknesses as it draws up what Western security chiefs suspect is a long-term plan to capture parts of the Baltic region after the war in Ukraine.

In the space of just a week, Moscow has ignited border disputes with both Nato member states, issuing a draft proposal to revise its sea border with Finland and removing a series of buoys in Estonian waters used to mark a river frontier with Russia.

The moves followed a warning last week by Micael Bydén, Sweden’s chief of defence, that Vladimir Putin aims to eventually seize control of the Baltic and use it as a “playground” to “terrorise” Nato members.

Diplomats from the Baltic states and security experts have told The Telegraph the provocations were part of a wider strategy by Moscow to test the West’s resolve and potentially to seek out weak spots for a future incursion.

“This is part of this ongoing hybrid warfare: Russia is aggressively trying to destabilise our society and also our support for Ukraine,” said Viljar Lubi, the Estonian ambassador to London.

“We need to be well prepared. It is not always easy, because you don’t know exactly what the next move is. They go into the so-called grey area, where we don’t know exactly what is next.”

Finland, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which won independence from the former USSR in 1991, are all Nato members committed to defending their land borders from Russia.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, and a surge in imperialist rhetoric from Putin, concerns have grown that the Russian leader could be plotting land grabs in that region within the next five to seven years, if he manages to defeat Ukraine and resupply his army.

Pattern of provocative behaviour
On May 23, Russian border guards removed buoys floating in the Narva river between Estonia and Russia, in what Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said was an “unacceptable” part of a “broader pattern of provocative behaviour.”

The guards took the buoys in the middle of the night, Mr Lubi said, and Estonian requests for a full explanation have so far gone unanswered: “It was surprising for us, especially because it came without warning.”

The Narva region is mostly Russian-speaking and there is currently no formal border agreement between Tallinn and Moscow, which potentially makes it an attractive target for a future Russian incursion.

Also last week, Russia’s defence ministry issued – then quickly deleted – a decree which appeared to adjust sea borders around the Gulf of Finland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Lithuania said the move was a “deliberate, targeted escalatory provocation”.

Kai Sauer, the Finnish ambassador to Germany, said the recent accession of Finland to Nato was clearly a factor in the manoeuvres by Russia.

“In military terms, our threat perception has not changed, but it seems quite clear that we are facing certain hybrid activities,” he said.

“It is clear that with the Finnish and Swedish Nato membership the geopolitical situation in the Baltic sea has changed. I think it’s also quite predictable that Russia is adapting to that change but how that will manifest itself is less clear.”

Another potential flashpoint is the Swedish island of Gotland, located in the middle of the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and Kaliningrad.

“I’m sure that Putin even has both eyes on Gotland. Putin’s goal is to gain control of the Baltic Sea,” Mr Bydén, the Swedish defence chief, told German news outlet RND.

“If Russia takes control and seals off the Baltic Sea, it would have an enormous impact on our lives, in Sweden and all other countries bordering the Baltic Sea. We can’t allow that... the Baltic Sea must not become Putin’s playground where he terrifies NATO members,” he added.

On Friday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, referred to the Estonian incident and warned that Russia was evidently “preparing for provocations in the Baltic region against borders”.

Baltic is Nato’s ‘most fragile’ border
Aliona Hlivco, a former Ukrainian MP and the managing director of the Henry Jackson Society, a security think tank, said she saw disturbing parallels between the latest Baltic dispute and the prelude to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“It is all a means of probing to see how far they [Russia] can go, though they do not currently have the military capacity to go for an actual war with the Baltics,” she said.

The Baltic region, she explained, was “the most fragile border of Nato” not just because it was porous but due to its contingency of “Russian diaspora which they can mobilise through Russian propaganda and TV … we had all these factors in Ukraine”.

Russia is currently rearming its forces as it continues its latest offensive in north-east Ukraine.

But Western leaders such as Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, have warned that Moscow’s rearmament could also make it ready to attack a Nato state within the next five to seven years.

BOUNDARIES-
Why Boundaries Are Essential Self-Care.
Boundaries protect and nourish us so that we don't need a pricey trip to the spa.

KEY POINTS-
We often think self-care means expensive spa treatments, destination retreats, or vacations.
When we are energetically drained, the problem is often poor boundaries, not the need for expensive splurges.
Setting and holding boundaries is the best way to create a life we don't need to escape from.

Often, when we think of self-care, we picture a long, lazy day at the spa, a trip to Napa with friends, or a blissed-out yoga retreat. These types of self-care are indeed nourishing experiences that help us recharge, gain perspective, find inspiration, or just make time for fun. But have you ever noticed that the happy, relaxed vibes from vacations and other luxurious treats fade quickly? Yes, for most of us, the impact of these infrequent, bigger-ticket indulgences is short-lived. Within days we are back to the status quo, minus some money in the bank (or worse, with new credit card debt!).

That’s why, although I encourage everyone to indulge in any and all activities that bring joy, connection, and relaxation, it’s important to know that they usually don’t provide the best form of self-care for sustainable wellness. In fact, when we set out to take better care of ourselves, the best place to begin is with boundaries.

Boundaries are the imaginary lines we draw around ourselves to promote physical and mental well-being. Boundaries apply to nearly all aspects of our lives. There are boundaries we set for ourselves with our own habits and behaviors, especially behaviors that are energetically draining (like turning off our devices at a certain time of night, limiting our alcohol intake, etc.). We also create boundaries with others in personal and professional relationships. These interpersonal boundaries determine how much contact we have with other people, what types of contact we have with them, how much we give and how much we ask for in our relationships, how much time we make for people, and how much time we reserve for ourselves.

Boundaries aren’t static, so creating and maintaining them is always a work in progress. But when we find ourselves feeling weary, burnt out, resentful, or angry, chances are we have some work to do on our boundaries. No amount of yoga retreats or spa days can make up for the stress and frustration that build when we don’t have and hold healthy boundaries.

Boundaries require that we know what we want and need, as even seemingly "healthy" habits or well-intentioned friends and family members can push against the boundaries that are best for us. We can all spot a toxic boundary violator. But can we respond wisely when someone we care about makes a perfectly reasonable request that’s just not in our best interest? For example, maybe a good friend is encouraging us to join her for a hot yoga class but what we need today is rest. Or perhaps a dear friend is getting divorced and asks us to join her for a weekend in Vegas to shake off her blues, but doing so would add financial and childcare stress to our lives. Or let’s say our partner wants a date night but what we really need is a night of solitude. There’s no right answer here: For some of us, saying yes to some or all of these things is the right move. For others, it’s not. Self-care is knowing our own particular priorities and our limits, and honoring those limits.

Here are three tips for exploring our boundaries in the service of providing ourselves with loving, consistent, and mature self-care. Grab a journal and write down any ideas, themes, or lessons that come to mind with the following prompts:

1. Look to the past: What experiences do I recall that were draining, difficult, or negative? Maybe these were explosive endings of relationships, awful work environments we tolerated too long, or periods in our lives that were especially heavy and challenging. Looking back, were there instances of boundary violations? Were there times I was overly accommodating to others at the expense of my own needs? What needs were highlighted through these experiences? What behaviors—such as assertive communication, listening to a gut instinct, etc.—could have improved those situations? What warning signs might be present that we failed to see last time?

2. Look at the present: At this moment in my life, how well am I caring for myself? Do I reserve enough energy to notice and attend to my own needs? Do I tend to wear myself out focusing on others? Do I make time for fun? Do I keep promises to myself? Do I find myself dreading events or people? Consider what situations and people cause a sense of dread or avoidance and explore how these situations may be pushing up against boundaries. For example, do these situations demand too much of my time? Do they force me to do things I don’t feel comfortable doing, such as public speaking? Do I struggle to be authentic in these circumstances? Are there people I dread because of imbalances in the relationship? Write down the situations that cause yucky feelings. Looking at the list, consider which areas might be easiest to address. For example, asking a good friend to do more listening and less talking is likely to go better than asking your boss for less public speaking if that’s one of your job duties. Pick the low-hanging fruit and work toward making small, positive changes while considering what bigger changes are feasible down the road when approached with skill and planning.

3. Be mindful: When we pay attention, our bodies let us know when something is wrong. A fist clench, a stomach drop, a racing heart: These are all signs that something is off. If we can stay present with our bodies, we can use these clues to help guide us to identify boundaries in need of shoring up. If tuning into your body feels unfamiliar, it may help to set reminders on a phone to check in on body sensations at regular intervals during the day. We can also look back at our days and journal in the evenings about situations and the emotional and physical reactions they caused. Over time, patterns make clear what we need to work on.
Note: It can be helpful to work with a therapist as we explore these life experiences, behavior patterns, and bodily reactions to ensure we are making accurate interpretations and building skills to address problems wisely.

Boundaries are our best friends when it comes to self-care. We find we need fewer big self-care splurges when our day-to-day lives are suited to what’s most healthy for our bodies and minds.

DARK TRIAD-
The Dark Triad’s Dark Underside Shows Where Things Go Wrong.
New analysis shows the need to peek below the dark triad's surface.

KEY POINTS-
The dark triad traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism are both fascinating and frightening.
A new meta-analysis breaks the dark triad down into its components, showing well-being comes up short.
Knowing the challenges that dark triad people face can help you understand and potentially help them change.

If you know someone with the so-called “dark triad” traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, it’s likely you see them as on top of their game. They can sweet talk anyone into anything and appear to have few, if any, self-doubts. Perhaps there’s someone in your social circle who constantly brags about their successes which, indeed, they seem to acquire on a regular basis. Their posts to their social media constantly portray them in a favorable light, whether it’s a glamorous outfit they’re sporting or a work recognition they’ve just received. As much as you’d like to shut down this constant stream of self-aggrandizement, you can’t bring yourself to do it just yet.

Personality researchers also seem unable to turn away from the dark triad as a topic of study. This fascination with the showy but undesirable combination of qualities has led to a number of questions not only about whether it’s a valid concept, but also what it means for the people who possess these undesirable traits.

Putting the Dark Triad Under the Microscope
With the large body of accumulated research now at the disposal of personality psychologists, it is now possible to answer the question of what having dark triad traits does to a person’s life. University of Lleida’s Ana Blasco-Belled and colleagues (2024), in a meta-analysis of 55 studies (with over 26,000 participants), sought to unpack the dark triad’s three basic traits and examine how each relates to well-being. The studies selected for the analysis all met stringent scientific criteria, and the authors additionally controlled for publication bias (the tendency for only significant results to see the light of day). If climbing over everyone else to achieve what you want is indeed psychologically healthy, this analysis can provide some clues.

To understand their approach, it’s first necessary to probe into each of the dark triad traits. Beginning with narcissism, there is a distinction in the literature that is fairly solid between the grandiose variety, those who grab all the attention, and the vulnerable, whose self-centeredness is based on deep insecurity. Even within this distinction, there is another that breaks narcissism down into the three facets of “agentic” (charmingness), “antagonistic” (feelings of superiority), and “neurotic” (hypersensitivity).

Psychopathy itself divides into the separate components of antagonism and impulsivity, as is well-established by studies on the antisocial personality. However, there can also be a flip side in which the person high on psychopathy shows what’s called “fearless dominance.” This is what can make them appealing as leaders.

Turning next to Machiavellianism, there is little evidence to date on whether this trait can be broken down as well. Instead, it remains defined by an “‘ends justify the means’ orientation, which includes strategical manipulativeness, lack of conventional morality, and cynical worldview in addition to antisocial tendencies” (p. 585). You might know you’re with a person high on this trait by the fact that you get talked into doing something (like giving up your hard-earned cash) without even realizing it’s happened.

The Links to Well-Being
With this background, you can now appreciate the study’s findings, which Blasco-Belled et al. describe for each of the three traits:

Narcissism

The breakdown of narcissism into its components, as the authors predicted, proved to be important in understanding its relationship to well-being. Grandiose narcissism, and its agentic facet, came out on the positive side of satisfaction and positive affect. The vulnerable and neurotic forms of narcissism, also as predicted, did not. However, the authors issued a caution on this result: “Although there seems to be an association between grandiose narcissism and desirable outcomes, it is important not to fall under the certainty that narcissism entails psychological adjustment” (p. 594). The main reason for this caution is that grandiosity may be followed by vulnerability within the same person, depending in part on what is going on in that person’s life. These fluctuations mean that the person you meet today who seems on top of their particular world may fall into a metaphorical pit the next day if they don’t get the attention they seek.

Psychopathy

The distinction between the antisocial and leaderlike qualities of psychopathy turned out to be important in analyzing this trait’s relationship to well-being. Overall, the fearless/dominant facet did appear to have adaptive qualities, and the antisocial side did not. There was no particular relationship between antagonism and well-being. The moral of the story would appear to be that fearless/dominant psychopaths probably feel pretty good about themselves, which only reinforces the tendency of other people to admire them, too.

Machiavellianism

This trait, the least complex of all three, came out with findings similar to the antagonistic side of psychopathy. The authors noted the problem in defining this trait as separate from psychopathy, however, and so some rethinking of the dark triad may be required. At the very least, the authors argue, more work is needed to differentiate its possible sub-facets.

What Looks Like Well-Being May Not Be
As you can see from these findings, the outward indicators of the charming side of narcissism and the dominant side of psychopathy would seem to bode well for the well-being of individuals who possess these traits. However, although they may seem satisfied with their lives and feel generally happy, the matter of adjustment is not so simple.

In answer to the question “What is the Footprint of Well-Being?”, the U. Lleida researchers show that well-being is more than feeling good. In their words: “Extant research demonstrated that healthy relationships are a prominent predictor of mental health and a necessary component of well-being” (p. 595).

The people high on the traits that seem to give them a sense of power and greatness may be the ones, from this perspective, least likely to have those all-important relationships. Thinking back on that person with all the self-congratulatory posts on social media, how much time would you really want to spend in their presence? If you are in a relationship with them, how many times do you imagine yourself breaking free?

Yet, as the authors also point out, change is possible even for the darkest of personalities. They offer hope that, by targeting these traits, these individuals can be shown the way to healthier relationships.

This comprehensive look at the dark triad, its strengths and weaknesses, provides an important contribution to both the personality and well-being literatures. Not only did Machiavellianism seem to fade as a robust concept, but also the identification of antagonism as the true dark side of the triad shows the need for a more nuanced understanding of well-being.

To sum up, it’s likely you don’t really want to be close to someone with dark triad traits. However, by bringing their relationships into the light, you may be able to show them the way to greater fulfillment.

SELF-ESTEEM-
From Objectification to Liberation.
Cultivating self-esteem outside of the male gaze.

KEY POINTS-
Social media amplifies women's objectification, exposing them to global scrutiny and dehumanization.
Self-objectification leads women to judge their worth by appearance, undermining their self-esteem.
Aging brings freedom from objectification, but many women struggle with without it.
True self-care involves rejecting self-objectification and building self-worth independent of male validation.

It is no secret that, throughout the ages, women’s bodies have been the source of nearly constant objectification. The ubiquity of social media has further enabled this objectification, as women’s likeness is made available for anyone in the world to scrutinize, romanticize, or dehumanize at will.

Sexual objectification occurs when a woman’s body or sexual functions are separated from her personhood, reducing her to an object for consumption rather than a human with feelings, personality, intelligence, or needs (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997). Contemporary research suggests that, on average, women report witnessing the sexual objectification of other women at least 1.35 times a day, and experience their own sexual objectification at least every other day (Holland et al., 2017).

This constant exposure to the objectification of women’s bodies has a lasting effect on their mental health, sexual functioning, self-esteem, and attitudes toward their bodies (Calogero & Thompson, 2009; Grabe, Hyde, & Lindberg, 2007; Steer & Tiggemann, 2008; Tiggemann & Kuring, 2004). In addition to these negative outcomes of sexual objectification on women’s well-being, there is another outcome that may be even more harmful: the internalization of objectification.

Self-Objectification and its Long-Term Effects
Self-objectification refers to the tendency for some women to internalize the objectifying messages they receive from their patriarchal culture—taking on a third-person perspective of themselves as though through the eyes of others (particularly men). Rather than seeing themselves as complex human beings with richness and worth that reside within, they begin evaluating their worth based on how they look, how other people think they look, and what their bodies can do. Sadly, they begin defining their worth by the very things that strip them of their humanity.

When sexual objectification is at its peak, likely at the onset of puberty and through the 20s and early 30s, some women find themselves having a complicated relationship with it. On one hand, they find the constant sexual attention to be uncomfortable, demeaning, or even frightening. On the other hand, because the poisonous reality of self-objectification has already begun to set in at their tender age, they begin to tie their worth and value to the very objectification they despise. Objectification becomes the validation that they are worthy and valuable.

This relationship with objectification can lead to a sense of self-esteem and self-worth that isn’t rooted in self at all. Without realizing it, their ability to feel worthy or valued becomes tethered to validation and sexual advances from men. This experience of internalized objectification and externalized self-esteem can lead to body shame, appearance anxiety, and even substance abuse and self-harm (Carr & Szymanski, 2011; Muehlenkamp, Swanson, & Brausch, 2005; Moradi & Huang, 2008). Sadly, as women reach their 40s and begin aging out of the constant sexual objectification from their youth, the negative effects of self-objectification can become even more pronounced.

Embracing Authentic Self-Worth as We Age
Many women describe reaching their 40s and beyond as a time of immense personal growth, authenticity, and freedom. Exiting the peak years of sexual objectification brings a sense of liberation, feeling free to stop monitoring their faces and bodies and focusing instead on cultivating inner qualities that were overlooked or neglected in their youth. However, this time of their lives can also be disappointing and even frightening as they realize that they don’t quite know who they are without constant attention and objectification from men. This is why they often find themselves turning to the multi-billion dollar skincare and elective cosmetic surgery industry to reclaim the image of youth and sexual availability they once had (Calogero, et al, 2010). Ironically, the time of their life that should be celebrated as freedom from sexual objectification becomes an (often unsatisfying) journey back toward the same objectification they once resented.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using cosmetic surgery and non-surgical procedures for self-improvement and enhanced self-esteem. However, it is important that women examine our true intentions for seeking such procedures before we start that journey. If we are pursuing those procedures because our worth remains enmeshed with our perceived “aesthetic pleasingness” to men, those procedures will never satisfy. They will only send us down the never-ending cascade of surgeries and serums that cannot and will not prevent us from getting older. They can only delay the process.

Perhaps the most significant work we can do as we age is to divest ourselves from our self-objectification. When we do the hard but necessary work of self-care—the kind that serves to build our self-esteem, cultivates a loving attitude toward ourselves, and embraces who we are as complicated humans who are so much more than how our bodies look—we become resilient. We develop the kind of self-worth that is not contingent on how we are perceived by men (or anyone for that matter), and can enjoy our newfound freedom that exists just outside the oppressive shadow of sexual objectification and the male gaze.

SEX-
How to Get in the Mood for Sex Even if You Aren't Feeling It.
Understand and practice the two types of sexual desire.

It’s a lazy Sunday morning. The kids are away. You wake up, enjoy a luxurious stretch, and then you lovingly reach for your tablet instead of your partner.

Remember when you first shared a bed with the person you desired? Back then, when you drifted up to consciousness, you’d immediately notice the warmth of your snoozing sweetheart. Your thoughts would quickly turn to love, and your body would swiftly follow with arousal. You traced their spine with gentle fingertips, watching as they stirred awake. Your lover smiled and turned toward you with a sparkle in their eyes and a kiss waiting on their lips.

These days, instead of waking up thinking about making love, you’re thinking about making coffee. And that is normal, as you can see see in this video.
https://youtu.be/OWulxoNFv...

There are actually two types of sexual desire. If you rely exclusively on the first type of desire, your lazy Sunday in bed will never turn into a sexy Sunday in bed. If you long to re-ignite lost passion, you must learn to cultivate the second type of desire. Here’s how.

Spontaneous desire is that “I can’t wait to rip your clothes off” feeling. When you were dating, a kiss goodnight was enough to send desire and arousal flooding through your body and mind, wasn’t it? Your tongues touched, and boom, biochemical lightning bolts collided with a psychological longing to create a storm of instant and easy passion.

Remember how glorious that was?

I say “was”—past tense—because, according to research (and your own experience), the vast majority of couples lose spontaneous desire over time. When I teach this concept to couples in my online Become Passion program, I say, “If you are in a long-term relationship, I want you to think of spontaneous desire as a teenager who spontaneously offers to clean the garage for you. It’s rare, it’s wonderful, and when it happens, I want you to enjoy the heck out of it. But you definitely shouldn’t count on it.”

That brings us to responsive desire. What does responsive mean? Quite simply, it's something that occurs in response to something else. So your teen cleans the garage in response to you offering to pay for their cell phone bill if they do a good job.

Now, let’s look at a sexier example: How about we revisit that lazy Sunday morning? In this version, you wake up, stretch, and think about checking the news or grabbing a coffee. Your sweetheart sits up in bed, trying to decide between a shower and a bagel. Neither of you is thinking about sex nor feeling turned on. In other words, there is no spontaneous desire.

However, what can happen if one of you says, “Hey babe, how about we make love?”

Ahh. Now, you are tapping into the potential of responsive desire. Even though you are not in the mood, you choose to be open to exploring. Perhaps you start with a naked cuddle. You nuzzle and nibble necks. Maybe you reach into the bedside drawer for some massage oil to drizzle and caress. As you play, your body and mind begin to pay attention and respond. You mindfully create desire by taking action.

Don’t just take my word for it; check in with your own experience. Is it accurate to suggest that you are rarely swept up in spontaneous lust these days? If so, take heart. You are not broken or with the wrong person. Now that you understand responsive desire, you can choose to make your sexual life intentional and focus on this second type of erotic appetizer: responsive desire.

One of the many beautiful aspects of long-term love is learning new ways to explore eroticism together. Don’t wait for passion. Instead, choose to become passionate.

I want to challenge you to create circumstances throughout the day that encourage desire. Text a lusty note to your partner. Hug more often. Tease a little. Be kind. Bank the coals so that it is easier for the spark of desire to respond. Then, go to bed together a little early tonight or linger in bed a little longer tomorrow morning. The coffee and bagel can wait.

CHRONIC PAIN-
What Is "Spoon Theory"? And Why Is It Important?
Personal Perspective: Understanding the concept of dynamic disability.

KEY POINTS-
Many people live with invisible disabilities, chronic pain, or symptoms that can be hard to predict.
Societal perceptions of disability can be harmful when they don't take into account individual experiences.
Spoon theory can be a helpful tool when explaining the limited energy that can accompany chronic conditions.

Twelve years ago, I remember a conversation with my neurosurgeon during a follow-up visit after an accident-related sacroiliac joint fusion surgery, where I subsequently also broke several vertebrae. I don't recall the exact details, but I do remember his comment really stuck with me:

"Healthcare regulations are the bane of my existence. I have paraplegic patients who are denied disability benefits, but I've got other patients with chronic back pain who get approval. We know who is more disabled. Go figure." I have no clue why he made that comment (since I had no plan on applying for disability). But I did walk away from that visit feeling ill at ease.

From a daily living-functional perspective, it made sense, as mobility impairments and accommodations are visibly hard. But in my gut, I couldn't help but feel as if he was missing something that I couldn't yet articulate. It wasn't until years later that I realized I was now a person in the second category of people he mentioned: a chronic back pain sufferer with unpredictable good days and bad days—trying to go about my daily life the same way I had before my accident.

It was hard. I got discouraged. I began to realize that I had taken my abilities for granted all these years when life felt carefree and things came easily. Ableism was not yet a widely used term, so the narrative I had internalized (which originated in the medical model of health) was that I must, somehow, now be irrevocably broken.

But I was wrong.

Many people live with invisible disabilities, such as fibromyalgia, depression, autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, and other life-impacting chronic symptoms that can be tough to predict. In the chronic illness and disability world, it can be challenging to convey how symptom fluctuations impact daily life, including mood, energy, and social plans. Until recently, the concept of dynamic disability1 was elusive. But a new term is helping change that. Enter the concept of spoon theory.

Spoon Theory
Writer Christine Miserandino coined the term "spoon theory" years ago while explaining to a friend what chronic illness feels like. She grabbed a handful of spoons to make her point.

"In the theory, each spoon represents a finite unit of energy. Healthy people may have an unlimited supply of spoons, but people with chronic illnesses have to ration them just to get through the day."2

"I start each day with 12 spoons, but depending on how I feel, the spoons are used differently. On a high-pain day, a relatively simple task of showering or getting ready for the day can take four spoons. On a low-pain day, that same task might take just one spoon. I have to balance what I need to do every day with how much energy I have. And when the spoons are all used up, there's no replenishing them."3

I'm a leg amputee, and that disability (my prosthetic leg) is quite visible. My chronic back pain is not visible. On high pain days my back issues are far more disabling than my leg, yet by societal norms, my leg amputation "qualifies" me as having a significant physical impairment.

The belief system that my disability needs to be visible to be acknowledged and validated is steeped in the ableist framework I've been trying hard to shake now for many years. I now realize that it's not society's acceptance or non-acceptance that renders my situation more or less disabling. It's my personal experience of dealing with pain and limitation that does. This can be hard for folks to understand.

I'm not one to judge others' conditions because I generally believe everyone wants to do the best they can, given their physical or emotional circumstances. While all people and situations are different, I know how challenging it can be to live with an unpredictable condition—regardless of what it is.

Having symptoms that wax and wane, and trying to live in a world that doesn't always accommodate the dynamic nature of our bodies and minds certainly can be frustrating. But advocates and pioneers who have formulated language to describe these circumstances have certainly made it easier to explain what it's like to live with chronic conditions.

The Essentials: Rest, Priority, and Limit Setting
Living with a dynamic disability or unpredictable chronic condition requires the juggling of life's multiple challenges. I like to think of rest as a time for creating, resetting, and discerning how to best utilize my spoons, with the realization that my energy reserves can change at any given moment.

Variables such as weather, unforeseen flareups, and the rise and fall of work and family obligations require a fine attunement to our bodies and surroundings, as well as an ability to be open and honest with our friends, colleagues, and loved ones. This can feel counterintuitive, especially if we've spent much of our lives responding to others' needs or jumping at opportunities to be involved in activities and projects.

For me, staying healthy has required making my wellness routine (including exercise, a healthy diet, and yoga) a priority. That said, most of us also need an income, so we need to work. We have children and aging parents, homes, yards, and projects. There is no end to the potential spoon usage, so each day needs to be met with a careful appraisal of what's most important, how to prioritize, and how to set limits for the onslaught of people and other issues that beg our attention.

While my workout routine may seem trivial or even self-absorbed, I know that my body needs movement to feel better. Yes, dinner needs to get made, laundry needs to get done, and the house needs cleaning, but these things need to take a back seat to my wellness routine. As I tell my family, My body's need to function well has its payoff for everyone around me. An investment in my own well-being is also an investment in those I care about.

Learning to say "no" to some things to say "yes" to others is an important lifelong skill. While the world doesn't stop spinning for any of us based on our unique personal needs, pain, and limitations require a sense of self-compassion. Spoon theory can be a tool in our lifestyle toolbox to help others understand the need to exercise self-care and self-compassion.4 It can also serve as a model for others to do the same.

PSYCHOSIS-
Schizophrenia Was the Greatest Adventure of My Life.
Personal Perspective: I go from technicolor Oz back to black-and-white Kansas.

KEY POINTS-
Psychosis can be as whimsical and beautiful as it can be disorienting and scary.
It can be healing to process one's psychosis in a way that's authentic to one's true experiences.
In a world that views psychosis as wholly negative, reclaiming its positive aspects fosters self-acceptance.

Among my most prized possessions is a doorbell I ripped off a building during an open house. Nine keys to locks I’ll never see that I stole from an apartment I broke into. A religious pamphlet touting views I disagree with was swiped from an unlocked car outside a gas station. A hospital administration card I grabbed from an admissions desk when its attendant stepped out. Rounding out the collection are 33 pennies, one quarter, one 20-cent Euro piece, a weathered box of matches, a battery, and a Walgreens gift card.

I first showed my treasures to a nurse the day after a long night I spent wandering around San Francisco, picking up objects that spoke to me. I lost my phone, passport, wallet, and Kate Spade handbag that night. But I’d clung tightly to these items.

“I like you. You’re nice,” she told me as she emptied my paper bag of treasures onto a beige table with rounded corners. “A lot of people, they come in here yelling and acting up.”

She cataloged each item in a soothing voice: “One clicker. Seventy-eight cents. Two plastic cards.” Then she cut the underwire out of my bra—“Just in case”—and added it to the collection.

A week later, I showed my treasures to my mother upon my discharge. I explained that a team of psychologists experimenting on me put the objects in my path. Each held a hidden significance.

She smiled thinly, fighting tears.

“Oh, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s really not that beautiful of a story.”

I didn’t show anyone else my treasures for a year and a half, storing them in my closet as I waited to discover their purposes. But after countless psychiatry appointments and medication adjustments, I finally understood they were purposeless.

I forgot about the collection until I came across it eight months after psychosis. I’d lived with my mom ever since my parents realized I was too ill to live independently. While packing up to finally move out of my "sick house," I found the hospital bag buried under sweaters, shoes, and notebooks.

Seeing the nurse’s handwriting, I wondered what she’d thought of my pile of trash. I dug my fingernails into my thumbs until it hurt.

The night culminating in my hospitalization began like many other low-key Friday nights. I was home alone, knitting and listening to National Public Radio (NPR).

Then, the voices on the podcast spoke directly to me.

“Are you ready for your adventure, Sally?” they cajoled.

My phone notified me that an Uber was arriving. I changed into a cute outfit, touched up my makeup, and went downstairs.

Once settled in the car, I opened the app and realized I was en route to the city. We passed a sign that said “Hakkasan," a club I’d been to on spring break. Am I going to Vegas?

The ride concluded outside the Warfield, a large concert venue I’d never been to before. While loitering outside, I swiped self-consciously on my phone. There were no obvious clues, like the NPR voices.

A tall man in a fedora approached me.

“You’re the Chosen One,” he said, like someone might say, “Excuse me,” on a bus. "Follow me.”

We walked past check-in to the venue. As quickly as he appeared, he was gone. I was alone in a sea of retirement-aged people in tie-dye. A glimpse of merchandise stands revealed a Grateful Dead cover band was playing.

When I entered the concert hall, a couple twirled around me. I jumped. So did the lead singer. I spun around. So did she. I pumped my arms above my head. She continued to copy my every move. So it’s true, then. I am the Chosen One.

I set out into the city on foot, guided by the psychologists’ streetlights. I wandered in and out of unlocked doors.

One door led to a Spanish-language church service. Its leader asked me to introduce myself. I drew on four semesters of college Spanish to say my name and thank the congregation for hosting me.

They were paid actors whom the psychologists were feeding lines. But I appreciated their kindness nonetheless.

I sang in Spanish with the congregation. I dug through a small purse until a man told me to stop going through his daughter’s stuff. Then I pulled the mirror off the bathroom wall—just in case there was a secret passage behind it. There wasn’t.

Another door led to house painters who also spoke Spanish. They drank Coronas, my favorite spring break beer. The “Hakkasan” sign from the drive flashed in my mind. Surely, it wasn’t a coincidence.

“¿Puedo tener una cerveza?” I asked the men.

“¡Claro!” the man closer to the cooler replied. He pulled out a beer, popped the cap, and handed me the bottle with a wink.

“Gracias,” I said, smiling and clinking my bottle against his.

If they expected me to stay and flirt, I disappointed them. I walked past them to a room with dropcloths tacked to the walls. I pulled down a dropcloth, wondering if there was a secret passage behind it. There wasn’t.

“Hey!” The same guy who handed me the beer waved his arms above his head.

I apologized, shrugged, and exited the way I came. Finishing my beer, I searched for the next door.

It led to a small, messy apartment. I picked up a framed photo from the bedroom desk. A teenage girl in a forest green graduation cap and gown smiled at me from the frame.

“Oh, I get it. It’s like me in high school,” I said aloud to the psychologists, picturing my forest green graduation garb from 2013.

I put down the frame, borrowed a jacket from the closet, and smoked some weed I found on the nightstand. A man entered the bedroom.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“What are you doing here?” I shot back.

“This is my house!”

I mumbled an apology and left, but not before swiping the mysterious keys from his dresser. Back outside, I jumped from rooftop to rooftop down a line of parked cars.

My spree ended in a San Francisco General Hospital stairwell. I was looking for a message. So I chanted the hook from “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.

“Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head. Ha-ha, ha, ha!” I timed the “Ha’s” to my stomps as I marched up and down.

Two cops approached. “Stop,” one commanded.

I stopped rapping and marching but maintained my steady ascent. Reaching the top of the stairs, I continued into a hallway lined with patient rooms.

Then my face hit the floor.

A cop had tackled me to the ground from behind. I cried silently as they handcuffed me and dragged me to the behavioral health unit.

But before cops took me down, before my diagnosis, I was the Chosen One.

I didn’t feel like the Chosen One as I gazed at the objects over a year later. Doctors had forbidden me from working for the past 18 months to prevent stress-induced relapse. My medications made me sleep 10 hours a night and left me groggy during the day.

And I missed the magic of psychosis. How could I go from technicolor Oz back to black-and-white Kansas?

Carefully returning my treasures to their bag, I packed them to move. In my new home, they hang in a shadow box on my wall as souvenirs of my most thrilling, exotic trip.

After the experiment gave way to lucidity, I yearned to rewind somehow and prevent my onset. It didn’t help when my psychiatrist called psychosis “lost time.” I lamented to a friend, “I never got to be 24.”

Now I understand that I became the Chosen One at 24—chosen not by omniscient psychologists but by an imbalance of dopamine in my brain—an imbalance parts of the world regard as divine.

A friend once asked me to describe psychosis. All I could say was, “I f*ck*ng saw God.”

ANXIETY-
Your Life Experiences May Have Contributed to Health Anxiety.
How dysfunctional core beliefs about health develop and are reinforced over time.

KEY POINTS-
Significant life experiences can contribute to the development and maintenance of health anxiety over time.
Life experiences might include experiencing trauma or adversity, such as witnessing or experiencing illness.
Core beliefs are deeply held beliefs formed through significant events and continually reinforced.
Health anxiety is associated with several dysfunctional beliefs about health and illness.

Core beliefs are deeply ingrained beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, the future, and the world. They develop early in life through significant experiences. Core beliefs play a powerful role in how we process information. Once they develop and are set in motion, core beliefs are continuously reinforced throughout the rest of childhood and into adulthood. This is because we selectively attend to information that confirms our beliefs and ignore or dismiss information that does not support them. Due to these processes, our core beliefs only get stronger over time.

How My Life Experiences Led to Maladaptive Beliefs
I am a therapist and treat health anxiety with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). But I also have a long personal history of dealing with health anxiety myself. Thanks to CBT, I am in a much different place today. I've been grateful to be able to help my clients work through similar issues that I have dealt with myself.

That said, let’s take a peek into my own history in the hopes that it might shed some light on how significant events in our lives can shape how we see the world.

For most of my childhood, things were pretty unstable. My father was abusive with substance use disorders: alcohol and meth. One day, when I was 7, my mom and little brother picked me up from school early, and we took off, forever leaving behind my father and the home we shared with him. This marked a positive change in our lives in many ways, but it was not without its challenges. We were hurt and broke, and my mom started getting terrible migraines, which only worsened over the years. Despite countless doctor visits, tests, and medical bills, we were left without an identifiable cause or effective treatment options. When I was 16, my mom died from an overdose of her pain medication.

These experiences as a child led me to develop maladaptive beliefs at a very young age, such as:

The world is unsafe and unpredictable
Serious disease is everywhere and unavoidable
The field of medicine is incapable of treating diseases
I am weak and vulnerable to disease
Uncertainty about health is dangerous and unacceptable
Not surprisingly, anxiety kicked in around the first or second grade. While my friends at school seemed to be concerned about "normal" things like whether they were going to be able to play outside or have ice cream, I was crying about nuclear bombs and whether my mom was gonna die in a car crash on the way home from work. In general, I felt unsafe and expected the worst most of the time.

And then, around 9 or 10, the health anxiety came for me. I began to believe that serious diseases were extremely common and that those who weren’t plagued with a debilitating illness were among the lucky few. After all, if my only remaining parent is sick, then so many others out there must be experiencing something similar.

As I moved into my teenage years, and especially after my mom died, I began to assume that if someone is sick, then it is likely to be very serious and eventually terminal. Besides migraines, my mom had everything else going for her in the health department: she was young, took care of herself, had good genes, and followed all of the doctor’s orders. Yet, she still died. So, I concluded that if one is diagnosed with anything, they are as good as dead.

Core Beliefs Are Reinforced for Years
Once these health-related beliefs were solidified, then the process of reinforcement began. Essentially, I would scan my environment and selectively attend to all the pieces of “evidence” that supported my belief system.

I paid special attention to situations when one of our relatives got sick or when I learned that a friend’s family member was sick or dying.
I read all about various diseases in medical texts.
I was overly focused in health class and became especially interested in the most deadly diseases we covered.
I watched as many tragic movies and TV shows about the sick and dying as I could get my hands on.

I was so busy seeking out sickness and death that I failed to acknowledge that, aside from my mom, everyone in my life was pretty healthy and, well, alive.

Of course, these beliefs just progressively strengthened over the years. How could they not? In the world I had created for myself through all these activities, everyone was sick and dying. I remember, at one point as a teenager, thinking about how lucky I was that I had escaped sickness and death. I laugh at that now. Here I was, a young person with virtually no health issues, and I believed that my survival was some kind of miracle. It demonstrates just how biased and inaccurate my thinking had become through this whole process.

Your Homework
Your own life experiences that contributed to your health anxiety may not be as obvious or cliche as mine. But I am guessing if you did some digging, you’d find some situations or events that have significantly impacted you. Your health anxiety is likely the culmination of a variety of experiences. It can be helpful to understand what triggered the development of inaccurate beliefs. Still, it is much more important to identify what your beliefs are and how they have been (and are currently being) reinforced in your life. I'd like you to try to look at your own life through this lens and see what you find.

Consider the following questions:
What significant events happened in your life?
Did you or someone you love struggle with illness and/or die? Did you experience any adverse or traumatic events? Did it seem as though you were living in an unsafe and unpredictable world?
How did these events shape your beliefs about health and illness?
Grab my guide for a description of unhelpful core beliefs about health. Do you think any of these beliefs were influenced by the things that happened in your life?
How were these beliefs then further reinforced/strengthened over time? Can you think of examples like those that I gave in terms of how I sought out information that supported these beliefs?

Remember, beliefs are not permanent. They can be reshaped. Doing so involves retraining or rewiring your brain to learn how to process information differently. You first learn how to identify all of the pieces of “evidence” that you think support your maladaptive belief. You then take the opportunity to reframe some of these pieces of evidence and challenge any inaccurate assumptions. Next, you want to develop a new, healthier, and more adaptive belief about health and begin to seek out evidence for that new belief.

Put some thought into this exercise. Gaining new insight can serve a positive purpose.

MEDITATION-
Escape the Monkey Trap of Unhappiness.
If you're trapped in an unhappy situation, there's a proven way to escape.

KEY POINTS-
We are often trapped and stuck by the strength of our own cravings and behaviors.
Mindfulness rewires the brain by using such practices as open monitoring, letting go, and acceptance.
The secret to getting free from almost any unhappiness trap is simply learning to let go of it.

How do you know if you are stuck in the "Monkey Trap" of an unhappy situation? For example, you might feel trapped at work, in a relationship, or in the grip of an addiction of some kind.

I'll explain the Monkey Trap in a moment. But as for knowing if you are stuck, metaphors can help. For example, if you feel all clenched up, tight-fisted, and your insides are tied up in knots, that might give you the clue that you are snared in a trap!

The real question is this: When we are wound up tight and feel trapped, how can we let go and loosen the Gorilla Glue-like grip of whatever it is that holds us?

This is not an easy task, but research from interventions such as Mindfulness-based Relapse Prevention gives hope for escaping such traps.

For instance, studies show that self-monitoring of negative affect and cravings can help serve as a kind of interrupter that breaks the cycle of craving—and actually rewires the brain's response and behavior in the moment.

The Monkey Trap
The Monkey Trap is based on a story I once read of how hunters used a unique method for capturing monkeys. A hollowed-out gourd was fixed to the ground, and tempting food was put inside. There was a hole barely large enough for the monkey’s hand to fit through and grab the morsel. Now, here's what made this an ingenious trap.

Once the monkey grasps the food with a clenched fist, its hand is too big to pull out. Yes, the monkey could get unstuck by releasing the food and yanking out its hand. However, the iron grip of attachment, greed, and desire for this food keeps the hand clenched. The monkey is trapped by nothing more than its own unwillingness to let go!

This is a powerful metaphor for our own “stuckness,” or any time we are trapped by a strongly held belief, rigid idea, or desire that keeps us frozen in place. In addition to feeling stuck, we may likely experience feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Fortunately, you can learn what a monkey caught in a trap does not know:

The secret to getting free from almost any unhappiness trap, addiction, or unbending belief system is simply learning to let go of it.

The Monkey Trap Meditation for letting go is excerpted from my book The Mindfulness Toolbox, which includes many other meditations and practices.

Escape the Monkey Trap Meditation
Pre-meditation questions: Everyone deals with some kind of a monkey trap in their life. The trick is to first become aware of the trap (which the monkey couldn’t do) to get free. What traps leave you feeling stuck, unhappy, anxious, depressed, or tense?

Keep in mind that any idea or strong belief—such as the perfectionistic need to get all “A’s” in school or the fear of messing up and not being liked—are traps that cause immense pain. On a sheet of paper, write down one or two of your “traps."

Next, ask yourself, “How strongly does this idea or belief hold onto me, my mind, and my emotions? You can even rate this on a 1-to-7 scale, with 1 being no hold on you, or 7 representing a “super glue” hold. Don't judge yourself. Accept that you are simply making observations and learning more about yourself—without shame or blame.

Now, let's move on to the Monkey Trap Meditation:

Find a place that is quiet and calm. Sit in a chair, taking an erect but relaxed posture.

Visualize your "monkey trap" or the cause of that anxiety or dis-ease and dis-comfort as being located in that gourd that traps monkeys. Now, imagine extending your arm and squeezing your hand through the gourd’s narrow hole and grabbing onto whatever it is that you feel is absolutely necessary to have. Notice how this is actually a form of grabbing onto, attachment, and craving.

As you hold on, focus on how tightly your hand is clenching onto your craving. Feel how tight and painful it is to hold on like this. Keep holding and feeling the sensation that comes from this kind of grabbing and holding on so tightly to something.

Now, ever so slightly, give yourself permission to let go of the craving, to let go of that idea or belief that you believed that you must absolutely possess. What would be so horribly bad about letting go of it? Would you be a pariah? Would you have no other options in life? Notice how the craving can be so narrow, limiting, and overpowering that it can make us forget about other possibilities! As you let go of the craving, or monkey trap that holds you, simultaneously release the tension in your hand.

Spend at least two minutes slowly letting yourself release and let go of this craving. You might say to yourself, “In this moment, I can relax my mind, relax my hand, and relax my need to grab onto the craving.” Slowly release your clenched fist. Feel how the blood returns to your hand. Notice how your hand has freedom of movement. Observe the pleasant sensation that comes from letting go. Now, slowly extract your hand from the “monkey trap” and leave your craving behind for the moment. Shake your hand and fingers for a few seconds, savoring the freedom of full movement that they now enjoy.

Conclusion
Congratulations on learning this new approach to letting go! How did it feel to let go in this way? To what extent did this meditation change the perception of your craving or lessen how strongly you are holding onto your “Monkey Trap”?

Use this simple meditation each day, or whenever you need help you deal with feelings or beliefs that constrict you and keep you clenched up and tight.

MOTIVATION-
Are You Too Good at Making Excuses?
How to keep your resistance from taking over.

KEY POINTS-
We are wired to resist things that prompt negative feelings like boredom, discomfort, or fear.
If we make excuses too convenient, we’ll let ourselves off the hook too often.
Making the default "yes" for our priorities makes us more likely to follow through.

Sorry, I can’t make it … this week is just too busy.

I wish I could help with that … but I have too much going on right now.

I want to hang out … but I’m too tired; I think I’ll just stay in tonight.

We’ve all uttered these statements at some point. And sometimes we really mean them: We have a tight work deadline or the flu or we have to take our kids four different places that day, so we actually can’t do the thing that’s asked of us (or that we ask of ourselves).

But have our excuses become too convenient?

There is one party that loves a convenient excuse: our internal resistance. We are wired to resist things that prompt negative feelings like boredom, discomfort, or fear. So what happens when modern culture gives us an easy way to resist these things with socially accepted excuses like busyness? We end up letting ourselves off the hook more often than we should—and more often than we really want. Instead of just saying no to things we can’t do, we also use “I’m too busy” to avoid things we just don’t feel like doing.

The problem is that the important things in life—building and maintaining relationships, caring for our kids or aging parents, pursuing interesting goals or hobbies, making meaningful contributions to the world—sometimes require doing things that we might not really feel like doing in the moment. But, if we give our resistance free rein and only show up for our friends when it’s convenient for us, it will be hard to maintain a friendship. If we always complain that we’re too tired to exercise, it will be hard to stay physically fit. And if we keep telling ourselves we’ll take that trip “someday when things settle down,” we might never take it.

The consequences of investing too little in our long-term values might not be as immediate or obvious as the overwhelm we experience when we take on too much, but it can still have a significant impact on our well-being. Overwhelm and burnout can make life feel bad, but avoiding them isn’t enough to make life good.

For life to be good, we need to need to do more than just subtract the negative; we also need to add the positive. We need meaning, connection, joy, purpose, and awe. But pursuing these values can sometimes require the kind of slow, hard, awkward, and deep work that makes our resistance cringe. Our resistance will try to grab onto any excuse it can for why we can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to do the work right now.

So, how do we make it harder for resistance to win?

Use defaults and thresholds to elude excuses.
If we want to make it harder for our resistance to latch onto excuses, we can set up our defaults and thresholds so there’s less of an opportunity for excuses to creep in where we don’t want them.

Here’s what that looks like:

Decide what our main priority is this season
Make the default saying "yes" to that thing
Set a high threshold for overriding that "‘yes"
Making our default "yes" lowers the decision-making burden, and setting a high threshold takes away some of the wiggle room for resistance. Sticking with a default of "yes" is easier than having to decide from scratch every time. The only time we even need to consider whether we should follow through is when we’re near our threshold. And if we set our threshold high enough, that won’t happen nearly as often.

This can be especially helpful for things we want to do but often don’t feel like doing in the moment. Suppose I really want to get in shape, but I don’t usually find myself having a hankering for going to the gym or going outside for a walk. Instead of just waiting around for exercise inspiration to strike, I can make working out my default choice and then not let myself override it unless I have a really good reason.

So, when it gets to my scheduled workout time and I have the flu or my kid has a school concert, I know that those exceed my excuse threshold and I can reschedule my workout. But if it’s workout time and I’m just feeling a little tired or I’d rather scroll on my phone, I’m going to tell myself to still do it. I know that “I'm feeling a little tired” and “I’d rather scroll on my phone than work out right now” are not good-enough reasons to get over my excuse threshold. If they were, I would almost never work out.

How can we tell when we’re making excuses?
This doesn’t mean that we should never sit on the couch and scroll Instagram or binge-watch Netflix or bail on a party for a quiet night in. We can still intentionally set aside time for these things.

What we want to avoid are the unintentional ways we get sucked into things that don’t really matter to us, especially when this gets in the way of the things that do. If we often find ourselves mindlessly drifting toward what’s easy, quick, and comfortable, we should be wary of our appeals of being “too busy” or “too tired.” If we’re constantly avoiding the hard work of pursuing our deeper values, we might be overusing excuses to our own detriment.

Of course, making our default "yes" and setting a high threshold for overriding it won’t stop us from trying to get away with flimsy excuses. Our resistance might still try to convince us that we’re too busy or tired even when we’re not. And sometimes we’ll believe it. Other times, we’ll know it’s a flimsy excuse and we’ll give in anyway.

We’re not after perfection here. We can’t expect ourselves to never give in to excuses. But, we can at least give ourselves a fighting chance against resistance so we can show up for more of the life we really want.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE-
The Diplomacy of Everyday Life.
Exploring interpersonal, social, and cultural respect.

KEY POINTS-
Respect recognizes rights, opinions, and boundaries, fosters empathy, and navigates conflicts with dignity.
Active listening forges genuine connections, empathizes with diverse perspectives, drops barriers to insights.
Empathy embraces the human experience amid cultural diversity to achieve mutual understanding.
Nonjudgmental attitudes amplify curiosity, foster understanding, displace bias, and advance cooperation.

The individual assumes a dual role as a navigator and architect in everyday life, shaping the intricate dynamics of interpersonal, social, and cultural working interactions. The essential elements of respect, listening, empathy, and nonjudgmental attitudes lie at the core of this complex dynamic undergirding the essence of emotional intelligence. Such a long-term communicative vision can generate cohesion and strategic problem-solving within the world's diverse communities. This optimistic essay explores such foundational principles in depth, showing their significant importance in the art of diplomacy, which permeates every facet of daily life while supporting dialogue and cooperation. Thus, the purpose of guiding diplomacy on these multiple levels matters.

Interpersonal Diplomacy
Interpersonally, respect emerges as the cornerstone upon which healthy relationships are constructed. Respect begins intrapersonally with self-reflection and ongoing introspection based on self-dignity supporting self-esteem. As this evolves, it demands a profound recognition and appreciation of the inherent rights, opinions, and boundaries of others, creating an environment conducive to the flourishing of empathy. Understanding and reflecting back the cognitive and emotional perspectives of others is essential in building communicative bridges. Through the lens of respect, individuals navigate conflicts with grace and dignity, engaging in a dialogue that leads to mutual understanding and compromise, the elements of negotiation. Within the framework of respect, the seeds of lasting connections may be sown, nurturing bonds built on mutual regard and consideration. The roots of harm reduction seed themselves in this way, making aggression in word and deed an unacceptable option.

For example, when two people hold opposing views on an idea, instead of dismissing each other's perspectives, interpersonal diplomacy permits an engagement in respectful dialogue, actively listening to the other’s concerns and differing perspectives. By approaching the discussion respectfully, participants foster an environment where both parties feel valued and understood. Through this process, their dialogue may reach a consensus that integrates the strengths of diverse viewpoints, leading to a more mutually agreeable meeting of minds.

Listening, a fundamental pillar of effective communication, is pivotal in interpersonal diplomacy. Active listening becomes a bridge for genuine connection, signaling a sincere desire to empathize with and comprehend the experiences of others. By listening attentively to diverse perspectives and responding with diplomatic sensitivity, individuals pave the way for deeper connections and meaningful interactions. In listening, barriers can dissolve, and pathways to empathy and understanding may become illuminated. These new vistas enrich fruitful human connections.

Social Diplomacy
For example, in a community where individuals from various backgrounds come together to discuss a local issue, active listening creates a space where everyone may feel heard and respected, regardless of their differing opinions. Common ground and solutions addressing the community’s needs emerge as they engage in open dialogue. Social cohesion strengthens and fosters a sense of belonging among all members by prioritizing listening as a tool for understanding.

Empathy, often heralded as a significant bedrock of social cohesion, emerges as a guiding principle in navigating the complexities of human interaction. This core of emotional intelligence opens individuals’ receptivity to embrace the diverse tapestry of others’ human experience, transcending boundaries of difference with compassion and understanding. Through acts of empathy, bridges are built, connecting disparate perspectives and fostering a sense of unity amid the kaleidoscope of cultural landscapes. Through the lens of empathy, the common threads of humanity weave themselves, binding people together in mutual understanding and respect.

Openness to all ideas is a concrete demonstration of adaptability and flexible thinking. This interactive dynamic conveys trust and is the forerunner for constructive feedback. When people and their needs are understood and respected, problem-solving negotiations amplify constructive solutions while fading aggressive feelings and forceful, dehumanizing options. A positive outlook establishes itself, preparing the way for a long-term vision of mutually engaged conflict resolution over time.

Cultural Diversity
Cultural exchange programs can range from tourist holidays to formal political negotiation meetings. In these programs, individuals from different countries share experiences, traditions, and often challenges needing mutually agreed-upon resolutions. Through empathetic engagement, participants immerse themselves in each other's cultures, gaining a deeper appreciation for the richness of diversity. As they exchange narratives and perspectives, empathy for one another's unique backgrounds cultivates, strengthening bonds of understanding across cultural divides.

In this rich environment of cultural diversity, nonjudgmental attitudes catalyze transformative exchanges. Individuals embark on a journey of mutual discovery and appreciation by constraining preconceived notions and embracing curiosity over bias and tribalism. Through this lens of acceptance, dialogue has a chance to flourish, and bridges may be forged, enriching collective experiences of cultural exchange. Nonjudgmental attitudes pave the way for authentic connections, transcending barriers of prejudice and fostering an environment of inclusivity and understanding. Adopting nonjudgmental attitudes and meaningful exchanges may embrace differences as opportunities for growth and connection. Through this cultural diplomacy, they cultivate mutual respect and appreciation, positively impacting the communities they interact with and visit.

Why Interpersonal, Social, and Cultural Diplomacy Is Important
The significance of respect, listening, empathy, and nonjudgmental attitudes extends far beyond individual interactions. Diplomacy permeates the fabric of societal progress by countering the inevitable negativity and belligerence that envy, jealousy, greed, and power grabs provoke. By upholding positive principles, individuals become agents of social change, championing inclusivity and understanding in the face of adversity. In this collective endeavor, diplomacy emerges as a tool and a guiding ethos toward a future defined by ever-greater unity and harmony.

Rooted in individual mindfulness and emotional intelligence, the deindividualization of anonymity of submersion in a group with blunting of self-awareness, self-restraint, and prudent decision-making falls by the wayside. Diplomacy in communication, negotiation, credibility, adaptability, and ethical conflict resolution can expand to become a social force extending beyond itself to influence the global community. Technological advances in almost instantaneous written, radio, and telecommunication make such access possible.

Diplomacy in everyday life hinges upon cultivating respect, listening, empathy, and nonjudgmental attitudes. These qualities serve as fundamental directions, illuminating pathways toward deeper humane connections. They foster bonds of unity across the intricate tapestry of human experience. A greater embrace of mindfulness and a broader integration of emotional intelligence in everyday relations obviates aggression at its root. Respect and dignity for all human life become axiomatic.

Rather than diminish, diplomacy at every relational level amplifies the human condition toward its best. As we embrace these principles, the potential for transformative change unlocks itself, ushering in a more inclusive and harmonious society. Within this dialogue of diplomatic fluency, the individual emerges as a core catalyst for interpersonal, social, and cultural transformation.

How Russia's grab of Crimea 10 years ago led to war with Ukraine and rising tensions with the West.

A decade ago, President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine, a bold land grab that set the stage for Russia to invade its neighbor in 2022.

The quick and bloodless seizure of the diamond-shaped peninsula, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet and a popular vacation site, touched off a wave of patriotism and sent Putin's popularity soaring. “Crimea is ours!” became a popular slogan in Russia.

Now that Putin has been anointed to another six-year term as president, he is determined to extend his gains in Ukraine amid Russia's battlefield successes and waning Western support for Kyiv.

Putin has been vague about his goals in Ukraine as the fighting grinds into a third year at the expense of many lives on both sides, but some of his top lieutenants still talk of capturing Kyiv and cutting Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

The largest conflict in Europe since World War II has sent tensions between Moscow and the West soaring to levels rarely seen during even the chilliest moments of the Cold War.

When he seized Crimea in 2014, Putin said he persuaded Western leaders to back down by reminding them of Moscow’s nuclear capabilities. It's a warning he has issued often, notably after the start of his full-scale invasion; in last month's state-of-the-nation address, when he declared the West risks nuclear war if it deepens its involvement in Ukraine; and again on Wednesday, when he said he would use that arsenal if Russia's sovereignty is threatened.

Analyst Tatiana Stanovaya says Putin feels more confident than ever amid “the Kremlin’s growing faith in Russia’s military advantage in the war with Ukraine and a sense of the weakness and fragmentation of the West.”

The senior fellow at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center noted that Putin’s speech last month “created an extremely chilling impression of an unraveling spiral of escalation.”

The 71-year-old Kremlin leader has cast the war in Ukraine as a life-or-death battle against the West, with Moscow ready to protect its gains at any cost. His obsession with Ukraine was clear in an interview with U.S. conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, with Putin delivering a long lecture that sought to prove his claim that the bulk of its territory historically belonged to Russia.

He made that argument 10 years ago when he said Moscow needed to protect Russian speakers in Crimea and reclaim its territory.

When Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly president was ousted in 2014 by mass protests that Moscow called a U.S.-instigated coup, Putin responded by sending troops to overrun Crimea and calling a plebiscite on joining Russia, which the West dismissed as illegal.

Russia then annexed Crimea on March 18, 2014, although the move was only recognized internationally by countries such as North Korea and Sudan.

Weeks later, Moscow-backed separatists launched an uprising in eastern Ukraine, battling Kyiv’s forces. The Kremlin denied supporting the rebellion with troops and weapons despite abundant evidence to the contrary, including a Dutch court’s finding that a Russia-supplied air defense system downed a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.

Russian hard-liners later criticized Putin for failing to capture all of Ukraine that year, arguing it was easily possible at a time when the government in Kyiv was in disarray and its military in shambles.

Putin instead backed the separatists and opted for a peace deal for eastern Ukraine that he hoped would allow Moscow to establish control over its neighbor. The 2015 Minsk agreement brokered by France and Germany, following painful defeats suffered by Ukrainian forces, obliged Kyiv to offer the separatist regions broad autonomy, including permission to form their own police force.

Had it been fully implemented, the agreement would have allowed Moscow to use the separatist areas to dictate Kyiv’s policies and prevent it from ever joining NATO. Many Ukrainians saw the deal as a betrayal of its national interests.

Russia viewed the election of political novice Volodymyr Zelenskyy as president in 2019 as a chance to revive the anemic Minsk deal. But Zelenskyy stood his ground, leaving the agreement stalled and Putin increasingly exasperated.

When Putin announced his “special military operation” in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, he hoped the country would fall as quickly and easily as Crimea. But the attempt to capture Kyiv collapsed amid stiff Ukrainian resistance, forcing Russian troops to withdraw from the outskirts of the capital.

More defeats followed in fall 2022, when Russian troops retreated from large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine under a swift counteroffensive by Kyiv.

Fortunes changed last year when another Ukrainian counteroffensive failed to cut Russia's land corridor to Crimea. Kyiv’s forces suffered heavy casualties when they made botched attempts to break through multilayered Russian defenses.

As Western support for Ukraine dwindled amid political infighting in the U.S. and Kyiv ran short of weapons and ammunition, Russian troops have intensified pressure along the over 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, relying on hundreds of thousands of volunteer soldiers and the newly supplied weapons that replaced early losses.

After capturing the key eastern stronghold of Avdiivka last month, Russia has pushed deeper into the Donetsk region as Zelenskyy pleads with the West for more weapons.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate last week, CIA Director William Burns emphasized the urgency of U.S. military aid, saying: "It’s our assessment that with supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the front lines through 2024 and into early 2025.”

Without it, he said, “Ukraine is likely to lose ground — and probably significant ground — in 2024,” adding, “you're going to see more Avdiivkas.”

The dithering Western support has put Ukraine in an increasingly precarious position, analysts say.

“Russia is gaining momentum in its assault on Ukraine amid stalled Western aid, making the coming months critical to the direction of conflict,” said Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, in an analysis. “In a worst-case scenario, parts of Kyiv’s front line could be at risk of collapse.”

Putin demurred when asked how deep into Ukraine he would like to forge, but he repeatedly stated that the line of contact should be pushed long enough to protect Russian territory from long-range weapons in Ukraine's arsenal. Some members of his entourage are less reticent, laying out plans for new land grabs.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council who has sought to curry Putin’s favor with regular hawkish statements, mentioned Kyiv and the Black Sea port of Odesa.

“Ukraine is Russia,” he bluntly declared recently, ruling out any talks with Zelenskyy’s government and suggesting a “peace formula” that would see Kyiv's surrender and Moscow's annexation of the entire country.

Russian defense analysts are divided over Moscow’s ability to pursue such ambitious goals.

Sergei Poletaev, a Moscow-based military expert, said the Russian army has opted for a strategy of draining Ukraine resources with attacks along the front line in the hope of achieving a point when Kyiv’s defenses would collapse.

“What matters is the damage inflicted to the enemy, making the enemy weaken faster,” he said.

Others say Russia's attacks seeking to exhaust Ukraine's military are costly for Moscow, too.

Russian and Ukrainian forces are locked in a stalemate that gives Moscow little chance of a breakthrough, said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies think tank.

“The Ukrainian defense is quite strong, and it doesn’t allow Russian troops to achieve anything more substantial than tactical gains,” he said.

Such a positional war of attrition "could be waged for years,” Pukhov added, with both parties waiting for the other to “face internal changes resulting in a policy shift.”