While Xi Jinping staged his military parade in Beijing alongside Putin and Kim, the real story of China’s power projection was unfolding in the corridors and backrooms: billions of dollars in deals signed with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. What was once about pipelines and Silk Road rhetoric has now become a granular takeover of everyday economic life, Chinese companies employing locals, dominating new sectors, and shaping long-term infrastructure across the region. Kazakhstan sealed more than 70 commercial agreements worth $15 billion, ranging from petrochemicals to digital technologies, while also granting CNPC a $1 billion contract for a gas chemical complex and greenlighting a Chinese-built third nuclear power plant. Uzbekistan secured $5 billion in uranium and mining deals, plus Chinese nuclear cooperation to offset the uncertainty surrounding Russian Rosatom under sanctions. For both governments, China’s capital now looks more reliable than Moscow’s strained and sanction-hit coffers. This economic colonization is increasingly visible on the ground. By 2024, Chinese firms had already outnumbered Russian companies in Uzbekistan, and more than 1,000 new ones were registered in 2025 alone. Central Asians buy Chinese products, work for Chinese employers, and even learn the language, embedding Beijing’s influence into society in ways that pipelines and summits never could. The shift also reveals Moscow’s declining leverage. While Russian officials meet to groom their heirs and mourn shrinking foreign investment, Beijing is locking in strategic sectors: uranium, nuclear power, renewable energy, and transport corridors. Xi’s model of steady engagement, predictable, technocratic, and well-financed, contrasts sharply with Russia’s erratic war-driven dependence. Yet the multivector instinct in Central Asia persists. Leaders in Astana and Tashkent still court Europe and the US to avoid overreliance, as seen in Uzbekistan’s outreach to Brussels and even a recent phone call between Mirziyoyev and Trump. But diversification looks more like hedging than balance: the EU may be the biggest investor, but China is the fastest-growing and most omnipresent partner. The symbolism is stark. Moscow brings instability and sanctions, Washington brings sporadic attention, and Brussels brings conditions. Beijing brings cash, steel, and turbines, without questions. Central Asia’s rulers may talk of balance, but with every contract signed in Beijing, the region’s sovereignty is quietly mortgaged to China’s steady hand.

Vladimir Putin has tethered his political survival to a permanent confrontation with the West. The latest drone incursions into Polish airspace, culminating in NATO jets shooting down Russian craft over allied territory, were not accidents but deliberate provocations. They signal that for Putin, escalation is the default. The logic is both simple and grim. Moscow’s war in Ukraine, though costly in lives and resources, has become the organizing principle of Russia’s political order. To step back would risk being branded weak by the very nationalist factions Putin empowered. The Kremlin’s promise of “grand victory” requires not just subjugating Ukraine, but proving NATO impotent. Hybrid warfare, drones, cyberattacks, disinformation, thus becomes the arena where Moscow can probe, embarrass, and exhaust the alliance without triggering full-scale retaliation. Domestically, Putin’s control of media allows him to frame setbacks as victories. His real audience, however, is the radical military-political elite. For them, peace would be betrayal; continued confrontation is loyalty. By branding himself as the “president of war,” Putin ensures he cannot be outflanked by hawks. This dynamic locks Russia into endless conflict with the West, regardless of battlefield outcomes in Ukraine. The West, meanwhile, shows dangerous cracks. U.S. President Donald Trump’s equivocal statements, suggesting Russian drones in Poland “could have been a mistake,” handing the Kremlin exactly the ambiguity it seeks. Every hesitant response chips away at NATO’s credibility, encouraging further tests of resolve. European allies, though alarmed, remain reliant on American leadership, which Moscow perceives as increasingly unreliable. The Kremlin’s longer game is clear: normalize provocations until they seem routine, erode NATO’s deterrent reputation, and frame Western inaction as proof of Russian ascendancy. Even if a peace deal emerges in Ukraine, Putin’s war with the West will not end, it will mutate into constant, low-level confrontation designed to sustain his rule and sap Western unity. For Russia, this strategy risks economic stagnation and long-term exhaustion. For NATO, it is a test of whether the alliance can adapt to perpetual hybrid conflict without unraveling. For Putin personally, it is survival. To cease being a wartime leader would not mean peace; it would mean political death.

At least 50,000 people rallied in Ankara on Sunday in a dramatic show of defiance against the government’s sweeping legal campaign to cripple Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP. The protest, held in Tandogan Square, came one day before a court ruling that could annul the CHP’s 2023 congress, a move that would unseat party leader Ozgur Ozel and potentially reorder Turkey’s political future. The gathering carried the weight of more than a procedural dispute. Supporters waved Turkish flags and portraits of jailed Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s most formidable rival, chanting for the president’s resignation. Imamoglu, imprisoned since March under corruption and terrorism-related charges widely seen as politically driven, sent a letter accusing the government of trying to predetermine the 2028 election by sidelining its opponents. His words drew chants of “President Imamoglu” from the crowd, underscoring his symbolic role as the opposition’s future hope. Ozel denounced the court case as a “coup against democracy” and demanded snap elections, warning that the government’s survival now depends on suppressing dissent rather than contesting votes. His words tapped into growing anger over Erdogan’s reliance on politicized prosecutions: more than 500 opposition figures, including 17 mayors, have been detained in the past year. The stakes extend beyond party politics. Markets remain jittery after Imamoglu’s March arrest triggered the country’s largest protests in a decade and sent the lira into a sharp selloff. Analysts warn that annulling the CHP congress could deepen instability, weaken investor confidence, and accelerate Turkey’s slide into a managed electoral autocracy. Erdogan’s government insists the judiciary is independent, but the scale of arrests and the timing of the trials suggest otherwise. By targeting both the party’s leadership and its rising star in Istanbul, Ankara appears intent on hollowing out institutional opposition before it can threaten the president’s grip on power. Turkey has seen street uprisings before, the 2013 Gezi Park protests marked a generational rupture. Today, Tandogan Square carries the same symbolic weight, but with an opposition more organized and a ruling elite more entrenched. Whether Sunday’s show of force can alter the judicial outcome is uncertain, but it has already exposed Erdogan’s vulnerability: without the machinery of repression, he cannot count on electoral legitimacy to sustain his rule.

In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, women deprived of schools and universities are finding sanctuary in secret book clubs, transforming literature into a weapon of defiance. Clandestine circles meet in Kabul apartments, on encrypted WhatsApp groups, and in exile-led Telegram chats, where scanned PDFs and smuggled novels circulate like contraband. What began as libraries shuttered by Taliban decree has become an underground network sustaining both memory and resistance. For women like Fahr Parsi, a pseudonym for a law graduate who once ran a public library in Kabul, books are both dangerous and indispensable. She hides thousands of volumes in undisclosed locations, lending them selectively while vetting every new member of her digital club. To be caught with banned titles risks beatings, imprisonment, or worse, yet demand is growing. Young women barred from classrooms consume novels, history, and even motivational literature with a hunger sharpened by absence. Participants describe the reading groups as lifelines. Fahima, 18, banned from exams, has devoured 35 books and written her own account of Afghan girlhood under the Taliban. Marjan, once preparing for Afghanistan’s national law entrance exam, has rebuilt her intellectual world through 15 titles shared in secret. These exchanges do not replace lost futures, but they forge a kind of solidarity in exile from public life. Exiled Afghan women in Europe sustain the networks remotely, guiding discussions and scanning texts, ensuring the book clubs expand despite Taliban surveillance. Activists describe them as “a battle of books and ideas” a counterweight to the regime’s deliberate attempt to erase women from public memory and shrink their inner lives. The Taliban’s campaign against women has been methodical: banning education above grade six, policing speech, confiscating books, and criminalizing female presence in nearly all public spaces. Yet the persistence of these shadow libraries demonstrates an unbroken refusal. In a country where public protest now brings torture and sexual abuse, resistance has not ended but adapted. For the Taliban, the sight of girls in classrooms may be banished, but the voices of Afghan women are now taking refuge in literature, hidden yet alive. The fate of Fahr’s library and those who sustain it will determine whether Afghanistan’s next generation inherits only silence, or the memory of an unbroken intellectual resistance.

Equatorial Guinea has enforced one of the most extreme and punitive internet shutdowns in recent memory: a year-long blackout on Annobón, a remote volcanic island of 5,000 residents. The trigger was not an election or coup attempt, but something far smaller, local complaints about dynamite blasting by Somagec, a Moroccan construction company with ties to the ruling elite. Within weeks, the internet was cut, dozens of signatories imprisoned, and Annobón cast into enforced isolation. The human cost has been profound. With banking and hospital systems reliant on connectivity, daily life has collapsed into dysfunction. Residents rack up crippling phone bills to communicate with the mainland, and some have fled entirely, fearing reprisals. The blackout is no mere technical disruption, it functions as a political weapon, a calculated effort to stifle dissent in a region with a long history of tension with Malabo. Annobón has long been treated as a colonial holding by the Obiang dynasty. Though the island holds geostrategic value in the Gulf of Guinea and is rich in volcanic rock, its population remains deeply marginalized, lacking adequate schools, healthcare, and infrastructure. Even the much-touted 2013 airport project brought little relief. Now, the island is again punished for asserting its rights, its residents effectively erased from the digital world to ensure their protests carry no echo. President Teodoro Obiang, 83, has perfected the art of coercion by control of communications. Elections have previously seen temporary restrictions, but this is the first time the internet was shut as retribution against a single community. Rights groups call it a test case in authoritarian innovation: by isolating Annobón, the government is both silencing a dissident region and signaling to the rest of the country that dissent will be answered not with dialogue, but with disappearance from the modern world. Meanwhile, the Obiang family continues its decadent lifestyle, impervious to sanctions or court rulings abroad. The UN just rejected Equatorial Guinea’s request to recover a Paris mansion seized from Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, convicted in France for corruption. Inside the country, however, his father deploys tools more subtle than brute force, turning the internet itself into a lever of control. Annobón’s blackout underlines a broader authoritarian pattern: in regimes where civil society is already weak, shutting down digital space completes the silencing. To cut a people’s internet is to cut their future. For now, Annobón remains incommunicado, its population punished not for rebellion, but for the audacity of asking questions.