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Poland's foreign minister says his country has evidence that Russia recruited people on the Telegram messaging service to carry out last year's massive shopping centre fire in Warsaw. Speaking to the BBC in an exclusive interview, Radek Sikorski said Moscow's actions were "completely unacceptable" and that a second Russian consulate in Poland had been closed as a result. His comments come after a Polish investigation concluded that the Marywilska shopping centre fire was orchestrated by Moscow's intelligence services. Russia denied its involvement, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accusing Poland of being "Russophobic".

Europe is 'totally unprepared' for Russia's tactics of hybrid warfare, defence officials have warned amid mounting fear that Moscow is already sabotaging critical infrastructure on the continent in anticipation of a wider conflict. Western leaders have accused Russia of sabotaging vital cables in the Baltic twice within 48 hours, after Biden relaxed rules on Ukraine firing long-range missiles into Russia and amid speculation Europe may follow suit. But with both sides so far stopping short of engaging in direct conflict, defence sources have warned that the West is improperly prepared to thwart Moscow's efforts to destabilise by meddling in European...

KYIV, Ukraine—As the Russian shells and rockets rained down on them in the frontline town of Debaltseve in February 2015, Ukrainian troops began to receive curious, anonymous text messages on their cellphones. “Your comrades nearby already left their positions, so you should leave yours as well,” one message read. The messages also claimed that Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at that time, as well as Ukrainian military commanders, had “betrayed” their soldiers. The Ukrainian military later concluded that Russian military forces had taken over the local cellphone network with mobile jamming stations. The text messages were part of a psychological operation...

Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is...