Paul Sanasardo, the forgotten one (except by Pina Bausch)
Paul Sanasardo. Photo Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Author of "excellent, unpleasant dances," as one critic put it, Paul Sanasardo was one of the lesser-known figures in American modern dance. He died on July 23, 2026, at the age of 97. This choreographer from Chicago, trained in painting and then in dance under Martha Graham and Antony Tudor, invented, with Donya Feuer, an intense, dreamlike, and often brutal theater of the body. In Europe, his name remains almost unknown—with the notable exception of Pina Bausch, who was his young stage and creative partner in New York. The humanities are not the same. Chronicles, analyses, stories, "off-the-beaten-path" pieces: to stay informed: Paul Sanasardo. Photo Jack Mitchell In France, and more broadly in Europe, he is unknown. Never invited by a single theater or festival. Yet he was one of the major artists of the 20th century. But he arrived too early, or too late, caughtbetween Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Unknown, therefore, except to a few, for whom his name was more than a reference: a legend. It was the choreographer Jacques Patarozzi, who died in January 2023 ( HERE ), who first introduced me to Paul Sanasardo (photo opposite: Jack Mitchell). As Rosita Boisseau recounted in Le Monde , it was with Paul Sanasardo, in the United States, in the very early 1970s, that Jacques Patarozzi met Pina Bausch, before joining her in Wuppertal in 1975 for the creation of The Rite of Spring , along with two other traveling dancers, Malou Airaudo and Dominique Mercy, who would later become two of the most iconic performers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 1958, Pina Bausch was 18 years old when she undertook, alone and without speaking a word of English, to cross the Atlantic by boat, the journey took eight days – to go to New York to complete her training at the Juilliard School, encouraged by Kurt Jooss, who had returned to Germany after the war to take over the direction of the dance department of the Folkwangschule in Essen, then housed in a former Benedictine abbey. [1] “Jooss organized summer courses in Essen,” Pina Bausch recounts, “where he always invited many other artists, Antony Tudor, and Lucas Hoving, who was a top-tier dancer, and José Limón… the José Limón company was then touring in Düsseldorf… and many jazz teachers, and Vera Volkova, and Alvin Nikolais, and Pearl Lang, who was a wonderful Graham dancer. They were all there… Lucas Hoving sometimes for three months… and they gave their classes. It was there, naturally, that I developed a taste for the most diverse things, like the Graham technique. And a great desire to learn, simply to always learn more. And then I tried to get a scholarship.” In the interview she gave me in March 2006 [2] , I asked Pina Bausch about the circumstances that led her to meet Paul Sanasardo: “At the Juilliard School, Antony Tudor taught, along with other masters like Margaret Craske and Alfred Corvino. And they all taught at the Met [the Metropolitan Opera in New York]. So I went to the Met to train with them, as well as in the classes of Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo. One day, they approached me. I couldn't understand anything, but they were incredibly kind and invited me to their studio. They always held classes there in the evenings, I joined them, and after class, at night, they prepared their pieces. They spent their days working, and in the evenings, at night, they lived. They immediately wanted me to participate in their pieces, and I immediately started working with them. They then became two close friends of mine…” It was within the small collective formed by Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer that Pina Bausch participated, in New York, in her first experiences of choreographic creation: Phases of Madness then In View of God . In an interview conducted three years ago by Jenai Cutcher for the Chicago Dance History Project (see below), Paul Sanasardo gives his own version [Sanasardo remembered that Bausch had wanted to leave Juilliard and would have lost her scholarship had she done so. Later accounts establish, however, that she completed her one-year grant at the school] : “Pearl Lang [a former leading dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, she taught at Juilliard from 1951 to 1969 and founded her own company, the Pearl Lang Dance Theater ] had gone to teach in Essen and told Kurt Jooss, ‘This young girl is very talented.’ Jooss was growing old, and arranged for her to go to New York on a Juilliard scholarship. There, Pina studied with Tudor, Anna Sokolow, and Limón, but she didn’t like anything academic. One day, Tudor came to see me: ‘There’s this very good student at Juilliard. I think you’ll like her. She’s German, very serious.’ She wanted to leave Juilliard; by leaving, she would lose her scholarship. So Tudor told her, ‘Don’t get your hopes up, you’re not a ballet dancer, but you can earn some money here.’ Then: ‘I want you to meet Paul.’” Donnie [Feuer] and I had just begun working together. Tudor said to us, “I think you should work together.” I invited Pina to the studio. She came one evening; she only took one class with me. I had seen her in Tudor's class: she was remarkable. Then I asked her if she wanted to work with us. Pina more or less moved in with us. She took Tudor’s morning class, then went to her work at the Met; afterwards, we would work together. She would come back late at night, and we would rehearse at midnight in the studio. That's how we started. The first piece was a trio, for the three of us, Phases of Madness. On stage, we roughed each other up until we turned red. It was a very rough piece. Pina already had that violence, those bodies colliding… » Interview with Paul Sanasardo for the Chicago Dance History Project (2023). A life of dance Paul Sanasardo died on July 23, 2026, in Park Ridge, a residential suburb northwest of Chicago. He was 97 years old. Born in Chicago in 1928 to a Sicilian family originally from Palermo, he first studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before training in dance under Antony Tudor and Martha Graham. He made his professional debut in 1952 with the Erika Thimey Dance Theater, then danced with Anna Sokolow in 1955, and later with Pearl Lang, notably in 1957 and 1964. He also performed at the New York City Opera and in several Broadway musicals. In 1957, with Donya Feuer, he founded the Paul Sanasardo-Donya Feuer Dance Company. The following year, the two artists created the Studio for Dance , which later became Modern Dance Artists Inc .: a school, rehearsal space, living space, and creative laboratory all in one. Early on, Sanasardo and Feuer rented three floors of a loft above a cardboard factory on West 19th Street in Manhattan. They lived and taught there. Some children enrolled in their classes stayed over the weekend, sleeping in sleeping bags to work with them. Several would appear in their works, which were anything but conventional children's theater. In 1963, Donya Feuer left for Stockholm, where she joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre and would work intensively with Ingmar Bergman for three decades. For Sanasardo, it was the end of an exceptional creative partnership—but not of a choreographic adventure that would continue for many years to come. Paul Sanasardo's company in 1982. Photo David Fullard From New York to Tel Aviv In 1970, Paul Sanasardo received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. In 1977, he was appointed artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, a position he held until 1980. For Batsheva, he created, among other works, Step by Step with Haydn , Abandoned Prayer , Meditation on an Open Stage and Lisztdelirium (1978), then Stravinsky Dance Circus (1979), Songs and The Spirit of Babi-Yar (1980). Returning to the United States in 1981, he resumed directing his company, which, until its dissolution in 1986, was housed in a studio on the second floor of a building on 21st Street in Manhattan. After 1986, Paul Sanasardo continued his work as a teacher and guest choreographer with various companies. His works entered or remained in the repertoire of ensembles such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Nederlands Dans Theater. Among several dozen pieces, Metallics (1963), a work of intense sexual tension set to an electronic score by Henry Cowell, was notably revived by these two companies. In 1971, critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times that it was "impossible not to respect Paul Sanasardo as a choreographer" : "an uncompromising artist" who "combines purity of movement with emotional depth." In the 1980s, some of his works took on a more lyrical and lighter tone. But his art retained what one of his critics called its strength of "excellent unpleasant dances" : bodies exposed, mistreated, subjected to relationships of desire, violence or power. Paul Sanasardo in the solo Pain (1970) "Passionate, determined" American dancer, choreographer, and teacher Bill Evans, born in 1940, knew Paul Sanasardo for decades. In a tribute published after his death, he remembered him as "a passionate, determined, frank, and eccentric man." At the beginning of the Repertory Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, Evans and his colleagues asked critic Clive Barnes to recommend a New York teacher of modern technique. "He immediately suggested Sanasardo," he recounted. Paul Sanasardo was then invited for two extended residencies. During his first residency, he created Fatal Birds . During rehearsals, Bill Evans recalled, Sanasardo would spread his long arms “like menacing wings,” lower himself into a wide plié , and shout “ woom, woom! ” For his second residency, Sanasardo created Earth for the entire company. The set consisted of long cardboard tubes, of the kind used to ship carpets; some, painted like tree trunks, were suspended above the stage. The dancers set them in motion by walking past or manipulating them. The men's costumes, Bill Evans recounted, were inspired by the United Airlines uniforms that Sanasardo had noticed during his flight from New York. “It was an exhilarating and exciting piece to dance,” he wrote. The Repertory Dance Theatre presented it in 1969 at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. After a performance, Bill Evans overheard Antony Tudor asking Paul Sanasardo, "But what does it all mean?" Prior to this week in Central Park, the Repertory Dance Theatre had performed in Saratoga Springs, at Sanasardo's invitation, for the inaugural season of a modern dance program he had helped create and directed at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. After the Delacorte, Bill Evans, Joan Moon, and Gregg Lizenbery stayed at Anna Sokolow's apartment on Christopher Street and attended Sanasardo's classes. This memory perhaps clarifies what Paul Sanasardo was for those who met him: not just a choreographer of the in-between, caught between Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, nor a name relegated to the margins of the history of American modern dance, but a creator whose extraordinary work ethic, exacting standards and strangeness have left a lasting mark on his performers. Douglas Nielsen and Paul Sanasardo. Photo Mula Eshet Back to painting Dance was not Paul Sanasardo’s first calling. In Chicago, he initially trained as a visual artist, graduating in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952. A lecture by Martha Graham altered the course of his life; the following year, he made his professional debut as a dancer. Paul Sanasardo, "Biomorphic Abstract", 1992. Painting, however, never entirely vanished from his life. After disbanding his company in the mid-1980s, Sanasardo returned to Chicago, continued teaching and resumed painting. Dominique Petit, the French dancer and choreographer who had danced with his company in the early 1970s, recalled: “He had gone to art school in Chicago […] he returned to Chicago, where he continued to teach and took up painting again.” Paul Sanasardo, Untitled, 1995. Only scattered traces of this later visual work remain readily accessible: a work held by the Tucson Museum of Art, a few paintings that have surfaced on the market, and little archival material from which to reconstruct a chronology, identify series or map exhibitions. That scarcity echoes his choreographic fate: a major body of work long left outside the dominant narratives, whose surviving fragments now call for a patient rediscovery. Paul Sanasardo, Untitled, 1991 His return to painting should perhaps be understood not as a retirement, but as a continuation. The artist who had brought bodies marked by desire, anguish, violence and tenderness to the stage returned to the silence of the canvas. Between painting and choreography, Paul Sanasardo never ceased to compose presences, tensions and images. Jean-Marc Adolphe NOTES [1] The Folkwangschule for music, dance, and spoken word opened on October 8, 1927, at 34 Friedrichstraße in Essen. Kurt Jooss was a co-founder, along with, among others, the stage director Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg, the conductor Max Fiedler, and the set designer Hein Heckroth; he immediately took over the direction of the dance department. The project extended an experiment conducted in Münster since 1925 with his close collaborator Sigurd Leeder: bringing together music, spoken word, movement, and theatrical practice under one roof. This transdisciplinary approach was then unparalleled in Germany for the professional training of dancers. Jooss, trained in the wake of Rudolf Laban, did not strictly separate classical dance, Ausdruckstanz — expressive dance — and theatre. He sought a precise relationship between the performer's inner world, movement, form and space; this articulation nourished both his teaching and his choreographies. In 1928, he founded the Folkwang-Tanztheater-Studio within the school , an experimental group combining training and creation. Two years later, he also took over the direction of the Essen Opera Ballet, giving the city a particularly unique structure where school, company, and theater interacted. In 1933, the Nazi authorities demanded that Jooss remove the Jewish members of his company. He refused and hastily left Germany with his group; he continued his work in exile, notably at Dartington Hall in England, with the Jooss-Leeder School. He returned to Essen after the war and, in 1949, resumed his position as director of the dance department at the Folkwangschule, then housed in the former Benedictine abbey of Essen-Werden. He taught there until his retirement in the late 1960s; the school was granted higher education status in 1963. [2] “I’ve never given such a long interview ,” Pina Bausch said with a laugh, at the end of this interview conducted on March 1, 2006 , in Wuppertal, with Michel Bataillon, who translated it from German to French. It was the last major interview during her lifetime (Pina Bausch died on June 30, 2009), intended for Guy Delahaye’s book of photographs, published by Actes Sud in 2007 (reissued in 2018). Read: "Dominique Petit: The Journey of a French Dancer in the United States, Encounters and Connections – No. 2. Years 1972-1973: Becoming a Professional Dancer with Paul Sanasardo," interview by Maëva Lamolière. https://journals.openedition.org/danse/4464 We opted for a completely free website, without advertising. which depends solely on the support of our readers.
Putin's secret plan to win the French presidential election
Participants in the "SputnikPro / AI" session from June 21 to 27, 2026 in Moscow. A participant in the June 2026 session of the "SputnikPro AI in Media" program—a training course for foreign journalists organized in Moscow by the state-owned holding company Rossiya Segodnya—testifies that, upon completion of the course, he was offered €8,000 per month to "collaborate" with Russian intelligence services. This previously undisclosed detail, obtained by our editorial team, sheds new light on a program officially presented as a simple cultural exchange between young media professionals, but deployed from Ghana to India via Jordan—and which completes a broader picture: deepfakes targeting French political figures, the Pravda propaganda network, a Russian ministry dedicated to AI disinformation, and a political channel maintained in Paris. Our investigation reconstructs, piece by piece, the strategy that the Kremlin is deploying eight months before the 2027 French presidential election. Exclusive investigations, columns, analyses, stories, "off-the-beaten-path" features: to stay informed: It's no secret: Putin is furious. Furious with Emmanuel Macron, with France, with us. The presence of Ukrainian soldiers on the Champs-Élysées during the Bastille Day parade was the last straw for the Kremlin, where Putin vents his spleen daily. And right now, his spleen is boiling over. Because it's not just France. After Hungary, where despite considerable resources Moscow failed to keep Viktor Orbán in power [1] , and after the fiasco in Armenia, where London sanctioned forty-nine additional employees of the Social Design Agency on May 11, 2026, as well as a dedicated structure, ANO Strategic Communications Caspian 2030, specifically accused of attempting to influence the June 2026 parliamentary elections [2] , the French presidential election is the next target. Judging by the modus operandi already observed elsewhere, Kremlin strategists have a ready-made strategy. Unsurprisingly, there should be, about ten days before the first round of the election, an "Islamist" attack on French soil—probably not in Paris, which is too heavily guarded. The masterminds behind this impending false-flag crime [3] may already be in place. Not at the Russian Federation embassy, that would be too conspicuous, but still in the very heart of Paris, a stone's throw from the Eiffel Tower: at the Holy Trinity, aka "Putin's Cathedral," or even "Kremlin-on-the-Seine." Are the ways of the Lord not inscrutable? The domes of the Russian Orthodox cathedral on the grounds of the Russian Spiritual and Cultural Centre, Quai Branly in Paris. Photo by Dominique Boutin / TASS Under the dome of Kremlin-on-the-Seine The Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center, inaugurated on the Quai Branly on October 19, 2016, by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was conceived as early as 2007 by Vladimir Putin himself. Its dome reaches a height of 37 meters—the maximum permitted by Parisian urban planning regulations. Since April 2023, our investigation [4] has documented serious suspicions about its activities, beyond religious worship and a “literary salon” sponsored by a foundation that is nonetheless under European sanctions. But this investigation, which has not been picked up by any other media outlet, has been to no avail. While the Ministry of the Interior signed an expulsion order on July 29, 2026, against Xenia Fedorova, former head of RT France who became a star columnist for the Bolloré group's media outlets—and, in reality, rather insignificant—Emmanuel Macron is not inclined to dislodge the nest of spies who are plotting on the Quai Branly while pretending to pray. The summer of stink bombs The planned "Islamist" attack will, so to speak, be merely the icing on the cake. Meanwhile, "interference" is already on the rise. Raphaël Glucksmann was targeted on August 4, 2026, in an operation attributed to the Storm-1516 network—"directly controlled by the GRU," according to information he claims to have received from the SGDSN (General Secretariat for Defence and National Security)—via a fake website replicating 181 pages of the Blast media outlet and a highly sophisticated voiceover imitating Edwy Plenel. On the same day, Gabriel Attal was targeted by fake news reports using the visual identities of RFI, BFM-TV, France 24, and Le Monde , portraying him as suffering from Parkinson's disease—an operation that VIGINUM attributes to the Matriochka network "with a high degree of confidence." Ten days earlier, on July 24, it was Édouard Philippe's turn to be targeted by fake news claiming he was suffering from senile dementia. These smear campaigns generated more media hype than they actually snowballed on social media—fewer than 30,000 views on X for the attack against Raphaël Glucksmann—but social media remains the Trojan horse for future attacks. Test mode, smokescreen A flop, then? Not really. For now, the Kremlin is still in "testing" mode. And if the content of these "interferences" is rather poorly executed, it's undoubtedly intentional. This isn't yet the "special operation" of hybrid warfare, just the beginnings—beginnings that also serve as a smokescreen. While state intelligence services are struggling to decipher the origin of these crude attacks, they risk being less aware of what's being prepared elsewhere, and in what form. Diversion is an old Russian and Soviet military doctrine: maskirovka , the art of making the adversary look where nothing essential is happening. Le Monde confirms this in another way: the crude deepfakes targeting Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal, and Raphaël Glucksmann have, to date, had virtually no measurable impact on public opinion—but their public denunciation by the candidates themselves serves the interests of the agencies that create them, which can then use them to demand more funding from their sponsors. The real risk, documented since 2017, lies elsewhere: hacking followed by the leak of internal documents—"hack and leak." Making noise with the fake to better conceal the truth: this is, very precisely, the logic of diversion. This mixing of genres is the very signature of the Russian influence apparatus targeting France: on the one hand, bungling, unassuming tactics—fake websites that fool no one, synthesized voices identifiable in seconds, messages written in English for a supposedly French audience; on the other, a formidably organized state infrastructure. The "Pravda" network of websites, mapped by VIGINUM as early as 2024 under the code name "Portal Kombat," published approximately 6,000 articles per day in 2024; it now publishes nearly 23,000, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported by The Guardian [5] . The objective is no longer to convince a human reader, but to flood the web in order to contaminate the language patterns that millions of voters will question during the campaign. To date, this is the most sophisticated—and most underestimated—vector for 2027. Budapest, dress rehearsal — a failure Hungary remains the best-documented case. On March 21, 2026, the Washington Post revealed that a unit of Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR), concerned about the collapse of support for Viktor Orbán, had considered staging an assassination attempt [6] . An analysis of more than 628,000 Telegram messages, published by Reuters on April 10, established that the six main sources amplifying pro-Orbán narratives were linked to Russia. On April 12, 2026, Orbán nevertheless lost: Péter Magyar's Tisza party won 141 out of 199 seats [7] . The Russian influence machine was mobilized at full capacity for a European national election. It did not prevent its candidate's defeat. This is the most useful warning for France: the mobilization of the apparatus is a verifiable fact; its electoral effectiveness is not. Participants in the "SputnikPro / AI" session from June 21 to 27, 2026 in Moscow (screenshot) Russia forced to train new battalions So, how does Putin really plan to win the French presidential election? To win this new battle in the "hybrid warfare" waged by the Kremlin's tsar, he first needs to develop new skills. However, as with the army on the Ukrainian front, the Kremlin has recruitment problems. North Korean cannon fodder works for a while, but it's not sustainable in the long run. On the disinformation front, Russia certainly has its troll factories, far from inactive—as we saw earlier with the "Pravda" network—but they lack skilled workers. Generating code, imitating and reproducing the graphics of a media outlet like Blast , is no problem; these troll factories are efficient. But when it comes to editorial content, they lack brains. Fortunately, the Kremlin has a countermeasure. The operation is called “SputnikPro AI in Media.” Officially, it is an “international training module,” organized by the state-owned holding company Rossiya Segodnya—parent company of the Sputnik news agency and RIA Novosti—in partnership with the federal agency Rossotrudnichestvo, responsible for Russian humanitarian and cultural cooperation abroad, as part of the “New Generation” (Novoe pokolenie) mobility program for young foreigners. Launched in 2011 by presidential decree, this program has already attracted more than 11,000 participants from over 150 countries to Moscow, with the stated objective, according to an investigation by the investigative media outlet iStories , of eventually creating a network of foreign leaders “constructively” disposed toward Russia [8] . Participants at the "SputnikPro / AI" session from June 21 to 27, 2026 in Moscow. Photo: Vitali Beloussov / RIA Novosti The last “SputnikPro” session took place from June 21 to 27, 2026 and brought together twenty-two young journalists and media professionals from eighteen countries — Serbia, Lebanon, Tunisia, Oman, Morocco, Indonesia, Malaysia, Senegal, Congo, Brazil, Vietnam, Kenya, Egypt, Nepal, Cambodia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Peru [9] —, some of whom were recruited from the Francophone area (Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa) via Russian Houses and Russian cultural centers abroad, which have served as local relays for the “New Generation” program since 2011. The program included: algorithmic monitoring and analysis of current events, AI-assisted audio and video production, translation and social media management tools, and sessions on the "ethical and legal challenges" of AI, presented, however, from the perspective of Russian institutions. The highlight of the stay was a meeting at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with Maria Zakharova, Director of the Information and Press Department [10] . "'New Generation' is a flagship international project for young people," said Kirill Bogomolov, Deputy Director of Rossotrudnichestvo, for whom this internship at Rossiya Segodnya was "the ideal place to observe how professionals use AI to solve concrete problems in the sector" [11] . On the ground, those most directly involved are playing along with an enthusiasm that sometimes borders on promotional naiveté. Laith Alassaf, head of social media for the Jordanian daily Ad-Dustour , sees it as "a valuable professional opportunity to explore the latest advances in artificial intelligence and its growing application to journalism and the media ," praising "the international format of the program," which "creates a unique framework for sharing experiences and constructive exchanges on the main challenges facing the media worldwide" [12] . Agouram Abdelaaziz, a journalist with the Moroccan daily Hespress, echoes this sentiment [13] . “SputnikPro fully meets the growing needs of journalists in the age of artificial intelligence. Participants will be able to use the knowledge gained to improve the efficiency and performance of their journalistic work” [14] . From Vietnam, Nguyen Thuy Linh, from the state-owned VTV, expressed surprise at the way Russian media are integrating artificial intelligence into journalism, adding that “the humor of the speakers made the discussions more interactive and enjoyable” [15] . Another participant, identified in the caption of a promotional video released by Rossotrudnichestvo as the young Tunisian journalist Sana Sadouina, praised the training as “really very useful,” having given her “a much broader understanding of the new tools and skills” [16] —though no other evidence of journalistic activity under her name could be found online. Interview with a Tunisian journalist presented as "Sana Sadouina", interviewed by the federal news agency Rossotrudnichestvo June 23, 2026, broadcast on the Facebook page of the Russian House in Tunis. This training is fully funded by the Russian federal budget: Rossiya Segodnya received 9.4 billion rubles in 2023, and is expected to receive 11.18 billion (about $135 million) in 2026 — an amount that is part of a general increase in funding allocated to Russian state propaganda, now exceeding 146 billion rubles ($1.78 billion) per year [17] . But, as with some DVDs, there is a bonus that Rossotrudnichestvo makes no mention of in any press release. According to testimony gathered by our editorial staff from one of the participants in the June 2026 session—who requested anonymity due to the real risks to his safety and career—an unwritten agreement was allegedly offered to him at the end of the training: €8,000 per month to "collaborate" with the Russian intelligence services. This sum does not appear in any public budget line of Rossiya Segodnya or Rossotrudnichestvo; Our source attributes it to external funding, that of the fascist oligarch Konstantin Malofeev — historical financier of the Donbass separatists, but also of the European far right — including the National Front in 2014 — under European and American sanctions since 2014, indicted by the American justice system in 2022 for violating these same sanctions. The Kremlin bullfight As we will see later, the recruitment of "digital writers" does not stop there… For the past few months, Ukrainian drones have been sowing discord in Russia and its Crimean annex. Despite being a poor matador, Putin has decided to seize the bull by the horns… Since the end of June 2026, SBU drone operators claim to have conducted over a hundred strikes against strategic Russian targets—defense industrial sites, airfields, command posts, ships, tankers, and refineries—targeting airfields in Crimea at Saky, Hvardiiske, Belbek, and Baherove [18] . Ryazan, Perm, Taganrog, Volgograd, Saratov, Bashkiria: in just a few weeks, some fifteen Russian refineries have been hit, causing fuel restrictions and long lines at gas stations as far away as Moscow [19] . It was in this climate that Vladimir Putin convened the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense on August 5, 2026, to announce a sweeping reshuffle of the military command—a continuation of the restructuring initiated after the dismissal of Sergei Shoigu in 2024. The official announcement was the creation of the "Unmanned Systems Troops," entrusted to Colonel General Denis Lyamine, until then Chief of Staff of the "Center" Group [20] . Putin himself had to admit that this new branch, whose formation the Ministry had announced would be "completed" by December 2025, was in reality still under construction [21] —a rare admission for a government unaccustomed to admitting its own delays. The rest of the reshuffling follows the same logic of centralization. All rear-echelon services—supply, transport, logistics—are now brought together under a single authority, entrusted to Colonel General Valery Solodchuk, who until then commanded the "Center" Group. The choice is surprising: the same man has been listed, since September 2025, among the officers identified by the Sunday Times as having commanded the units accused of the massacres of civilians in Butcha—which did not prevent him from receiving, in July 2025, the title of "Hero of Russia" [22] . The functions related to armaments—procurement, supply, equipment—are, for their part, brought together under the authority of Deputy Minister Alexander Sanchik, while General Andrei Ivanayev takes command of the "Center" Group and Major General Pyotr Bolgarev assumes, on an interim basis, command of the "Vostok" Group [23] . According to analysts cited by Euronews , this “military perestroika” has a dual objective: to adapt the army to a war of attrition that is expected to be protracted, and to tighten Putin’s personal control over a hierarchy still riddled with networks inherited from the Shoigu era. Andrei Belousov, an economist by training who became Minister of Defense, embodies less a “Minister of War” than a “manager” tasked with disciplining defense spending and the defense industry. The Institute for the Study of War is more circumspect: the announced changes consist mainly of reassigning commanders already in their posts, rather than promoting figures capable of changing the way Russia wages war [24] . Organizational chart of the Russian intelligence services. © The Humanities The two faces of the Russian shadow This major military overhaul was accompanied, behind the scenes, by more discreet upheavals within the intelligence apparatus—where two agencies with very distinct missions operated. The GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate, now renamed the Main Directorate of the General Staff) reported directly to the General Staff of the Armed Forces: it was a military service, focused on action—field intelligence, but also sabotage, assassination, and psychological warfare. The SVR, a civilian service inherited from the first KGB Directorate, concentrated on traditional espionage and reported directly to the President [25] . The GRU houses the units most documented by Western intelligence services. Unit 26165 (“Fancy Bear”) and Unit 74455 (“Sandworm”) were respectively sanctioned by London for the hacking of the US Democratic Party in 2016 and for the destructive cyberattacks “Viasat” and “NotPetya” [26] . Even more worrying for Europe, Unit 29155, headed by General Andrei Averianov, has been identified by several Western investigations as responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018, the explosion of an ammunition depot in Vrbětice, Czech Republic, in 2014, and a series of explosions at Bulgarian arms depots between 2011 and 2020. The European Union describes it as responsible for “destabilizing activities—terrorist attacks and cyberattacks—across Europe,” with active military personnel “in Ukraine, Western Europe, and Africa.” [27] No public inquiry has yet established that this unit—or any other—is preparing an operation specifically targeting the 2027 French presidential election. but the modus operandi it has deployed elsewhere in Europe, and the precedents mentioned above in Hungary, point to a documented risk, not an editorialist's fantasy. The atmosphere within the apparatus itself is no less tense. An assassination attempt targeting Vladimir Alekseyev, First Deputy Chief of the GRU Directorate, triggered personnel changes in the spring of 2026—not within the GRU itself, but within the FSB's military counterintelligence department, which is precisely responsible for protecting its leadership. Alexei Badeev, deputy head of this department, left his post; Vyacheslav Vdovichenko, head of the 9th department in charge of overseeing the central apparatus of military intelligence, is targeted for a lack of control over the security of the GRU leadership [28] . This is yet another sign that the Russian power structure, however tightly controlled it may appear on the surface, is not immune to its own weaknesses. Organizational chart of the Russian interference ecosystem, under the direct authority of Vladimir Putin. © The Humanities Dobby is free, the agency closes ranks. The same spring of 2026 saw one last move, less spectacular but just as revealing for our investigation: on April 27, Putin dismissed Yevgeny Primakov — grandson of the former Soviet Prime Minister of the same name — from the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, the federal agency under European sanctions which organizes precisely the “New Generation” program and its “SputnikPro” sessions described above. Igor Chaika, the new director of the federal agency Rossotrudnichestvo. Konstantin Kolpakov, deputy head of Rossotrudnichestvo, appointed by Putin on August 7, 2026. Photo by Vladimir Trefilof / RIA Novosti. On the pro-Kremlin messaging app Ranshe Vsekh, Primakov commented on his departure with a single word: “Dobby is free”—a reference to the house-elf from Harry Potter, freed from his servitude [29] . His successor, Igor Chaika, son of the former Prosecutor General of Russia, had been his deputy in charge of humanitarian and educational programs since March 2025—precisely those responsible for recruiting young foreign journalists. This change of guard, two months before the June session, places the Russian cultural influence apparatus even more firmly under the control of figures from security circles. Last August 7, Putin has completed the organizational chart for the Rossotrudnichestvo agency by appointing a new deputy director by decree: Konstantin Kolpakov, 43, a lawyer specializing in financial management. An interesting detail: having served at the Russian Embassy in Canada from 2006 to 2012, he is partially French-speaking. Colombia: the real-life laboratory Far from Moscow, in Colombia, we were—alone in the entire international press—in documenting how a presidential election could be shaped by artificial intelligence ( HERE ). On June 21, 2026, Abelardo De la Espriella, a far-right candidate and friend of drug traffickers and paramilitary militias, supported by Donald Trump, defeated Iván Cepeda with 49.66% of the vote—the narrowest margin in Colombian presidential history. On August 7, the day of his inauguration in Cali, the French Embassy in Bogotá issued a brief but clear warning to French citizens living in the country: remain vigilant. Press release from the French Embassy in Colombia (screenshot) And that's it? Yes, that's it, from the French perspective. Russian spies, however, are not taking a break. On July 30, the Russian ambassador to Colombia, Nikolai Tavdumadze—stationed in Bogotá since 2020—forwarded Sergey Lavrov with a 38-page report on the Colombian election, written by military attaché Vladimir Skorikov and embassy secretary Daria Rykova. Sixteen of these 38 pages are devoted to the use of artificial intelligence in the campaign—and our investigation, translated into Russian, is cited extensively. In fact, it's worth noting that this is the only way we were able to access this document, which Moscow would have preferred to keep "confidential." The ministry that codes propaganda It is difficult to understand how this kind of report is produced without tracing it back to its institutional source. In Russia, artificial intelligence falls administratively under the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, headed since January 21, 2020 (reappointed in May 2024) by Maksut Shadaev, a sociology graduate from the Russian State Social University and under Western sanctions (EU, UK, US, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand) since 2022-2023 for his role in the digital management of occupied Ukrainian territories. The ministry has about twenty departments and a dozen deputy ministers; that of artificial intelligence and data, entrusted since October 31, 2022 to Grigory Borisenko — 44 years old, mathematician and Doctor of Physical-Mathematical Sciences from Lomonosov Moscow University —, now leads the federal project "Artificial Intelligence" of the national program "Data Economy"; and in this capacity, sends dozens of Russian citizens opposed to the war in Ukraine to prison every month. The AI gurus in Russia: on the left, Grigory Borisenko and on the right, Maksut Shadaev, respectively Deputy Minister and Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media. This same technology is also used on the front lines: according to the Institute for the Study of War, Russia reportedly used, as early as June 2026, videos possibly generated by artificial intelligence showing Russian soldiers raising their flag in Kostiantynivka to create the illusion of the city's capture, while the reality on the ground was quite different (RBC-Ukraine). Visual propaganda, too, has entered the synthetic age. Okay. Russia isn't alone in the world. Granted, among the Kremlin's allies are the Iran of the mullahs and the "Revolutionary Guards," North Korea of the obese Kim Jong-un, and, more recently, the Taliban in Afghanistan, those great defenders of women's rights. But all that doesn't add up, even with Trump by the beard of a good dose of kompromat, because with Comrade Xi Jinping, you never know where you stand, as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin rightly reasons. "New generation": exporting the model Reaching a wider audience is precisely the aim of Sputnik's "New Generation" program with Rossotrudnichestvo, already mentioned above in connection with the twenty-two young journalists trained in Moscow in June. In Ghana, for example: last May, the RIA Novosti news agency announced that it had organized, with Sputnik radio, the first "SputnikPro" module for one of the country's leading public universities, Winneba University of Education. Vasily Pushkov, Sputnik's Director of International Cooperation, addressed more than fifty listeners about the workings of a modern news agency, emphasizing journalistic ethics, the reliability of content, and fact-checking (RIA Novosti, May 13, 2026). Artem Tachkev and Vassili Pouchkov in a video conference with Avdhesh Mathur, president of the Indian nationalist think tank Visvaniti Foundation (screenshot). Or again in India, where Sputnik signed a memorandum of understanding on May 5, 2026, with an independent think tank in New Delhi, the Visvaniti Foundation. The document was initialed by Vasily Pushkov and Ahmad Bajwa, the foundation's director (RIA Novosti, May 5, 2026). "Visvaniti" literally translates to "world politics": the foundation presents itself as a "leading global think tank," aiming to foster dialogue between Indian perspectives and global issues in service of a "multipolar" order. It held its first annual meeting in July 2026 in New Delhi, publishes analyses on "Ramayana diplomacy" in service of the civilizational strategy of "Bharat," and presents itself on LinkedIn as an independent research institution employing between eleven and fifty people, chaired by Avdhesh Mathur. An ideological positioning close to the Hindu nationalist movement which is now influential in Indian foreign policy circles — which does not obviously prevent Sputnik from finding a partner of choice there. Sputnik trains, the state finances At Sputnik, the man who is actually driving this global dissemination of expertise is Igor Arkhipov, head of the artificial intelligence project within the video production department. His role: to integrate AI tools into Sputnik's video production and train foreign journalists in these technologies. He spoke to South African journalists from the IOL portal in July 2025 about AI tools in video production, to the OIC Union of News Agencies in April 2024 about AI-powered video translation, and at the University of Kerala, India, in August 2024. He also teaches in-person courses at Sputnik headquarters and leads workshops on creating manipulated videos. Igor Arkhipov, head of the artificial intelligence project at Sputnik's video production department The link to the Kremlin here is not merely speculative; it is institutional and perfectly documentable. Arkhipov works for Rossiya Segodnya, the state news agency created by Putin's decree on December 9, 2013, to "cover Russian state policy and Russian public life abroad," and whose director general was appointed by the same decree—a position that can only be dismissed by Putin himself. Kiselev has remained under European sanctions since 2014. The other key figure in this ecosystem, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and Rossiya Segodnya, was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2024 for coordinating with the Kremlin. Rossiya Segodnya, entirely funded by the federal budget—9.4 billion rubles in 2023, 11.18 billion projected for 2026, or approximately $135 million—is also sanctioned by the EU and designated a "foreign mission" by the United States. In February 2026, Putin also created a Presidential Commission on the Development of AI Technologies, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko and Deputy Chief of Staff Maxim Oreshkin, with an explicit focus on "national AI solutions for defense and security." There is no indication that Arkhipov sits on this high-level commission; his work, according to documents, remains operational. But the institutional link is undeniable: he works for an entity created by presidential decree, headed by a Putin appointee, and entirely funded by the state. Katerina Tikhonova, Vladimir Putin's youngest daughter (screenshot from Russian television). Rumor dismissed, reality more solid A confidential report obtained by our editorial team suggested that Arkhipov was personally linked to Katerina Tikhonova, the youngest daughter of Vladimir Putin and his ex-wife Lyudmila. We sought to verify this link: no reliable source corroborates it, and we therefore disregard it. But pursuing a salacious rumor caused us to overlook a far more substantial, and more worrying, fact: it is indeed Putin's own daughter who is leading part of Russia's national AI strategy. Born Putina on August 31, 1986, in Dresden—her identity was only publicly confirmed in 2015, following revelations by Russian journalists and Alexei Navalny—Katerina Tikhonova has headed Innopraktika, a $1.7 billion expansion project of Moscow State University, since 2012-2013. Its main clients are the oil giant Rosneft and the state nuclear company Rosatom. Since February 2020, she has also headed the artificial intelligence institute at the same university, funded in part by the Russian Direct Investment Fund—Putin himself having described this center as "one of the essential tools of the national strategy for AI development." Sanctioned by Western countries since 2022, she married Kirill Shamalov in 2013—in a secret ceremony at the Igora ski resort—the son of an old friend of her father, who became Russia's youngest billionaire thanks to his stakes in the petrochemical company Sibur. She divorced him in 2018. This is not a celebrity rumor: it's part of the official organizational chart of Russian AI, which runs, in part, through the Kremlin family circle. The political channel: Mariani and the Franco-Russian Dialogue In France, too, Russian propaganda needs intermediaries, even if it means bribing them. The main "transmission belt" of this channel of influence is not so much Xenia Fedorova, as the media, too quick to repeat, are as follows: MEP Thierry Mariani, former Les Républicains minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, now aligned with Le Pen-Bardella—and about whom we hear far less than Éric Ciotti. Co-president since 2012 of the Franco-Russian Dialogue association—created in 2004 under the joint patronage of Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin—Mariani declared a budget of €86,000 for this organization in 2022. As the NGO Conspiracy Watch has shown, Franco-Russian Dialogue is nothing more than a Kremlin front. Following a report from Tracfin, the association was the subject of two preliminary investigations into suspected corruption, influence peddling, breach of trust and money laundering; both were closed without further action on October 10, 2024. A dismissal of the case is not a political carte blanche: it closes a file, but it doesn't resolve the question of what this association represents, nor the role it could still play in the 2027 campaign. According to our information, Konstantin Malofev remains in control. Since Marine Le Pen was caught red-handed misappropriating European funds, directly financing the Rassemblement national is too risky. Thierry Mariani, a Kremlin agent with his “Franco-Russian Dialogue.” Blacklisted by the European Parliament in 2021 for fake election observation trips to Crimea and Kazakhstan (favorable reports obtained in exchange for luxury trips), and the subject of two investigations by the Central Anti-Corruption Office, he was nonetheless nominated by the Rassemblement national for the 2026 municipal elections in Paris. He received 1.61% of the vote. Photo: DR In a video posted on the “Dialogue Franco-Russe” YouTube channel, the association’s director, Irina Dubois (42, born in Moscow; she served as a special envoy in Russian diplomatic circles between 2005 and 2010 and describes herself as “the high priestess of Russia in France”) made a heartfelt appeal for donations to address the closure of the association’s bank account, on August 14 : But as everyone knows, there are no problems, only solutions. According to our information, Yves Pozzo di Borgo, the unofficial treasurer of the Franco-Russian Dialogue, has discreetly opened a bank account in Liechtenstein, through which funds sent by the "patron" Malofeev are allegedly channeled. A scion of the noble Pozzo di Borgo family (one of whose ancestors, Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo, was granted the title of Count in 1826 by Emperor Nicholas I of Russia), Yves Pozzo di Borgo was a centrist senator for Paris from 2004 to 2017, before turning to conspiracy theorism. Since 2014, he has been active within the Franco-Russian Dialogue. In 2015, he went to Crimea, conquered by Russia, to show off wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "Obama, asshole." In October 2025, on X, he attributed the pro-European demonstrations in Georgia to the "CIA relay network deeply entrenched in Georgia," whose "implantation" Raphaël Glucksmann allegedly facilitated. He openly called Glucksmann a "dirty bastard." He didn't dare say "dirty Jew," though; that would have landed him in court. But when he said, "Glucksmann and his friends and mentors BHL and Soros", everyone understands... In the next round of smear campaigns (mid-September) emanating from the Kremlin, the "Jewish" Raphaël Glucksmann will once again be targeted. Confidential documents will be leaked "proving" that his campaign is being secretly financed by Mossad. But this will be just for kicks , or, once again, a diversionary tactic. The primary targets will remain Gabriel Attal, who will be implicated for his (openly acknowledged) homosexuality, and Édouard Philippe. Regarding the latter, scientific and medical "evidence" will be presented to demonstrate that vitiligo and alopecia, the two conditions that have altered the former Prime Minister's appearance, are due to excessive cocaine use, obtained from seizures made by customs officials in the port of Le Havre. Let the supporters of La France Insoumise rest assured: Jean-Luc Mélenchon will not be the target of any treachery. The scenario of a Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff is precisely what Vladimir Putin ardently desires. The Kremlin tsar is well-informed: he knows that in such a scenario, his friend Marine is guaranteed to win. Fortunately, this is also the scenario Mélenchon dreams of: once the "reformist" left has been ground up, he knows he has no chance of winning against the heir to a party created by the Waffen-SS, but he dares to believe that her election will provoke, in the Islamized suburbs, a "popular" uprising that could establish his Sixth Republic, inspired by Castro and Chavista. Good luck with that… One mystery remains… How can the “patriots” Le Pen, Bardella, Mariani, Pozzo di Borgo, Ciotti, and their ilk be prepared to combine “national sovereignty” with submission to the Tsar of all the Russias? It’s even more absurd than Emmanuel Macron’s “at the same time” approach! And then, how can these same “patriots,” in order to seize power, be willing to allow their opportunistic ally to foment, on French soil—the very soil whose right he claims—an attack that will undoubtedly claim innocent French victims? This is where we stand on August 8, 2026, just a few months before the French presidential election. Jean-Marc Adolphe and les humanités investigation unit. NOTES [1] Orbán's Fidesz party was swept aside on April 12, 2026, by Péter Magyar's Tisza party, which won approximately 53% of the vote, resulting in more than two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian Parliament. Orbán conceded defeat that same evening, ending his sixteen-year rule. The Kremlin, which thus lost its main ally within the EU, reacted with notable coolness: Moscow refrained from congratulating Péter Magyar, a silence that observers interpreted as an admission of strategic defeat—Vladimir Putin losing, in the words of the French Foreign Minister, "his Trojan horse in the European Union." [2] One of the SDA documents proposed the creation of a media outlet called “Yerevan1,” aimed at the Armenian diaspora in Russia, to promote a negative attitude toward Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, based on the logic that Armenia’s prosperity depends on a close alliance with Moscow. France 24 documented a campaign targeting not only Armenia but also the EU and France, with the recurring narrative that Paris was helping Pashinyan falsify the election results. Despite this pressure, Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party maintained a wide lead on June 7—another setback for the Kremlin, following Hungary. [3] A false flag operation (from the English "false flag ," a calque of "false banner" or "false ensign") consists of carrying out an action—attack, sabotage, assassination, provocation—by disguising it so that it is attributed to a third party, usually a designated adversary (Wikipedia, BBC Africa). The expression comes from naval vocabulary: ships would raise the flag of another country to deceive their target. The objective is almost always the same: to create or exploit a shocking event, attribute responsibility for it to the adversary, and then use the resulting public outcry to legitimize a response, an entry into the war, or a repressive measure that would otherwise be rejected by public opinion. Under international humanitarian law, when such an operation involves the use of weapons while impersonating the enemy, it constitutes perfidy, a war crime. Russia is known for its false flag operations. In late January/early February 2022, American and British intelligence services had already revealed a Russian plan to fabricate a Ukrainian attack against Russia or Russian-speaking populations: propaganda video with staged explosions, fake corpses, actors playing grieving relatives, and Ukrainian and Western military equipment placed on site to make the scenario credible. [4] “Paris: the curious impunity of the ‘Kremlin-on-the-Seine,’ stronghold of Russian propaganda and possible nest of spies,” https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/paris-la-curieuse-impunit%C3%A9-du-kremlin-sur-seine-fief-de-la-propagande-russe-et-possible-nid-de [5] The Guardian , November 21, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/21/english-language-websites-link-pro-kremlin-russian-propaganda-pravda-network [6] Washington Post , March 21, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/03/21/hungary-election-interference-russia-orban/ [7] Reuters, April 12, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/fr/affaires/hongrie-elections-lgislatives-fort-enjeu-pour-orban-2026-04-12/ ; Le Figaro, April 13, 2026, https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/defaite-de-viktor-orban-aux-legislatives-hongroise-moscou-espere-des-contacts-pragmatiques-avec-peter-magyar-20260413 [8] GBC Ghana Online, “Premier 24 hour Russian TV Station and Russian International Relations Agency launch New Generation Internship Program,” July 2026, https://www.gbcghanaonline.com/general-news/premier-24-hour-russian-tv-station-and-russian-international-relations-agency-launch-new-generation-internship-program-to-build-global-media-ties/2026/ and iStories, “Kremlin Has Increased Spending on Expanding Its Network of Loyal…,” September 16, 2025, https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/09/16/rossotrudnichestvo-2025/ [9] RHM Journal (Rossiya Segodnya agency), “В Москве завершилась программа SputnikPro AI in Media”, June 2026, https://journal.rhm.agency/news/v-moskve-zavershilas-programma-sputnikpro-ai-in-media-dlya-zhurnalistov-iz-18-stran/ [10] RHM Journal (Rossiya Segodnya agency), “В Москве завершилась программа SputnikPro AI in Media”, June 2026, https://journal.rhm.agency/news/v-moskve-zavershilas-programma-sputnikpro-ai-in-media-dlya-zhurnalistov-iz-18-stran/ [11] Sputnik Africa, “SputnikPro AI Training Program Brings Journalists From Three Continents to Moscow,” June 23, 2026, https://en.sputniknews.africa/20260623/sputnikpro-ai-training-program-brings-journalists-from-three-continents-to-moscow-1086890403.html [12] Sputnik Globe, “SputnikPro AI Project Gathers Journalists From Three Continents in Moscow,” June 23, 2026, https://sputnikglobe.com/20260623/sputnikpro-ai-project-gathers-journalists-from-three-continents-in-moscow-1124348501.html ; and Россия Сегодня, “Проект SputnikPro AI in Moscow собрал журналистов”, June 23, 2026, https://xn--c1acbl2abdlkab1og.xn--p1ai/20260623/786628.html [13] Hespress (هسبريس) is a Moroccan online news site, founded in February 2007 by brothers Hassan and Amine El Guennouni. The name is said to derive from the mythical Land of the Hesperides—sometimes located in Morocco in ancient legend—combined with the English word "press." Initially, it was a participatory platform where citizens and bloggers shared information gathered in the field, rather than a traditional newsroom. The site gained notoriety in 2008 thanks to videos exposing cases of police corruption, followed by the highly publicized arrest of columnist Mohamed Erraji for a column critical of the Moroccan monarchy. Incorporated as a company in 2009, it then began recruiting professional journalists, with an editorial office based in Rabat (Ocean district). In January 2015, it became the third most visited website in Morocco, surpassing YouTube and ranking just behind Google and Facebook, with approximately 2 million daily visits and 250 million page views per month. Hespress was recently accused of publishing a letter attributed to the imprisoned Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whose lawyer claimed it was a forgery. [14] Россия Сегодня, “Project SputnikPro AI in Moscow, June 23, 2026, https://xn--c1acbl2abdlkab1og.xn--p1ai/20260623/786628.html ; and Sputnik Globe, “SputnikPro AI Project Gathers Journalists From Three Continents in Moscow,” June 23, 2026, https://sputnikglobe.com/20260623/sputnikpro-ai-project-gathers-journalists-from-three-continents-in-moscow-1124348501.html [15] Sputnik Globe, “SputnikPro AI Project Gathers Journalists From Three Continents in Moscow,” June 23, 2026, https://sputnikglobe.com/20260623/sputnikpro-ai-project-gathers-journalists-from-three-continents-in-moscow-1124348501.html [16] Video published by Rossotrudnichestvo / “Novoe pokolenie”, Facebook, June 23, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/reel/1832621211069582 [17] United24 Media, “Putin Doubles Down on Propaganda With Record Spending in 2026 Budget,” https://united24media.com/latest-news/putin-doubles-down-on-propaganda-with-record-spending-in-2026-budget-12119 ; and Debunk.org , “Kremlin Spent $1.9 Billion on Propaganda Last Year, the Budget Exceeded by a Quarter,” https://www.debunk.org/kremlin-spent-1-9-billion-usd-on-propaganda-last-year-the-budget-exceeded-by-a-quarter [18] Institute for the Study of War, “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 4, 2026,” https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-4-2026/ [19] Reuters, “Ukrainian drones strike across Russia, hitting refineries…”, July 29, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/industrial-facilities-russias-ryazan-fire-after-drone-attack-regional-governor-2026-07-29/ ; and The Guardian , “Ukraine war briefing: Strikes on three Russian oil refineries…”, August 2, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/02/ukraine-war-briefing-strikes-on-three-russian-oil-refineries-and-sanctioned-ship [20] Reuters, “Putin names head of new Russian drone forces in military reshuffle,” August 5, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-names-head-new-russian-drone-forces-military-reshuffle-2026-08-05/ ; and The Moscow Times , “Putin Announces Reshuffling of Top Military Leadership,” August 5, 2026, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/05/putin-announces-reshuffling-of-top-military-leadership-a93419 [21] Meduza , “Putin has reshuffled Russia's military command — here's what you need to know,” August 5, 2026, https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/08/05/putin-has-reshuffled-russia-s-military-command-here-s-what-you-need-to-know [22] Meduza , citing a Sunday Times investigation , September 29, 2025, https://meduza.io/news/2025/09/29/the-sunday-times-nazvala-imena-rossiyskih-ofitserov-chi-podrazdeleniya-obvinyayutsya-v-prestupleniyah-v-buche [23] Reuters, “Putin names head of new Russian drone forces in military reshuffle,” August 5, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-names-head-new-russian-drone-forces-military-reshuffle-2026-08-05/ [24] Euronews (FR), “Putin’s military ‘perestroika’”, August 5, 2026, https://fr.euronews.com/2026/08/05/la-perestroika-militaire-de-poutine-les-dessous-de-la-refonte-de-larmee-russe ; and The New Voice of Ukraine , “Putin reshuffles Russia’s military command as Kremlin tries to revive offensive”, August 6, 2026, https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/putin-reshuffles-russia-s-military-command-in-bid-to-revive-slowing-offensive-50630506.html [25] Wikipedia, “GRU (Russian Federation),” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU_(Russian_Federation) ; and “Foreign Intelligence Service (Russia)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Service_(Russia) [26] Gov.uk , “Profile: GRU cyber and hybrid threat operations”, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/profile-gru-cyber-and-hybrid-threat-operations/profile-gru-cyber-and-hybrid-threat-operations [27] Wikipedia, “GRU Unit 29155”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU_Unit_29155 ; and Council of the European Union, press release, 27 January 2025, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/01/27/cyber-attacks-three-individuals-added-to-eu-sanctions-list-for-malicious-cyber-activities-against-estonia/ [28] Rucriminal.info , “The assassination attempt on General Alekseev led to resignations in the FSB,” March 4, 2026, https://rucriminal.info/en/material/pokushenie-na-generala-alekseeva-privelo-k-otstavkam-v-fsb-rf [29] The Moscow Times , “Putin Fires Head of Russia's Cultural Diplomacy Agency,” April 27, 2026, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/04/27/putin-fires-head-of-russias-cultural-diplomacy-agency-a92614 We opted for a completely free website, without advertising. which depends solely on the support of our readers.
"Open field", a holiday workbook. A welcoming address
This Sunday, July 19, 2026, the french actor Jacques Bonnaffé's first "spreading of the word" launches our "Open Fields," which will captivate les humanités throughout August. At least, we hope so: a parade of articles—and why not a brass band? Now it's YOUR turn. Chronicles, analyses, stories, "off-the-beaten-path" pieces: to stay informed: This is a trailer , even if we're not putting on a show. In August, we will be majestic, respectable, that is to say, august . But without imperialism. It will be a participatory project: the more the merrier…, etc. It is not about being reasonable, but about continuing a path outside the paths (Henri Michaux). This is an invitation "We cannot invite the wind, but we must leave the window open." Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), " Freedom from the Known" This is an invitation - from the Latin verb invitare , "to invite, to convene, to entertain", linked to the idea of being pleasant to someone, especially by inviting them to a meal. Our meal will consist of words, images, and sounds, to your liking. This invitation is primarily reserved for our subscribers and donors, but since nobody is perfect, there will naturally be some exceptions. "Freedom is a word that has traveled the world and never returned." - Coluche (1944-1986) What is this about? The title says it all: Open Fields . From August 1st to 31st, les humanités course will be like a summer workbook. But it won't be so much about revising – although, why not? – but about inventing . Inviting everyone to come and share their holiday experiences: a landscape before their eyes or under their eyelids, a thought that rises from the cellar to the attic, a digression, a poem - with or without inclusive writing -, a rant or a thunderbolt that escapes the constraints of conventional norms, a story, a testimony, a dream of… In short, to keep a chronicle , for once – or more if there is a connection – at the guest table of a firefly-newspaper. Throughout the month of August, the humanities offer you hospitality . “Hospitality is not an isolated act; it is a way of life.” Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Each of these chronicles could begin with: "Hello les humanités, I am writing to you from..." (a landscape, a workplace, a mental space, etc.) There is no set format. We say "writing," but it can be in images (photography, painting, drawing, video…) or in sounds (recordings, sound clips, music…). We don't accept the excuse "but I don't know how to write." For those who might be afraid (of not succeeding), we'll offer good advice (on how to refine an idea, how to give it shape). Instructions for use An email address: contact@leshumanites.org Here, you can submit a completed article , or just a draft (idea, proposal, etc.) Any questions? Until then, slow down. Until then, until July 31st, the small, still volunteer-run les humanités editorial team will take a bit of a break. Lately, we've given a lot, in terms of articles and investigations. Frankly, considering our modest resources, we have no reason to be ashamed. The next two weeks won't be a complete vacation. There will be a few publications in the works, which are still being finalized. But we also need to take the time to get a few things back on track internally, not to mention a proposal to draft, budget, and submit by the end of this month in the hope of receiving some crumbs of public funding (for online press) later on. This comes after we've fought hard to obtain accreditation for political and general information. We will also give updates on our crowdfunding campaign on HelloAsso ( HERE ), which we have to continue and grow if we want to have a chance to continue. “Now it’s war, a game where you push from one side, hold the door from the other! / I’m suffocating from being surrounded by nothing but this! / Let me breathe! / Open all the windows! / Open more windows than all the windows in the world.” Fernando Pessoa, “Ultimatum” (1917) We had to fight over the meaning of words (vocabulary is political) to argue, for example, that a poem by Fernando Pessoa (which we published in May 2023, HERE ) is not just poetry to make a statement , but that it also falls under "political and general information" - moreover, no restrictive decree limits its scope, everything depends on the interpretation. "We don't talk enough about the stickleback, this small fish from our small European rivers, which has become famous for the complex gestural procedures of its reproduction." Jacques Bonnaffé, as an introduction to "Open field". Jacques Bonnaffé, a master of poetic exceptions—who never considered himself a cultural exception —had joined the festival des humanités we had so amicably organized in September 2023 in Cenne-Monestiés, in the Aude region ( HERE ). It's a real shame we weren't able to repeat the experience. But since then, we've occasionally exchanged a few pleasantries with Jacques Bonnaffé. As a curtain-raiser, a first peddling by Jacques Bonnaffé A few days ago, a phone conversation led us to the horizon of these open field . And then, without overthinking it, the idea came to us that a Jacques Bonnaffé column could take the form of a short audio clip, transmitted by telephone. "I'll think about it," he said. And fifteen minutes later, the following recording arrived. Bonnaffé is a quick thinker, when it makes sense. Yesterday, he wrote to us: “I can probably shorten it and offer a bit of additional writing. At least say that this isn’t just another joke, a borrowed role, but the feeling of a vague duty, like going where one doesn’t go, being transient and alive.” We trust him to fail better , as Beckett would say. But for today, this first peddling will serve as the curtain-raiser for our (your) open fields . In the mid-1990s, Jacques Bonnaffé created, with a fanfare to boot, a wonderful show, Cafougnette et l'défilé , based on texts by Jules Mousseron, miner and poet from the North ( HERE ). That's where we are. We're opening the balcony, waiting for the parade of your upcoming columns. If there's a fanfare too, we won't say no. Jean-Marc Adolphe and the editorial committee of the humanities . We opted for a completely free website, without advertising. which depends solely on the support of our readers.
Landes de Gascogne: the hidden side of the fires
Wildfires advance near the Proge region on Thursday, July 23, 2026. Photo by Caroline Blumberg/AP The testimonies of the evacuees are undeniably moving—some of whom have lost everything. The images of Croatian Canadair water bombers and an Airbus A400 are spectacular. The accounts of firefighters battling exhaustion as much against the flames as against the fire are heartbreaking. This "background noise" obscures the essential point: the structural causes of a blaze that is anything but random—a factory forest planted as a monoculture for the timber industry, urbanization that has encroached upon its edges, and adaptation policies that are constantly being postponed. In the Gironde and Landes regions, what is burning today is not just a "forest" but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer sustainable. And who, by the way, is going to foot the bill? The humanities are not the same. Chronicles, analyses, stories, "off-the-beaten-path" pieces: to stay informed: Wildfires in the Landes de Gascogne: since July 22, 2026, more than 40,000 hectares have gone up in smoke between Saumos, Biscarrosse, Lège-Cap-Ferret, and Parentis-en-Born, and approximately 220,000 people have been evacuated—a figure that already surpasses the traumatic events of summer 2022 and has not been seen in the region since 1949. On television, there is talk of a historic drought, violent winds, and possible arson. Croatian Canadair water bombers, Portuguese Air Tractors, Czech and Slovakian helicopters brought in to lend a hand, and 1,500 soldiers deployed as reinforcements are shown. A photo taken from the French Civil Security rescue coordination helicopter shows the Airbus A400M performing Its very first drop over the forest fire near Lacanau, France, on Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo by Abdul Saboor What is shown much less is that what is burning is not a forest in the way we spontaneously understand the term. It is a production tool, planted by human hands, shaped for a century and a half according to a single logic—the profitability of maritime pine—and whose very structure explains a good part of its vulnerability. Asking the question "why is it burning so much?" therefore forces us to ask a more disturbing question: who decided to plant this particular forest, who owns it, who profits from it, and who, conversely, is paying the price today? Landes de Gascogne fires: a manufactured forest, not a donated one The Landes de Gascogne massif is anything but a natural relic. It is the largest planted forest in Western Europe, nearly one million hectares, composed of more than 80% maritime pine in stands of the same age, managed as "regular monospecific high forests". Its history begins in the 18th century with the forestry engineer Nicolas Brémontier, tasked with stabilizing the coastal dunes to protect the hinterland, and then truly takes shape with the 1857 law "relating to the drainage and cultivation of the Landes de Gascogne," championed by the civil engineer Jules Chambrelent during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The objective was neither ecological nor aesthetic: it was to drain a vast, unhealthy marshland, a breeding ground for malaria, and transform it into an economic asset through the systematic planting of maritime pine, the only species capable of thriving in these poor, sandy soils. (1) This historical note is not insignificant: it reminds us that the choice of "all pine" was never an ecological accident, but a political and economic decision, made at a time when the concept of climate resilience simply did not exist. The problem, a century and a half later, is that this model has never been fundamentally challenged—on the contrary, it has been intensified. Who owns the burning forest? In France, 75% of the forest area belongs to private owners, a myriad of small and large foresters, often grouped into cooperatives (Alliance Forêts Bois being one of the largest in the greater Southwest), the remainder falling under the forestry regime managed by the National Forestry Office (ONF) for the State and local authorities. In the Landes de Gascogne region, forestry is a regional economic pillar structured around a complete timber industry: nurseries, foresters, sawmills, paper mills, and the panel industry. Le Monde has gathered a figure that speaks volumes about the economic rationale at play: a hectare of maritime pine, several decades old, is worth approximately €10,000, taking into account the land, the investments in planting and maintenance, and the timber it will eventually produce. This valuation implicitly explains why the industry has long resisted any diversification strategy that would reduce the density—and therefore the productivity and fire risk—of the plantations: each hectare planted with a mixture of species is, in the short term, a hectare that yields less profit. This is where the question of ownership becomes crucial for understanding the system's inertia: unlike a state-owned forest where the government can, in theory, impose a proactive diversification policy, a private forest fragmented among thousands of owners—the largest of whom manage their plots as long-term investments rather than as ecosystems—is ill-suited to a rapid reorientation of forestry practices. The National Center for Forest Ownership (CNPF) itself acknowledges this in a post-2022 technical report: diversification is hampered by "the economic constraints of the sector." On Saturday, July 25, 2026, a firefighter stands on a truck on a road near Lacanau. Photo Emma Da Silva / AP. 2022, the lesson we didn't learn The summer of 2022 had already revealed everything. The fires in La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras destroyed nearly 30,000 hectares in the Landes forest and led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. In the aftermath, arborist Thomas Brail, founder of the National Tree Monitoring Group, publicly criticized the planting model: "The Landes forest is essentially composed of maritime pines planted by humans, which are extremely flammable resinous trees." The National Forestry Office then pointed out that nearly half of France's forests consist of single-species stands, representing 7.5 million hectares. In response to this disaster, Emmanuel Macron announced in October 2022 a plan to "plant one billion trees" over ten years, mobilizing 8 to 10 billion euros as part of the France Relance recovery plan. Eighteen months later, the official figures showed 50 million trees planted—one-twentieth of the target—and the Canopée association denounced a drift: approximately 10,000 hectares of "healthy and thriving forests" had reportedly been clear-cut for replanting, including 6,500 hectares of clear-cuts in Natura 2000 areas, according to its campaign manager, Bruno Doucet. By 2026, this promise had virtually disappeared from the government's agenda. In other words: the public authorities clearly identified the problem as early as 2022, promised to respond with billions of dollars, and the concrete result, four years later, is that the Landes forest is burning even more than in 2022 — with, according to the director of the Gironde SDIS Marc Vermeulen, a state of drought "much more significant than in 2022, or even than in 1976" , and rates of spread reaching 800 to 1,000 hectares burned per hour in peri-urban areas. Is the pine tree guilty, or is it being used as a convenient scapegoat? However, the scientific debate is more nuanced than the dominant media narrative of the "pine tree exploding like a match." On the one hand, a study published in 2025 in Nature Communications shows that, in nine out of ten temperate countries studied, forest plantations have a 57% to 155% higher probability of burning than managed natural forests. Researchers from INRAE themselves, Christophe Plomion and Annabel Porté, explain that the horizontal and vertical continuity of the canopy—the contiguous tree crowns, the absence of discontinuities—allows fire to "jump from one plot to another" and renders conventional firebreaks ineffective, while the pine needle litter decomposes more slowly than dead leaves and accumulates as fuel. On the other hand, an interview published by Sud Ouest on July 25th presents a serious contradiction that would be dishonest to ignore: an industry professional asserts that "the problem isn't the maritime pine itself, but the fact that the forest is extremely dry" —mature pine being, on the contrary, one of the few species capable of withstanding this type of drought on poor, sandy soil, and stands planted in 2022 have generally fared better than young, dense plantations. According to this source, replacing the pine with another species would make no difference in the face of drought; the real solution would be to reduce planting density—and therefore the overall water consumption of the forest—which ultimately means accepting a decrease in productivity and abandoning a "maximum optimization" approach inherited from a bygone "golden age." But whether the root cause is monoculture itself or the dense planting that accompanies it, the proposed solution in both cases implies the same thing—reducing the immediate profitability of logging in the name of long-term resilience. This is precisely the type of trade-off that short-term market forces structurally struggle to make, whether it involves an isolated private landowner or an industrial sector organized around production volume. The work of Inrae on the future of the massif recommends edges and groves of deciduous trees, the preservation of wetlands and riparian forests (2) , the diversification of stand ages, and even the development of silvopastoralism — not to make the forest incombustible, which is impossible, but to slow the spread and give firefighters something to work with. A house burned down near Lacanau, in the Lège-Cap-Ferret region, Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo Emma Da Silva / AP Who pays the price for the risk? This is the dimension least addressed in the press in recent days: who financially bears the consequences of a forestry model whose economic benefits remain largely private? The Central Reinsurance Fund (CCR) had estimated the cost of the Gironde fires alone in the summer of 2022 at approximately €550 million under the "natural disasters" scheme. More broadly, the average annual cost of climate-related claims in France rose from €2.7 billion between 2000 and 2008 to €6 billion between 2020 and 2023, a "change of scale" according to Florence Lustman, president of France Assureurs. Of the 40,000 hectares already burned this week, a significant portion of the cost—destroyed homes (more than 240 according to the latest figures), infrastructure, and the mobilization of over 2,500 firefighters and 2,700 gendarmes, police officers, and soldiers—will be covered through national solidarity and the insurance premiums of all French citizens. However, the very structure of the forest, which exacerbated the disaster, stems from management choices made by an industry that continues to profit from this production! A law that's been languishing in the Assembly And yet, since July 7, 2026—two weeks before the flames reignited in Saumos—there has been a cross-party bill introduced by Marie Pochon, a Green Party member of parliament from the Drôme region, and co-signed by 57 members of parliament from eight parliamentary groups ranging from La France Insoumise to Horizons, with the exception of the National Rally, the resident arsonist who only comes after the fact to cry wolf (3) . The text notably proposes: the creation of a national fund for adapting forest areas to fire risk; a framework for clear-cuts; strengthened support for more resilient and diversified forestry; the strengthening of the human resources of the National Forestry Office, with the recruitment of 1,300 additional people for the monitoring of wooded areas; the ban on stump removal after fire, a practice deemed harmful to the natural regeneration of soils. The text is based on an alarming observation: tree mortality has reportedly increased by 125% in mainland France over the past ten years. Its signatories are calling for its swift inclusion on the National Assembly's agenda. As of July 26, while the Landes forest is burning for the second time in four years on this scale, the text has still not been examined. A tree trunk burns in Lanton, in the Lège-Cap-Ferret region, on Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo by Emma Da Silva / AP A geopolitics of fire: European solidarity put to the test To combat the fires in Gironde and Landes, France called upon resources from across Europe: two Croatian Canadair water bombers, two Portuguese Air Tractors, and two Czech and Slovakian Black Hawk helicopters, within the framework of European civil protection solidarity mechanisms. The French government also mobilized 1,500 military personnel, a Reaper surveillance drone, and an A330 MRTT tanker aircraft—a level of mobilization whose scale is more reminiscent of an overseas operation than a simple forest firefighting effort. This European pooling of resources raises a fundamental question: as climate change multiplies megafires—52 French departments were already classified as high risk by April 2026, compared to a handful historically concentrated around the Mediterranean—will this system of solidarity through the loan of resources (the European Civil Protection Mechanism, rescEU) be able to continue functioning when several countries are simultaneously affected at the same time during the summer? Or when a certain political party (the National Rally), once in power, rushes, in the name of "national sovereignty," to implement a kind of more or less disguised Frexit? Dominique Vernis, Isabelle Favre NOTES (1) According to Rémy Petit, a researcher at INRAE, "this pine forest was planted in the 18th and 19th centuries in a vast wetland area which had to be drained for this purpose, initially with spades, and now with excavators. This immense area of wet heathland can be seen on this beautiful map created a year after the French Revolution. It is high time to start draining the land, something the Landes de Gascogne Regional Natural Park is trying to encourage, without much support so far." (2) A Bon Pote investigation published on July 13, 2026, a few days after the bill was tabled, sheds light on the RN's fundamental position on this type of measure. The RN group has in the past: Voted against a forest adaptation plan aligned with the national low-carbon strategy, a measure nevertheless requested by the High Council for the Climate, Amendments concerning firebreaks of deciduous trees between plots of coniferous trees and the preservation of forest roads necessary for firefighting were rejected. A law was passed to exempt forestry work from penalties related to the destruction of natural habitats, in the name of "fire prevention". Rejected from increases in funding for fire and rescue services (SDIS) via the tourist tax or insurance, Adopted a "utilitarian" approach to the forest, favouring tax incentives and technical solutions (atmospheric water generators, aerial means) rather than coercive measures — precisely the type of mechanisms (regulation of clear-cuts, prohibition of stump removal) that the Pochon-Davi proposal supports. On July 23, 2026, a National Rally MP, Emmanuel Taché, tabled his own bill, strictly oriented towards criminal response — automatic and heavier sentences for arson — rather than on the structural adaptation of forests to climate change. We opted for a completely free website, without advertising. which depends solely on the support of our readers.
Carry the house. Ukraine: speak again, write again, sing again / 02
Illustration by Danylo Movchan for the poems of Victoria Amelina published by the humanities on April 9, 2025 ( HERE ). From Kramatorsk to the temporarily occupied territories, from the poetry of Victoria Amelina to the music of Anton Kistrin and SVIT, Ukrainian culture grapples with the question of lost or displaced home. Poems, songs, and stories become instruments of resistance, narrative therapy, and the transmission of an emotional legacy of war, where "home" is recomposed within the narratives. In "The Story of Return," one of her last poems, written a year before her death—she was killed in a Russian airstrike in Kramatorsk in June 2023—Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina evokes four children forced to flee the war. As they leave their homes, each carries a fragment of the world they left behind. Mira takes a pearl from a box. Tim picks up a pebble from the street. Yarka keeps an apricot pit. Vira, however, "took nothing with her / saying she'll be back soon." The gesture is minimal, almost insignificant. But it speaks volumes about the violence of the wrenching separation. And above all, it says something else: home is not just a place. “When you run away from home ,” says Vira, “the house becomes smaller, [it] fits in your pocket,” but “the house will grow little by little / remember, never / will you be without your home.” Through these lines, Victoria Amelina expresses a crucial insight: exile does not destroy home, it transforms it. It displaces it, internalizes it, fragments it—but does not abolish it. The grave of Viktoria Amelina in the Lychakiv cemetery. Photo photo-lviv. This idea permeates a significant portion of Ukrainian cultural production today, particularly among artists from the occupied territories. It can also be found, in a different form, in the work of the musician Anton Kistrin. Originally from Dniprorudne, in the Zaporizhzhia region—now under Russian occupation—Kistrin has created a body of work deeply marked by loss, but also by the projection of a possible return. His songs blend personal memories, fragments of landscapes, and intimate narratives, in a musical language that oscillates between melancholy and resistance. In an interview with the weekly newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnia , he discusses the need to rethink Ukrainian culture in the temporarily occupied territories as "a long-term gamble." It's not just about cultural survival, but about maintaining symbolic continuity and preserving narratives capable of transcending occupation. His latest solo project, "MANTU," falls within this perspective. In it, he performs two "messages to Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories" in a video broadcast on the YouTube channel Тотальний: Наживо ("Total: Live"). This platform brings together Ukrainian artists around filmed musical performances, explicitly conceived as acts of support for populations under occupation and the resistance movement. An active force against erasure Beyond their artistic dimension, these performances are part of a cultural strategy. They affirm that Ukrainian culture is not merely a heritage, but an active force, a form of presence where territorial control seeks to impose erasure. Each song, each text thus becomes a vehicle for continuity: a way of saying that Ukrainian symbolic space does not coincide with the front lines. This interplay between memory, loss, and persistence is also found in the contemporary music scene, notably in the work of the artist SVIT. In her song dedicated to the feeling of home, she states: "For me, this song is about the fact that true home lives within us. We can neither take it, nor lose it, nor abandon it permanently. It remains in the memories, the people, and the sensations that shape us." This statement extends, almost word for word, the intuition formulated by Victoria Amelina. But it offers a more explicitly introspective version. Where the poem works through images — the pearl, the pebble, the kernel — SVIT directly names the constituent elements of this “inner hearth”: memory, relationships, emotions. Emerging from the new Ukrainian scene, SVIT belongs to a generation of artists for whom war is both a trauma and a framework for creation. Her music, marked by melodic sensitivity and intimate writing, explores the links between territory, identity, and personal experience. She thus contributes to a reconfiguration of Ukrainian artistic discourse, where the personal becomes a political space. The role of narratives in war situations This shift in perspective—from territory to interiority—is not merely aesthetic. It points to a broader reflection on the role of narratives in situations of war. This is precisely what the writer Kateryna Yehorushkina and the psychoanalyst, translator, and literary critic Yurko Prokhasko explore in a conversation published by the Ukrainian weekly The Ukrainian Week (Tyzhden) . Writer Kateryna Yehorushkina. Photo Iryna Dmytrenko-Terefera Kateryna Yehorushkina, known for her children's books and her work in art therapy, presents a non-fiction work for adults: "And Then Our House Became a Ship: Stories About the Emotional Legacy of War." The title itself effects a metaphorical transformation: the house, fixed and anchored, becomes a ship—mobile, exposed, forced to navigate uncertainty. The book brings together hybrid narratives—essays, journal fragments, “artistic reports”—that attempt to capture what war leaves behind in subjectivities. Not just visible destruction, but an emotional legacy, often diffuse, that is transmitted and reconfigured. Translator and literary critic Yurko Prokhasko. Photo Sensormedia In their exchange, Kateryna Yehorushkina and Yurko Prokhasko examine the function of narration in this context. They evoke the "durability of tenderness," a notion that may seem paradoxical in times of war, but which precisely designates this capacity of narratives to preserve forms of connection, care, and attention—despite the violence. Metaphor plays a central role here. It allows us to say what would otherwise remain unspeakable. Transforming a house into a ship, reducing a home to a pocket-sized object, fitting a country into a song: these are all symbolic gestures that are not about escapism, but about actively working with reality. This work, in a certain way, aligns with the approaches of narrative therapy and psychoanalysis. It's not simply about recounting to bear witness, but about recounting to reconfigure experience, to give it a form that allows one to continue living with it. Within this framework, stories are not mere embellishments. They become structures of meaning, tools for survival, sometimes even forms of resistance. They contribute to building a shared reality, to maintaining continuity where everything seems fragmented. From Victoria Amelina's poem to the songs of Anton Kistrin and SVIT, and on to the reflections of Yehorushkina and Prokhasko, a single thread emerges: a shift in focus, from physical space to narrative space. The destroyed, occupied, or inaccessible house does not disappear; it is recomposed in words, images, and sounds. As long as these stories circulate, transform, and are transmitted, the house—even reduced to a pearl, a pebble, or a memory—continues to exist. Jean-Marc Adolphe
When Bolloré's Russian darling crucified a 3-year-old child
On November 11, 2018, Ksenia Fedorova interviewed Vladimir Putin in Paris for Russia Today, during his visit for the commemorations of the centenary of the Armistice of the First World War. Screenshots (the video of the interview has been removed from YouTube). With Ksenia Fedorova, Vincent Bolloré isn't just nurturing a "propagandist," but an unscrupulous forger, likely "recruited" by the FSB more than twenty years ago, capable of inventing or covering up the worst schemes. While Russian propaganda has just fabricated the story of a little girl who supposedly hid in a cellar to escape Ukrainian drones, let's revisit a famous fake news story from 2014: the "crucified child of Sloviansk" affair, staged on Russian television. A monument to disinformation. At the time, Ksenia Fedorova had a front-row seat... The humanities are not the same. Chronicles, analyses, stories, "off-the-beaten-path" pieces: to stay informed: The story is "very, very moving." It's about a little girl, 10-year-old Sofia, whom the Russian army reportedly rescued bravely in Ukraine. Her mother and grandparents were allegedly killed by a Ukrainian drone. Sofia had hidden alone in a cellar on the outskirts of Konstantinivka, a town in the Donetsk region, fiercely contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Fortunately, according to the official account, she was spotted by valiant Russian soldiers who brought her food for nearly a month before evacuating her on July 8th. Phew: she is now supposedly "safe." Russia's main television channel and the TASS news agency widely broadcast this story. In a video lasting about fifteen minutes, the little girl recounts: “The Ukrainian soldiers came, they took my grandfather into the kitchen. And they all promised they would get us out of there. They didn't. They lied. They know how to lie, these 'Uk…'”—an untranslatable expression that compares Ukrainians to animals. Then comes the strangest passage, where the text seems to veer into a mixture of linguistic elements and political confusion: “I feel so much better inside, so happy to be leaving this damned Ukraine, where Trump started this war. (…) I can already connect to the internet. They installed Telegram and Max for me yesterday.” The "rescue" of "Sofia" by Russian soldiers in Konstantinivka, and her "testimony": three sequences from a video broadcast by Russian media. At this point, the Russian viewer is supposed to be deeply moved: a traumatized child, cruel Ukrainians, magnanimous Russians, and a distant enemy—a “Trump” who appeared out of nowhere—further blurring the lines of perception of the war. Except that… the only evidence of Ukrainian drone strikes in the vicinity of Konstantinivka involves Russian columns, military targets, not cellars sheltering a family. As for Konstantinivka itself, still under Ukrainian control, several on-the-ground reports— from Les Échos , RFE/RL, and TV5 Monde—describe it as a city where Ukrainian civilians and soldiers live under the constant threat of Russian drones and bombings. In these accounts, it is the residents of Konstantinivka who take refuge in basements to escape strikes from the east, not a little Russian-speaking girl hidden from “Ukrainian” drones. The fabricated “testimony” Even stranger: a month ago, Sofia wasn't in a besieged cellar, but far from the front lines, in a social rehabilitation center for minors located in Shakhtersk, a city controlled since 2014 by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Journalists from the Russian investigative media outlet Агентство identified her in photos published on the center's website and social media: on June 5, during a "Pushkin Day," and then on June 29, July 2, and July 3. She is seen participating in activities, attending shows, and posing with other children—images that radically contradict the scenario of a child alone in a cellar, starving, under Ukrainian drones. Sofia's "heartbreaking" story is, in reality, a fabricated narrative, scripted and calibrated for propaganda. And this is where the unease becomes dizzying: what indoctrination—even threats—was required to get this ten-year-old girl (who may not even be named Sofia) to recite her "testimony" on camera? What text was written for her? How many times was she made to repeat these phrases about the "UK…" who "know how to lie," about "Trump" who supposedly started the war, about her "joy" at leaving that "damned Ukraine"? Behind the heroic fable lies a stark reality: a child manipulated, a "reintegration" center transformed into a propaganda studio, and a government that uses the voices of the most vulnerable to distort the very meaning of the war. Before a future hearing at the European Court of Human Rights Why is this story surfacing now? Perhaps to counter what is about to happen in Strasbourg. On September 22, the European Court of Human Rights will hold a hearing in the case of "Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union on behalf of ten Ukrainian children v. Russia" (application no. 6719/23), which concerns Ukrainian children placed in protective facilities in Crimea at the time of Russia's occupation of the peninsula in 2014. While the case formally concerns only ten children, the Court's press release goes much further: "Following February 27, 2014, when Russia claimed jurisdiction over Crimea, more than 4,000 children deprived of parental care were automatically declared Russian nationals. Despite requests from the Ukrainian government, Russia allegedly refused to transfer the children to the Ukrainian authorities and initiated adoption proceedings." In other words, behind these ten cases lies a mass policy: forced change of nationality, refusal to return children to Ukrainian authorities, and arranged adoptions benefiting Russian families. The joint observations submitted to the Court by the International Partnership for Human Rights and Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab situate these children precisely within a broader system of deportation, "passporting," and illegal adoptions—a centralized mechanism targeting thousands of Ukrainian minors. This only confirms what we have documented since the beginning of the year: well before the 2022 invasion, Crimea served as a "genocidal laboratory" for Russian policy towards Ukrainian children ( HERE ). Network of homes and orphanages, transfers of children to Russia, administrative and identity Russification, indoctrination in "patriotic" camps: everything that the International Criminal Court would later classify as the crime of forced deportation of children had already been experimented with, tested, and honed on the annexed peninsula. The Russian factory of "martyred children" In any case, the "Sofia affair" didn't come out of nowhere. Russian propaganda invents, more or less regularly, fictional stories in which children are tortured by "evil Ukrainian Nazis." This has become a recurring motif in war narratives: Ukraine portrayed as a child torturer, Russia as a compassionate protector. In Moscow, portraits of Ukrainian children have proliferated, displayed in the streets and presented as victims of atrocities, sometimes without any indication as to whether the photos depict real people, verified cases, or figures fabricated for the sake of the narrative. Accusations of "organ trafficking" targeting Ukraine, leveled by Russian representatives and amplified by the state media, have even been heard within the walls of the United Nations: sensational, unsubstantiated claims that portray the Ukrainian child as a sacrifice on the altar of Western barbarity. In March 2022, just after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, this photograph was part of a propaganda exhibition. organized in Saint Petersburg by the "Army of Russia" advertising and information agency of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation from Russia to collect donations for the children of Donbas. A series entitled "Посмотри в глаза Донбассу" (“Look into the eyes of Donbass”), directed by Irina Lashkevich and Daniil Bogdan, has resulted in traveling exhibitions portraits of children in several countries, presented as child victims of war who have "lost their childhood" because of the conflict. In 2025, the photo exhibition "Дети, которых больше нет" ("Children who are no longer here") dedicated to children killed in the Donbas, the exhibition brought together some thirty photoportraits of children whose deaths are attributed to “Ukrainian bombings”. More recently, in early 2026, at the “Orlyonok” children’s center, an exhibition entitled “Дети России. Дети Донбасса” featured, among other things, 27 portraits of young inhabitants of the “republics” of Donbass, painted from photos taken by military correspondents supposedly showing children living in firing zones between 2014 and 2017. This mechanism has already been documented in several investigations: on how Russia manipulates Spain and other countries to accuse Ukraine of organ trafficking, obviously without evidence ( HERE ), by playing on the most primal fears surrounding the body of the child; on how propaganda masks a very real mass crime behind these narratives – the deportation and forced Russification of thousands of Ukrainian minors. In these narratives, the perpetrator and the victim switch sides: those responsible for the abductions and transfers become “whistleblowers” about imaginary horrors. This narrative has been promoted for years by figures like Anna Kuznetsova, former presidential commissioner for children's rights, who helped spread the idea that Ukrainian children are being "saved" from trafficking, violence, and unfit families—even as they are being torn from their country, their language, and their loved ones. Her statements have already been reported, demonstrating how this discourse of "protection" serves as a smokescreen for a policy of abduction and mass dispersal ( HERE ). Within this context, "Sofia" fits perfectly: a little girl carefully scripted to tell the story that Ukrainians lie, kill, and torture, while Russians feed, save, and adopt. She is not an exception, but rather another episode in a series where childhood is systematically invoked to whitewash the regime's crimes and smear the Ukrainian resistance. "The Crucified Child of Sloviansk": a propaganda monument We must return to a landmark case of this kind: the infamous "Sloviansk crucified child case". In July 2014, a woman presented as a refugee, Galina Pychniak, told Russian television that Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a three-year-old boy in the central square of Sloviansk, in front of his mother, and then left him to die for an hour. The interview aired on July 12 on the evening news of the state-run Channel One (Pervyi Kanal) , and was subsequently rebroadcast repeatedly by Russia Today . Very quickly, journalists present in Sloviansk—from international news agencies and Ukrainian media outlets—found no trace of the described scene: no witnesses, no body, and no location matching the account. The "crucified child" then became the quintessential example of televised fake news , designed to shock and demonize the Ukrainian army. Big smile... On July 16, 2014, Alexey Volin, then Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Media of the Russian Federation (he was appointed in 2021 as Director General of the Russian Satellite Communications Company) stated during a Dozhd TV program that the investigation into "the crucified child of Sloviansk" is "compliant with all standards, rules and criteria of journalistic ethics". While the manipulation was proven—lack of evidence, contradictions, local denials—it was never officially revealed how the scheme was orchestrated or who decided to broadcast it. Pervyi Kanal initially defended its report before becoming more discreet; no one was named as responsible, and no independent investigation established the precise chain of command behind this horrific tale. In the front row: Xenia Fedorova At the forefront of the story, according to a confidential source, is a name that has been making headlines in France for some time: that of Xenia Fedorova. A brief overview is in order. Fedorova is now known as the former head of RT France, who has become an omnipresent commentator in the media outlets of the Bolloré group, where she relentlessly disseminates the Kremlin's narratives on Ukraine, NATO, and deported children. She is described in several profiles as a very useful protégé: she provides the voice of Moscow, and the networks offer her airtime. Her CV, however, is incomplete to say the least. She awarded herself a journalism degree from the prestigious journalism school of Moscow State University, where she apparently never set foot – as Maxime Audinet, author of *Un média d'influence d'État. Enquête sur la chaîne russe RT* (INA Éditions, 2024), points out, reconstructing her career and noting the gaps in her official biography. More likely, Fedorova attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), nicknamed the "Russian Harvard," which is under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has historically served as a training ground for the KGB. The "tradition" continued with the FSB, as revealed by an investigation by the independent media outlet Proekt , reported by The Moscow Times : MGIMO students recounted being summoned to specific offices within the university, where unidentified representatives offered them careers in intelligence, including missions to monitor colleagues or diplomatic personnel during embassy internships. Fedorova was allegedly "recruited" by the FSB in this context in the early 2000s. Propaganda platforms at the top of RT In 2004, under her birth name (Ksenya Borchik), she appeared in a small role as a journalist in Evgeny Lavrentiev's action film, Countdown (Личный номер). Despite a considerable budget for the time, the film was a complete disaster: loosely based on the Moscow theater hostage crisis, it added so many fictional elements that it became an indigestible mess. The plot had only one objective: to present a positive image of the FSB, which financed the bulk of the production and sent its former deputy director, Vladimir Anisimov, to the set as a "consultant"—Anisimov who would later be implicated in smuggling and fraud cases linked to mafia oligarchs. Shortly after the release of this propaganda film, Fedorova's career accelerated. Hired by the Russia Today channel, she was propelled, at the age of 26, to the position of head of the international news department and then executive producer. In 2009, she became director of RT's media project development and advancement office, and subsequently head of news for Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Baltic states. In 2014, she was appointed head of RT France, at a time when the channel was preparing its expansion into French-language broadcasting. In other words, at the moment when Russia annexes Crimea, encourages – not to say trains and finances, with the support of oligarchs like Konstantin Malofeev – the separatists of Donbass, Fedorova is at the heart of the RT apparatus which manufactures and disseminates news narratives, including on Ukraine. 2014: Annexation, Donbass, crucified child It is precisely in this context that the infamous case of the "crucified child of Sloviansk" emerged on Russian television and in the press. Galina Pychniak's interview was first broadcast on July 12 on Pervyi Kanal (Kanal Channel) , then replayed endlessly the very next day by Russia Today, which fueled the controversy. Among others, the Illuminati's Alexander Dugin added fuel to the fire: for him, this barbaric crucifixion was the ultimate proof that there was "a genocide of the civilian population" taking place in the Donbas. The facts, however, do not follow. But the mechanism is there: a story of a martyred child, a pseudo-Christian torture scene, a vocabulary of "genocide", ideologues like Dugin to give it a metaphysical depth, and a media machine to project it into every home. Margarita Simonyan with Vladimir Putin at the offices of Russia Today. At the time of his assassination in Moscow in February 2015, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was working on a report about the Kremlin's involvement in Ukraine. In his notes and in the fragments that were made public, the case of the crucified child is cited as a prime example of a deliberate war propaganda policy: a fabricated story designed to terrorize the public, incite hatred, and justify aggression. But in concrete terms, who could have conceived such a sordid fabrication? There's no need to look far. In 2014, the chief propagandist for Russia Today, the one pulling the strings of the narrative, was Margarita Simonyan. From the very beginning of the year, she openly called for the annexation of Donbas and made statements about Ukraine that would earn her a medal from Putin for her "objectivity" in covering the events in Crimea. We see her again in December 2023, on Vladimir Solovyov's show on Russia's Channel One, referring to Ukrainians in the western regions as "недобитки" – "those who haven't been finished off" – and asserting that their descendants "will have to be finished off this time," including "their children and grandchildren." A call for mass murder, pure and simple. When you reach such a level of ignominy, any means are justified. In 2014, if Simonian had been given the opportunity to actually crucify a three-year-old child in a Slaviansk square and then blame it on those damned "Ukrainian Nazis," there's no reason to think she would have hesitated. Galina Pychniak's fabricated interview ultimately fizzled out, debunked by journalists and forgotten by official sources, but it was widely circulated and shared enough to send shivers of fear through Russian homes and become ingrained in the collective imagination as "proof" of Ukrainian barbarity. Of course, Margarita Simonyan wasn't alone in this endeavor. At the time, Xenia Fedorova, the news director, was one of her closest collaborators, at the heart of the editorial decision-making chain. She was in charge of news coverage for Russia, the CIS, and the Baltic states, and later prepared the launch of RT France. Her trajectory since then speaks for itself: Syria, Ukraine, displaced children, deportations, "organ trafficking"—a whole catalog of stories in which she systematically acts as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin's version. Given her position in 2014 and her methods, everything suggests that Xenia Fedorova was at the heart of fabricating this story of a crucified child, as alleged in the testimony we gathered. This testimony remains difficult to verify—we cannot publish its sources without endangering people—but it fits into a chilling pattern: at the forefront of the RT apparatus, Fedorova not only relayed the fake news , she controlled its dissemination, amplified it, and transformed it into a propaganda weapon. At this level, it constitutes, at the very least, active complicity in one of the most abject disinformation campaigns of the war. That the Catholic Vincent Bolloré has, according to information from Le Canard enchaîné , made her his mistress is his own business. "The flesh is weak," the septuagenarian will no doubt explain to his confessor. But that the far-right media mogul grants this scheming Putin supporter such power over the newspapers, television stations, and radio stations he controls is another matter entirely. What does this confessor think of the crucifixions of children—real or fabricated—that fuel war propaganda? What does he think of the fact that the Bolloré empire provides a platform in France for the woman who, just yesterday, crucified a three-year-old child on screen to justify an imaginary "genocide" in the Donbas? Jean-Marc Adolphe We opted for a completely free website, without advertising. which depends solely on the support of our readers.
Ukraine, War, and Justice: An In-Depth Interview with Oleksandra Matviichuk
Photo Yulia Weber pour Yellow Blue More than four years after the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine continues to fight for its survival and for justice. Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of the Center for Civil Liberties and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, shares her perspective and experience from Kyiv: the weariness of constantly being labeled “resilient,” the gray areas of life in occupied territory, and the pitfalls of peace plans that lack justice... With compassion and wisdom, she also speaks to a society traumatized daily by the war and Russian crimes about the need to care for one another in order to endure. les humanités, it's different Ukraine: Keep Speaking, Keep Writing, Keep Singing / 01 Does Oleksandra Matviichuk even need an introduction? This 42-year-old lawyer, who won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for the Center for Civil Liberties she heads in Kyiv, embodies the very heart of contemporary Ukraine: that of a nation that refuses the yoke of submission and oppression. In 2007, at age 24, fresh out of law school at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Oleksandra Matviichuk could have chosen to practice business law—undoubtedly far more lucrative than the path she ultimately chose, one that is priceless: human rights. She joined a fledgling NGO, the Center for Civil Liberties (CLC), founded in Kyiv that same year, 2007. Ukraine was barely emerging from the “Orange Revolution” and was sinking into a new political crisis. President Viktor Yushchenko was attempting to bring the country closer to the European Union, while Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-regional parliamentary majority sought to consolidate a regime marked by corruption and ties to Moscow. Against a backdrop of the dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada, early parliamentary elections, and factional rivalries, civil society realized just how fragile and reversible the democratic promises of 2004 remained. It is against this unstable backdrop that the Center for Civil Liberties was established as an NGO dedicated to defending human rights and civil liberties, with the goal of holding institutions accountable, protecting citizens, and embedding democracy in everyday practice, far beyond mere rhetoric. Starting in 2013–2014, the Center for Civil Liberties took on a new dimension by becoming deeply involved in the Revolution of Dignity (Maidan), defending citizens and pro-European protesters against the repression of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime. It waged a “political struggle” against corruption within the pro-Russian government and for effective democratic reforms. After 2014, with the war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea, it began systematically documenting human rights violations and war crimes in those territories (violence against civilians, disappearances, torture, forced displacement). As early as 2016, Oleksandra Matviichuk’s work was recognized with the “Democracy Defender Award,” presented by 16 OSCE delegations, for her “outstanding contribution to the promotion of democracy and human rights.” In 2021, she was appointed to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. And the following year, she was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Belarusian opposition figure and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and the Russian NGO Memorial. 2007–2027: Next year will mark twenty years of Oleksandra Matviichuk’s unwavering commitment to dignity and respect for human rights. One could not wish for a better anniversary to mark these twenty years of struggle and tenacity than the defeat of Putin’s Russia. The way would finally be open for Ukrainian and international courts to adjudicate the countless war crimes committed in Ukraine since 2014. The road ahead may still be long, or it may, on the contrary, accelerate. But in any case, there is reason for hope. At the cost of heavy sacrifices, but also thanks to extraordinary civic solidarity, Ukraine has managed to contain the advance of the occupying troops on the ground. While the front line is more or less frozen, other lines are shifting, as we have already reported in Les Humanités. Ukraine’s newly acquired capability to strike deep into Russia—using drones that precisely target energy or military facilities—has begun to undermine Putin’s war machine. And what about Crimea, cut off from fuel and under siege? What about the Russian economy, which is in serious trouble? Whatever the cost—already staggering in terms of human lives lost—it is clear that Vladimir Putin will capitulate only when forced to do so, as his very personal survival is at stake. Even surrounded by a inner circle entirely devoted to his cause—one that would never risk crossing him—Vladimir Putin may have some reason to fear an internal coup that would oust him to salvage what remains of the Russian Federation. In the meantime, he has no reason to curb his capacity for destruction. We see this every day. With 265 civilians killed and 1,816 wounded, June 2026 was the deadliest month since the start of the Russian aggression, according to the latest report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Kremlin no longer even bothers to falsely label residential buildings and other civilian targets as military objectives. But here, too, the situation could change. After months of wait-and-see procrastination—and thus pro-Russian posturing—Donald Trump—who is no stranger to about-faces—has just announced at the recent NATO summit in Ankara that the United States would grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot air defense systems. Trump also raised the idea that U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine could include measures to “close the airspace” over the country. This is what Volodymyr Zelensky had requested as early as 2022 in the form of a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, a request that NATO has consistently refused for fear of a direct confrontation with Russia. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov seems to have taken the blow in stride: “That would involve operational activities by the armed forces of NATO member states over Ukrainian territory. That is precisely what the special military operation aims to prevent. ” He who cries wolf eventually sees it come! It’s curious that this maxim was forgotten at the KGB school where Putin trained… In any case, there is an urgent need for this war to end. There is an urgent need for Russia to withdraw from the occupied territories. For today, just one figure: according to a report presented last Thursday by independent experts to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, some 1.6 million Ukrainian children are currently subjected in these territories to a systematic program of military indoctrination orchestrated by Russia (see HERE). 1.6 million children! For them, war is anything but abstract. Behind the coldness of the statistics (the number of deported children, civilians illegally detained in Russia, women tortured and raped, etc.), Oleksandra Matviichuk has never stopped speaking about people and human lives. In the interview she granted us on February 24, 2025 (HERE), she concluded her address to Emmanuel Macron as follows: “I would like to draw attention to the fact that today political circles are talking about mineral resources, elections in Ukraine, and many other things, but they fail to talk about the people. (…) I personally ask the French president to bring the human dimension back into all political processes”. The interview we are publishing today continues in this vein. With a dignity, a sense of responsibility, and an intellectual honesty that inspire respect and admiration. And in the wake of the war and the many traumas it has caused, Oleksandra Matviichuk reminds us—if any reminder were needed—that Ukraine, as a nation of resistance (rather than “resilience”), offers us a lesson in courage and in the meaning of life: “If we stop loving, stop finding joy in the little things between funerals, stop sharing our warmth—in short, if we stop doing what makes us human—then the war will have won”. It is along these lines that the interview with Oleksandra Matviichuk kicks off a series of publications: “Ukraine: Speak Again, Write Again, Sing Again.” Voices from Ukraine to follow in the coming days. Jean-Marc Adolphe PLEASE NOTE The interview with Oleksandra Matviichuk was conducted in Kyiv by Yuliana Skibitska, editor-in-chief of Yellow Blue. Yellow Blue is a Ukrainian editorial platform founded in 2024–2025 that tells the story of Ukraine by giving a voice to those who create, investigate, teach, advocate, or start businesses. The project is led by a team of journalists and activists who publish interviews, reports, podcasts, and guides aimed at bringing to light the stories of people committed to rebuilding the country and its diaspora. Yellow Blue identifies as an independent media outlet rooted in civil society and is part of the landscape of “trusted Ukrainian outlets in English” that the platform itself highlights alongside the Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, and hromadske. The English translation of the interview below is the one published by Yellow Blue: https://yellowblue.pro/vybrane/180-oleksandra-matviichuk-on-human-rights-and-justice A Conversation with Oleksandra Matviichuk Photo Jiulia Weber Could you tell us what exactly you are working on right now? The Center for Civil Liberties operates in several key areas. The first is overcoming the consequences of the war. This is not just about working to launch international accountability mechanisms, such as a special tribunal [for Vladimir Putin], the International Register of Damage (1), or the confiscation of frozen Russian assets (2), which is supposed to complement this register. It also involves the work we’ve been doing for many years—changing legislation in this area. Ukraine has finally ratified the Rome Statute (3), but much has yet to change in our Criminal Code, and this needs to be fixed. The second area is European integration, and our task is to help the state navigate this path as quickly as possible. Our focus is obviously on what we are strong at—human rights and the rule of law. Quite recently, we presented a European integration map, an online tool. It shows what Ukraine has already done, what it hasn’t, and what, in our opinion, still needs to be accomplished (4). The third area is human rights education. War is always a poison for democracy. Naturally, during a war, survival comes to the forefront. But we must remind both ourselves and society what we are fighting for in this war. That’s why we have restored our educational direction—for example, this year we trained a cohort of human rights trainers in the regions. And the final area is international solidarity. After all, we understand that Russian aggression against Ukraine is a reflection of the overall collapse of the world order that was established after World War II. Right now, this system isn’t working, and it has never been reformed. If we don’t enter this process [of creating a new world order], we might not like the future. To be honest, it seemed to me that the old world order broke back in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, which went very smoothly for Russia. And now we have seemingly arrived at a logical conclusion. In January of this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech in Davos that Ukrainians really liked. He said that the international order is broken. I read this speech and couldn’t understand why Ukrainians were so inspired by it. What did he say that was new? For us, all of this should have been obvious since 2014. The occupation and annexation of Crimea was an unprecedented step. Nothing like this had happened since World War II. But then I wrote a post saying that this joy came from the fact that we were finally heard. We had been saying for 12 years that the world order was broken, but in reality, no one believed us. I assume that advanced democracies thought the UN Charter was non-functional only regarding Ukraine. Suddenly, it turned out that this chain reaction, which had been set off, was leading to a natural result—now no one is safe. I would like to talk about the special tribunal in a bit more detail. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of optimism about it. What drives it? Three weeks ago, ministers from 36 countries plus the EU officially expressed their desire to join the special tribunal. And this is a significant achievement, despite the fact that it’s only the beginning of a long journey. I remember May 2022 and my first trip to Oslo, where I spoke about the need to establish an international court for the crime of aggression. Oleksandra Matviichuk speaks during a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council dedicated to the situation in Ukraine, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, in 2022. Even our sympathizers looked at us with pity back then—as if to say, this is correct in principle, but impossible. Because in all 80 years, there had been only one example—Nuremberg. Neither the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia nor the special court for Sierra Leone were tribunals for the decision to start a war—only for the fact that people killed each other in those wars, violating the rules. But the very fact of unleashing an aggressive war went unpunished. The Nuremberg trials teach us that justice is a privilege of the victors. Meanwhile, the current tribunal shows that it’s possible and necessary to create international accountability mechanisms without waiting to see how and when the war ends. I will play a sceptic here. Let’s imagine the tribunal is up and running and issuing verdicts. What happens next? In Nuremberg, things were different because the criminals were physically detained. First of all, since this special tribunal is the result of a compromise, it lacks jurisdiction over Putin. This means that while the investigation into Putin will proceed, he won’t be able to stand trial before this special tribunal as long as he heads the state. But the question you’re asking is about what justice means to people. And that is a very non-linear thing. I’ve been working with victims of war crimes for 12 years, and they all view justice differently. For some, justice is indeed seeing the perpetrators behind bars; for others, it is receiving compensation; for some, it’s learning the truth about what happened to their loved ones; and for others, it is being publicly heard. This means justice is multidimensional, and our task is much more complex than simply launching legal mechanisms so that, theoretically, people who committed war crimes end up behind bars. A legal decision, a court verdict, is not the political position of the party currently ruling the state, where tomorrow another political party will come along and decide otherwise. While yesterday the US condemned Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, today they avoid any sharp criticism. The political position has changed, but it doesn’t work that way with a verdict. Can it then be broadly summarized that the special tribunal is something like a guarantee for our future? I would probably put it differently. First and foremost, it’s a change in the global approach to crimes against peace. It will mean that countries in other parts of the world can follow our example. So we are already moving international law forward. And what would justice toward Russia mean to you? To put it simply, for me, justice is a balance of cause-and-effect relationships. That is, if someone has done something good, it’s just that they are thanked for it. If they have done something bad, it’s just that they are held accountable for it. For many people in Ukraine, justice means hanging officials on lamp posts when they are exposed on Facebook for involvement in corruption. Justice is a very dangerous thing; there is a reason why all populist parties love to plaster it into their names. Because you can pack anything you want under the guise of justice. But it seems to me that justice must go hand in hand with something else. First, this demand for “lamp posts” must be translated into the legal field. That’s why our work is so important to me, because where there is no justice, revenge takes over. This triggers an endless cycle of violence. Second, I would like us, when thinking about justice, not to forget about humanity. We have the right to all the emotions we feel. In 12 years, I have still not grown accustomed to what they do to people in [Russian colonies]. So I still feel a whole palette of emotions. But my duty is to rationalise these emotions. That’s why I am sincerely grateful to the Ukrainian state that the vast majority of crimes in our database are those committed by the Russian side. It would be much harder for me to talk about Russia’s crimes if we were the same. Because human rights defenders have a slightly different lens—we document all crimes, regardless of the side. Ukrainian children who returned from the occupied territories as part of the “Bring Kids Back UA” initiative in 2025. One of the issues you are also working on is the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. In your interviews, you have often said that this problem has no simple solutions. But I’m interested in another aspect. How do we bring back children who have already settled into new families? The honest answer is—don’t know. Our organization doesn’t handle repatriations, only documentation. But this is indeed a very painful topic. When the law doesn’t work, there is no predictability. And this means there is no universal mechanism for returning children. You work with individual cases. In one instance, you get a child out this way; in another, you do it differently; and in a third, you fail to get them out. Moreover, childhood has its own “expiration date"—children grow up. I think we will have to create long-term strategies. For example, some kind of database—so that children we fail to bring back will have the opportunity to understand in the future that they were Ukrainians. While I was on my way to our meeting, I saw a post on Facebook by Vakhtang Kipiani, which, among other things, included a phrase stating that Ukraine has already lost the teenagers who moved abroad—specifically to Poland. Do you agree with this? (6) Last year, I launched a mentorship program for young people aged 18 to 25 and wrote that Ukrainians abroad could also apply. Such applications accounted for 70%. This means that this generation is holding onto its connection with Ukraine. I believe that we have become a global nation. And we have a choice: either we build horizontal ties with our multi-million diaspora and accept that some people will not return for various reasons; or we simply say that these are no longer our people. But I think we don’t have the luxury of throwing people away like that. Perhaps if not these children, then their children will want to return to Ukraine. I have a vivid example. My assistant is an Argentine of Ukrainian descent, born in Argentina but in the third generation. And she returned to Ukraine. She says she cannot believe it—her ancestors fought the Russians, and now she is fighting them. We must simply forbid ourselves from thinking of anyone as lost people. As someone who spends a lot of time abroad, how do you perceive our relations with our allies today? Have they truly grown tired of us? It seems to me that the war is becoming normalized. And this is a very human process. I’m not blaming anyone—I saw this in Ukraine. Back in 2014, there was shock, but by 2015, a huge number of people turned off the war on their TV screens. I remember how we tried to draw attention to Crimea, to the repressions, to the political prisoners, and [media] editors told me that no one was interested in that anymore. So what do we want from European countries? The people there are not malicious or indifferent. They are simply behaving the way a large portion of people behaved in 2015. They decided that war is terrible, but it’s far away. Meanwhile, they have their own lives, and they just want to live them. They don’t know how they can be useful. Because, for instance, you’ve been sending some humanitarian aid year after year, yet the war doesn’t end. And you don’t understand: are you actually making any difference at all? I see how many people are still helping us. And often, these are ordinary people. In Paris, a fisherman from Brittany approached me. He said he was sending nets to Kherson. And you think to yourself: “My God, some fisherman. And here it all comes together. Brittany. Kherson.” And there’s a lot of that. But it’s not as visible in Ukraine. I always repeat that there are no small actions during a major war. Every action matters. And it’s precisely from these small actions that our resilience, which people love to credit us with, is built. Photo Yulia Weber Moments like this remind me of the Euromaidan slogan: “I’m a drop in the ocean.” I tell this story all the time. For many, the saying “I’m a drop in the ocean” means that my efforts are worth nothing. But we reinterpreted it. We said: “I’m a drop in the ocean,” and that means drop by drop makes an ocean. To quote you: “People in Europe are beginning to understand. Bit by bit, but the realization is emerging that Putin started the war not to occupy some part of Ukrainian territories, but to go further.” Why are they only starting to understand this now, after four years of a major war, and even then, as you say, “bit by bit”? Let’s remember how in January 2022, a huge number of people denied a full-scale invasion. It’s about human nature. When reality is threatening, we reject it. Why has the realization begun to arrive now? Because there are adults in the room who dared to accept this reality and do something about it. It is important that there are more of them in every country, so that they remain in power. People are the same everywhere. I try to understand this and not act as a lecturer when I speak to an international audience. Nobody likes to be lectured. But the truth is, it’s better to prepare for reality, choose an adult stance, and change this reality without waiting for it to arrive. In a 2025 interview with Ukrainska Pravda, you said that the human dimension is not a priority at all right now. Has anything changed since then? Nothing has changed. We are losing the human element in general and everywhere. The human dimension is leaving politics, leaving the technology sector. Take artificial intelligence, for example. This is actually a massive ethical challenge. It used to be believed that only humans could think and create. Not anymore. And what makes us human then? Some of the people leading tech companies genuinely believe that humans are very expensive. A human requires a pension, healthcare, social protection, and some form of security. They need democracy. Since we are currently at a turning point in the world order, it’s highly likely that the next order will be one where only technology has freedom—while humans will be a consumable material serving that technology. People who think this way aren’t marginal. This is just a different kind of ethics, a different kind of thinking, and, consequently, different decisions and actions. I’m certain I said this [in the mentioned interview] in the context of negotiations [regarding the war in Ukraine], because that is where it’s very clearly visible how much we have lost the human dimension. You said that everything revolves around territories, and we don’t talk about people at all. I cannot reproach the Ukrainian side for this, in particular. We are simply forced to play by rules that weren’t determined by us. But American negotiators talk about the occupied territories as if they were empty spaces. I just want to slam my fist on the table and say, “Stop!”. These are not empty spaces. Millions of people live there. They have absolutely no way to protect themselves, their freedom, or their children. Russian occupation is not when one flag is exchanged for another, as imagined by people who have never been occupied by Russia. Russian occupation means forced abductions, rapes, torture, the denial of your identity, the banning of your language and culture, filtration camps, and mass graves. For us, occupation is the very same war, just in a different form. Twelve years have passed since some territories were occupied; have we lost the people from there? These are our people. Yes, they have lived for 12 years in conditions that we, thank God, didn’t have to live through. They’ve changed a lot. I remember that within just two or three years, resentment was growing among the people who stayed [in the occupied territories] that they had been abandoned. This resentment may be irrational, because we couldn’t liberate these territories, but it is there. We love to speak in mantras like “Crimea is Ukraine,” “Donbas is Ukraine,” and so on. But when it comes down to specific things, a portion of people switch to a simplified, binary view that everyone who wanted to leave has already left. It seems to me that this is very unfair and primitive. We—those who document crimes—know that Russia uses terror. Because it’s one thing to capture territories, and another to hold them. To do that, you have to break social ties and communities, physically destroy the active minority or push them out of the region, and intimidate the passive majority. That’s why often the only way to survive is to become an executioner. Mentally. To identify oneself with the aggressor. I assume you have seen the discussion regarding the strike on the college in occupied Starobilsk. About who actually died there—Russian military personnel or real students. This debate became especially sharp when “Realna Gazeta” reported that there were indeed students there. What do you think about this? (7) I cannot comment on the strike on Starobilsk itself because I haven’t studied the information surrounding it. Now, regarding the discussions. I’m glad it is happening. Right now, we all feel that the situation at the front is changing. Ukraine has begun producing its own weapons, which allow us to reach [and destroy objects in] distances that were previously inaccessible. And we need this discussion to once again distinguish between a strike on military objectives where collateral damage is acceptable, and a disproportionate use of force or a deliberate strike on civilians. These are all distinct legal categories, and we need to understand them. But I would like the participants in this discussion to be more patient with one another. I understand that it’s difficult. People living under constant stress can be genuinely irritated simply by the fact that someone else holds a different viewpoint. But there must be some reflective stance. We might not like each other, but there is no one else. We’re going to win this war with the lineup we have. And in general, there are few of us; we are being ground down, we are dying. We must take care of each other. How do you, as a human rights defender, see the way our society has changed both over these 12 years and over the specific four years of the major war? We are already tired of being called resilient. It has become such a mantra, as if Ukrainians are made of iron and can endure anything. And this is an absolute falsehood. We cannot endure everything. What doesn’t kill us doesn’t make us stronger. It breaks some of us, it changes some, and it forces others to leave. There are positive changes. This is the awakening of civic consciousness. The volunteer movement has grown tremendously. As I already wrote in my Nobel speech, in our country, ordinary people do extraordinary things. Ordinary people change history. However, overall, war is horrific. And it doesn’t change us for the better. War is the tearing of social fabrics. It atomizes people. Someone ends up abroad, someone is in the army, someone decides to stay and live near the front line and goes to sleep every night not knowing if they will wake up in the morning. And within these categories, there are tens of thousands more groups that have formed based on their unique experience lived through during the war. If trust circulates only within these groups, it will tear us apart. Because the experiences are different, and the visions of the situation are different too. And if there is no framework that stitches us all together, the country gets ripped apart. Therefore, one of the urgent tasks is to build bridges between these groups. At the same time, war implies black-and-white thinking. I think that when you are on the battlefield and a Russian soldier is coming at you, you must clearly identify who the enemy is and who is one of your own. You cannot ask yourself: “Maybe he has five children? What if he’s a good person? What if he’s just a contract soldier fooled by Russian propaganda?”. In other words, black-and-white thinking is necessary on the battlefield. But the vast majority of people aren’t there. We discuss things in a coffee shop or write on social media, yet we behave as if we are on the battlefield. Meaning, we divide everyone around us into our own and enemies just because we didn’t like a different point of view. Life, after all, is more complex. Furthermore, trust is the most undervalued resource during a war. If people trust each other, they unite quickly and solve a given problem. If they don’t, they unite slowly, while war is all about speed. For many people, this is just a convenient way to show their stance because going to fight against the Russians is terrifying. Yes, you cannot reach your abusers, so you take it out on those who are closer. You look for any internet fight on social media where you can come and pour out your negative emotions. Well, I will repeat once more—we have the right to all emotions, but we have an adult duty to rationalize them. You cannot strike your own side. We cannot afford this during a genocidal war aimed at our destruction. In this context, I cannot help but recall the story with the Nobel Prize. There was a lot of hate because you received it alongside Belarusian and Russian human rights defenders. (8) Hate is still there. But yes, now it’s no longer such a topical issue. I hold no grudges against the people who hated on me back then in 2022, because on a human level, I understand them. War is the destruction of everything you call a normal life. And it’s completely natural to want to create a distance from a representative of the nation that attacked you. Oleksandra Matviichuk during her speech at the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony on behalf of the Center for Civil Liberties. Photo Sergei Gapon / AFP. I didn’t go to receive the Nobel Prize with some abstract Belarusian and Russian human rights defenders. I went with colleagues and friends with whom we work together in this war. In 2014, we were the first to send mobile groups to Crimea and the East. I called Russian human rights organizations and asked them to send safety protocols because they had the experience of mobile groups in Chechnya. In March 2014, representatives of “Memorial” helped us build a system for missing persons. We have tens of thousands of imprisoned Ukrainians in the occupied territories and in Russia. How do you send an independent lawyer or visit them in a penal colony? This is done at their own peril and risk by our Russian colleagues, who tomorrow might find themselves behind bars. I understand the people for whom this was very painful to accept, because they probably think that we are simply holding dialogues and signing memorandums. No, we are working. Do you think the strategy of ignoring and canceling Russians at public events is working in the fifth year of the major war? I think the approach should have been more nuanced. When [Russian conductor Valery] Gergiev tried to hold a concert in Italy, I signed a letter to prevent that concert from happening. I understand that over these years, we have failed to convey our message—we are demanding the cancellation of Gergiev’s concert not because he’s a Russian composer, but because he is a Russian composer who supports Putin. For people abroad who are outside our wartime context, the cancelling of Russian culture is simply incomprehensible. In other words, we needed to explain what we meant more clearly. Furthermore, it seems to me that we shouldn’t be fighting Dostoevsky, but rather reading him correctly. Read him as a diagnosis of Russian society. I hope that in 2026 we will finally develop a more pragmatic strategy. Once again, so that everyone understands correctly—I by no means support Russia’s return to sports, museums, or artistic venues. But this is not a question of ethnicity; it’s a question of supporting the war and Russia using these platforms as the soft power of the Russian military machine. But you do realize that the prevailing opinion in society is precisely about ethnicity? That any Russian, “good” or “bad,” shouldn’t have support in the West. Many things can prevail in society, but there are amplifiers. And these are usually people who should actually be reflective and pragmatic. I ask myself: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to win the war?”. I’m human too, and there are many things I want. But if you ultimately want to achieve the goal, sometimes you have to forget about your ego. Photo Yulia Weber for The Ukrainians Media If we compare it to 2022 again—which arguments work better today when we talk about the war in Ukraine with foreigners: emotional or pragmatic ones? Probably only in 2022 was it possible to give a universal answer. Because that emotion was shock. Otherwise, the world is very diverse. There are many parts of the world that know nothing about our region except that Russia is here. And it was only in 2022 that Ukraine suddenly began to be visualized on their mental map. Moreover, when I travel to countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, I realize that we start from a position of mutual ignorance. Because Ukrainians know little about other contexts, experiences, history, wars, and pain. We know little about the world. Now, after the initial period of shock has passed, a strategic approach is required. And one of the things I practice and urge Ukrainians to do as well is that Ukraine’s voice in the world should not only be about Ukraine. We, who constantly talk about solidarity, must demonstrate it. Do you mean solidarity with other countries that have similar experiences? I mean that we must speak in coalitions. It doesn’t necessarily have to be countries with similar experiences. For example, a few months ago I went on a solidarity visit to Syria to understand what we could do for Syrian human rights defenders. They are currently rebuilding a transitional justice system from scratch. In particular, we can learn from them. A lot of what they have done commands immense respect and admiration. Has the attitude toward us changed since Trump’s victory? In America—yes. At the political level. And what do the people think? I look at sociodemographic surveys. Republican voters support our fight for freedom. In this context, Trump’s policy runs counter to the will of the American people. Americans would prefer that America support Ukraine. And in Europe? Europeans support us more. The issue is that the shift in Trump’s foreign policy has primarily changed America’s attitude toward Europe. Therefore, European countries are less concerned about Ukraine and more concerned about themselves. They are thinking about how to survive in this world where the world order is collapsing, and they are no longer guaranteed the American nuclear umbrella. For decades, Europeans didn’t invest in developing Europe’s autonomous security. Now they need to start doing it very quickly. Alexandra Matviichuk during her meeting with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on June 11, 2025. During the audience, she discussed the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and presented a symbolic gift on behalf of Ukrainian children. Are there any questions that you are asked over and over again at all those international speaking engagements? They are very simple. Why don’t you want to make peace with Russia? Why not sign a peace treaty, freeze this conflict, and accept that 20 percent of the territory will be occupied? People think that the war will stop if some formal treaty is signed. I constantly meet people who know nothing about life under occupation, or about the fact that we have tens of thousands of unlawfully imprisoned civilians in Russian captivity. They are unaware that just a few years ago we signed as many as two peace agreements. One needs to be patient and simply explain this. I had a turning point when I told my colleagues and myself that I was tired of being in this role: I was starting to feel sick of myself because I had to explain the same things, repeat, recount, and answer the same questions. But I somehow reinterpreted it. I thought: if the Bible has been saying the same things for millennia, then I should probably have a humbler attitude toward myself. Just go and do your job. And my last question. We talked about how Ukrainian society has changed during the war. How have you changed? Good question. I don’t fully know the answer because I don’t allow myself to start… Answering this question requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause, time, and at least a minimal sense of safety. And on a physical level, I have the feeling that we are being killed. We have to run a marathon in a sprint mode, so there is no time to deal with our own emotions, with our own changes. People don’t need my tears or reflections, nor philosophical guidance, but concrete actions. I have accepted that the war might last for a very long time. Previously, war for me was the collapse of everything that could be called civilization. Now I understand that I, in particular, was lucky to live in relative peace for at least a certain period of time. War, unfortunately, is a part of human activity. I realized that one cannot put life on hold. If we stop loving, stop enjoying simple things in the intervals between funerals, and stop sharing warmth—meaning, if we stop doing what makes us human—then they win. The war wins. It will take away our entire life. And we don’t have another life, so I’m not going to give it away to the war. Interview by Yuliana Skibitska published by Yellow blue on June 17, 2026. Original version HERE. NOTES (1). The International Register of Damages is a platform established under the auspices of the Council of Europe to systematically document the damages suffered by Ukraine and its citizens as a result of the Russian aggression (loss of life, destruction of housing, infrastructure, cultural heritage, the environment, etc.), with a view to future compensation and reparations proceedings. (2). Approximately $230 billion in Russian assets in the European Union. (3). Ukraine ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on October 24, 2024. As of January 1, 2025, it became the 125th full State Party. At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, amended the Criminal Code to bring it into line with international standards of criminal justice. (4). https://eurointegration.ccl.org.ua/ (5). In many countries, parties with populist rhetoric explicitly include the words “justice” or “social justice” in their names—for example, various versions of “Justice Party” or “Social Justice Party” in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. (6). Vakhtang Kipiani is a Ukrainian journalist, historian, and publicist committed to preserving memory and seeking justice, who is currently serving in the territorial defense forces. When he speaks of “already lost” teenagers who have left for abroad, particularly Poland, he expresses the fear that a portion of the younger generation will settle permanently outside Ukraine, depriving the country of the vital forces needed for its reconstruction—beyond the direct human losses of the war. (7). This issue refers to the controversy that arose following a Ukrainian strike, on the night of May 21–22, 2026, against buildings at an educational institution in the occupied city of Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region. Russian authorities claimed that a student dormitory had been hit, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, mostly among young people, and denounced it as a “terrorist attack” against civilians. The Ukrainian General Staff, for its part, explained that the operation targeted a military facility—specifically a Rubicon drone unit stationed on the premises—while denying accusations of a deliberate strike against students. The debate intensified further following an article by the independent media outlet Realnaya Gazeta, which, based on eyewitness accounts and lists of victims published by the occupying forces, maintains that there were indeed students in the buildings that were struck. The case illustrates a broader issue: the difficulty of verifying information in occupied territory, the risks to civilians during “deep” strikes, and internal tensions within the Ukrainian media landscape over how to address these gray areas, caught between Russian propaganda and their own accountability. (8). The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian organization Memorial, and the Center for Civil Liberties led by Oleksandra Matviichuk. Some critics argued that this sharing of the prize diluted the distinct nature of Ukraine’s struggle or amounted to placing a country under attack on the same level as actors from aggressor nations—even if they are opponents. Hence the criticism directed at Oleksandra Matviichuk for accepting this honor “alongside” Russian and Belarusian recipients. We have chosen to run a website that is completely free and ad-free, and that relies only on the support of our readers.
Russia and the deportation of children: behind the scenes of an investigation
On November 11, 2022, in a pediatric institute in Henichesk, in the Kherson Oblast, Maria Lvova-Belova seized an infant and immediately handed it to one of the soldiers accompanying her in this predatory operation. Since the beginning of the war, Jean-Marc Adolphe's patient investigation for les humanités has played a decisive role in raising awareness of the system of forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. In a video interview with subscribers, Jean-Marc Adolphe revisited the behind-the-scenes aspects of this work—from the initial Google alerts to the uncovering of a structured politico-religious apparatus involving the Russian state, United Russia, and the Orthodox Church—demonstrating how "open-source journalism" can, on its own, reveal the genocidal logic at work behind the Kremlin's humanitarian propaganda. As the association "For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours" writes: "Since the beginning of the war, a pioneering journalist, Jean-Marc Adolphe, has been developing on his website, leshumanites-media.com , the incisive investigation that catalyzed in France the awareness of the existence of the transfer of children, its necessary classification as genocide, and the call for action at a media, political, and humanitarian level" (see "The investigation that first revealed in France the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and Belarus" ). A few days ago, during a video interview involving Caterina Zomer, deputy editor of les humanités, and several subscriber readers, Jean-Marc Adolphe was kind enough to reveal some of the behind-the-scenes details of his investigation. He begins by recounting how, from the very beginning of the Russian invasion, he sought an angle that escaped the dominant military commentary, to focus on people and the discreet traces of wartime violence. It is in this context that he sets up Google alerts in French, Ukrainian and Russian, until on April 2, 2022 he came across Timofey Sergeytsev's article on the website of the official Russian agency RIA Novosti, later published under the title "Vladimir Putin's Mein Kampf", which explains a genocidal project over several generations, notably through the indoctrination of Ukrainian children ( HERE ). At the same time, he closely followed the siege of Mariupol, which he anticipated as early as March 1, 2022 ( HERE ), documented the first "filtration camps" and published as early as April 10, 2022 on the deportations in Russia ( HERE ), while these elements remained largely absent from the French press ( HERE ). The shift towards the issue of children began with seemingly innocuous details: a local Russian newspaper article about Ukrainian “refugees” housed in a gymnasium in Taganrog, a photo with a representative of the Russian Red Cross, official figures of hundreds of thousands of “voluntary” displaced persons that don't correspond to any images of convoys of cars at the Russian-Ukrainian border. The investigation, which progresses patiently from these initial documents, corroborated by testimonies and NGO reports, uncovers a mechanism where Mariupol residents board “humanitarian” buses, believing they are going to Kyiv or other destinations in Ukraine, and end up in Russia, often after passing through filtering camps where families can be separated. As the publications accumulate, the conviction grows stronger that, behind the Russian rhetoric of humanitarian welcome, lies a system of forced transfers in which children occupy a central place, even if, initially, they appear lost in the mass of displaced “citizens.” The interview emphasizes the methodology employed, which Jean-Marc Adolphe likens to "open-source journalism": meticulous digging through online content—local archives, social media, public databases, satellite imagery—combined with "protected" human sources (whose identities are withheld to avoid endangering them). He recounts the considerable time spent translating entire pages into Russian, a language he doesn't speak fluently, the multitude of false leads and "dead ends" encountered in the search for a few crucial documents, and how, from an initial "needle in a haystack," a thread unravels into a 350-page ball of printed material. This approach is also an implicit critique of the French media landscape: dependence on AFP, the scarcity of investigative journalism and critical analysis, and the structural laziness that leads newsrooms to ignore investigations that are nonetheless sourced and verifiable with a simple click on the hyperlinks embedded in published articles. The individual investigation is part of a broader ecosystem: investigations by NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Memorial), work by the Humanitarian Laboratory Research at Yale University, investigations by international media and associations such as For Ukraine, For Their Freedom and Ours or Russia-Liberties , but also the drastic limitations imposed by Putin's Russia, which expels or bans independent organizations and restricts access to the field, including for UNICEF and the International Red Cross. From the Ukrainian perspective, the interview highlights the constraints of a state at war, overwhelmed institutions, saturated services, and organizations like Save Ukraine that work almost clandestinely in Russia to find and repatriate, child by child, a small minority of those deported. Jean-Marc Adolphe rejects any heroic posture, simply saying he is "less lazy than others", but claims to take the long time, to pay attention to detail and to demand proof when he uses words like "trafficking" or "genocidal system". Maria Lvova-Belova, speaking on October 27, 2022 via video transmission at a seminar of the Russian Orthodox Church in Soichi, titled "Traditional Values - Future of Russia". The final section opens up a broader political and religious framework for understanding this system: the legacy of the first Russian child rights commissars, the ambivalent trajectory of figures like "Doctora Lisa," the close alliance between Putin's regime and the Orthodox Church of Kirill, a former KGB agent, and the structuring role of the United Russia party as the oil that "lubricates" the entire machine. Within this system, the federal and regional child rights commissars, all products of the establishment, have direct channels to the Kremlin and an administrative network that facilitates the transfer of children from the occupied territories to the Russian oblasts. Faced with estimates of 30,000 to 300,000 displaced minors, for only 500 to 1,000 known adoptions and Russian orphanages already full, the now central hypothesis of the investigation is the massive use of the network of Orthodox monasteries and religious institutions to disperse, hide and indoctrinate these children, far from any international control. Jean-Marc Adolphe then outlines the extensions of this long-term investigation: identifying pilot regions like Tver, where "refugee children" presented as having arrived "of their own accord" from Donetsk are in fact revealed to have been kidnapped in Mariupol; pinpointing transit points like Crimea and Taganrog; and cross-referencing recent testimonies mentioning monasteries where Ukrainian children are allegedly being held and mistreated. The goal is no longer simply to denounce a state crime, but to uncover specific locations, networks, and institutions, in order to facilitate concerted action by journalists, NGOs, international institutions, and Ukrainian authorities to find these tens of thousands of invisible children. True to the spirit of the humanities , Jean-Marc Adolphe thus defends a journalism that refuses resignation, champions the patience required for proof, and reminds us that a crucial part of the truth lies hidden in the accessible corners of the internet, provided they are explored relentlessly. Dominique Vernis We have chosen a completely free, ad-free website that relies solely on the engagement of our readers. Donations or subscriptions HERE And to receive our newsletter: https://www.leshumanites-media.com/info-lettre
We'll go to Guernica to party
Activists from the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, who have just won a historic victory against the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, notably Shortly after our recent investigation into the "mega greenwashing" of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and its patrons, the museum's board of directors has just announced, after 17 years of legal proceedings and environmental protests, the abandonment of an expansion project that would have jeopardized a precious biosphere reserve. On February 7, 2026, at the call of the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, activists, residents, scientists, and wetland defenders will celebrate this historic victory: a popular festival against concrete, a joyfully irreverent carnival aimed at public authorities and major sponsors alike, and a signal sent far beyond the Basque Country to all those who refuse to see culture used as a Trojan horse for the destruction of life. Mark your calendars: February 7, 2026, is going to be a hell of a party in Guernica, in the Spanish Basque Country, as everyone knows. There's a victory to celebrate, and victories don't come around every day. A truly momentous victory, one that will be etched in the annals of Wikipedia: the victory of the Zapatista army of wetland protectors against the wealthy foot soldiers, armed with powerful marketing tools, of the colonial empire of the contemporary art business. And without claiming more credit than necessary, we've still thrown our two cents of journalistic weight into the battlefield. On May 25, the alarm was already raised: " Under the guise of cultural influence, a project to extend the Guggenheim in the Spanish Basque Country threatens one of the most precious ecosystems in Europe. Biosphere reserve, protected wetland, sanctuary for migratory birds: all this could give way to the bulldozers of an art that has become an economic showcase ". Urdaibai Natural Area and Biosphere Reserve. Photo by Roberto Martínez (Flickr) We recounted how the Urdaibai estuary, including its delta, which harbors exceptional biodiversity and serves as a vital stopover for migratory birds, despite being classified as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a Ramsar site, and a Natura 2000 area, was at serious risk of being impacted by a proposed expansion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with two new museum branches in Guernica and Murueta, linked by a footpath. We also described how this project, initiated in 2008 and revived in 2020, was generating strong local opposition (through the "Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop" platform) and international opposition, culminating in an advocacy campaign by the Mediterranean Alliance for Wetlands with UNESCO. Environmentalists denounced a destructive overtourism project, emblematic of a globalized "McGuggenheim", but the Guggenheim Foundation, now chaired by American billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, a specialist in mergers and acquisitions and hedge funds, would not listen. Billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, in his New York apartment. Photo Ryan Shorosky / Christie's. Alone among the entire French, and even European, press, we recently labeled the "Arts of the Earth" exhibition, which had just opened at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, as "mega greenwashing." At Humanities , in fact, it's not really our style to mistake appearances for reality: "In Bilbao, with enormous marketing resources, the Guggenheim Museum is opening a vast 'Arts of the Earth' exhibition, celebrating soils, organic materials, and ecological imagination. Just a few dozen kilometers away, however, the same foundation is pursuing an expansion project in the heart of the Urdaibai estuary, a UNESCO biosphere reserve and protected wetland, denounced by environmentalists as a major threat to biodiversity. In other words: art drapes itself in the colors of life, while preparing the bulldozers" (HERE). In that same article, we highlighted the exhibition's "sponsor": Iberdrola, the Spanish energy giant presented as a "world leader in renewables," but whose portfolio still relies heavily on gas-fired power plants and a mega-infrastructure model. In the Spanish Basque Country, no one has forgotten that Iberdrola succeeded Iberduero in 1992, which had begun construction of a nuclear power plant in Lemóniz (Biscay), on the Basque coast; the project was abandoned in the 1980s under the combined pressure of environmental movements, a part of Basque society and political violence (ETA attacks), leaving an industrial wasteland that has become a lasting trauma in Spanish energy history. It was becoming too much. The verdict has finally come down: there will be no Guggenheim Urdaibai. After years of wrangling, the Patronato of the Bilbao museum decided on December 16th not to pursue the expansion project in the heart of the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, citing "technical unviability in the short and medium term" in the face of a mountain of environmental, urban planning, administrative, and legal obstacles. This about-face comes at the end of a "listening process" conducted in the region, the 950 accounts of which clearly revealed a majority opposed to the museum, but in favor of an alternative development model for the Busturialdea region (1) : in October 2024, thousands of people marched in Gernika (Guernica, in Basque) to say "no to the Guggenheim, yes to the future of the region." To try and push the project through, the authorities had initiated a series of exemptions: lowering the coastal protection zone from 100 to 20 meters in Murueta, modifying urban planning regulations, demolishing a former factory and removing asbestos from the site, and promising 700 jobs and €39 million in annual economic benefits. But the legal challenges filed, particularly against the reduction of coastal protection, the need to compensate the shipyard, decontaminate the soil, and restore the wetlands, ultimately transformed the anticipated "cultural icon" into a political and legal quagmire that will persist for over a decade. In March 2025, the president of the Basque government, Imanol Pradales (in the foreground), visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York. to assure the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation of its support for the Guggenheim Museum expansion project in Urdaibai. What happened to cause the Guggenheim Foundation to ultimately abandon a project it had, until recently, been determined to pursue? The Bilbao museum is based on a Basque public-private partnership. Its board of directors (Patronato), chaired by the Lehendakari (President of the Basque Government), is composed of three "founding patrons": the Basque Government, the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia (Province of Biscay), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, there are "non-founding patrons": some fifteen to twenty large companies and financial entities (banks, industrial groups, telecommunications, energy, etc.), but political influence is considerable. After initially dismissing the citizen mobilization and its arguments, based on the supposed "lever for economic development" of the Guggenheim project, the current president of the Basque government, Imanol Pradales, has gradually softened his stance. The scale of the local protests played a significant role in this shift. The German artist and baroness Hilla von Rebay, "muse" and wife of Solomon R. Guggenheim But it is possible that dissent has taken root within the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation itself. Now controlled by financiers and businessmen, it bears little resemblance to its original spirit, when Solomon R. Guggenheim, from a mining family and a lover of ancient art, decided to dedicate himself to abstract art, which he perceived as possessing a spiritual and utopian dimension. He began exhibiting his acquisitions in his Plaza apartment before opening the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the first showcase for a collection entirely devoted to non-figurative art. History is unfair, however, because only his name has become the "brand" affixed to the facades of museums that, from New York, have spread throughout the world; for his wife, the German artist and Baroness Hilla von Rebay, played a more than decisive role. Settling in New York in the late 1920s, she met Solomon R. Guggenheim and became his artistic advisor, confidante, and the true architect of his collection of non-objective art (Kandinsky, Bauer, Klee, etc.). It was she who encouraged Guggenheim to create the foundation dedicated to this art in 1937, and then to open the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, which she directed until 1952. She played a decisive role in the commission given to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 to design a "temple" of abstract art: the future rotunda of the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is largely the product of her vision. After the death of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1949), the family and the new leadership marginalized her; She was ousted from the management, then practically erased from the official history of the museum, to the point of not being invited to the inauguration of the building in 1959. Long forgotten, she has been rehabilitated since the 2000s as a major figure, both an artist and a "curatorial genius", without whom the Guggenheim would have neither its founding collection nor its iconic building. Did the ghost of Hilla von Rebay, having read certain articles about the Guggenheim Bilbao project, particularly the recent one on les humanités, surreptitiously attend a Guggenheim Foundation board meeting, expressing her displeasure by threatening to overturn the board? We lack precise sources to state this with certainty, but the hypothesis is not unwelcome; for once, journalism might actually be useful... Press release (in English) from the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop Platform. In any case, the collectives, including the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, are now calling it a historic victory for Urdaibai, "one of the most important wetlands in Europe," and a precedent against large-scale cultural projects touted as levers for green development (see video HERE). While Basque institutions promise to "rethink" the future of the region, local movements remind us that the urgent task is not to replace one mega-museum with another iconic landmark, but to build, with the residents, a model based on wetland restoration, agroecology, slow tourism, and ecological commons. So, a celebration is planned for February 7th. We'll report from Guernica... Jean-Marc Adolphe (1). Busturialdea is a coastal comarca in Biscay, in the Spanish Basque Country, which largely corresponds to the territory of the Urdaibai biosphere reserve. It covers approximately 280 km² and comprises about twenty municipalities, the two main urban and administrative centers of which are Bermeo and Gernika-Lumo. Inheriting from the former merindad of Busturia, the comarca combines fishing ports (Bermeo, Mundaka), small industrial or service towns (Gernika-Lumo, Murueta, Forua), and a mosaic of rural villages nestled against the marshes, hills, and forests of Urdaibai. It has around 46,000 inhabitants, with an aging population and a fragile economic structure (limited employment, declining industrial activity), which fuels debates on a development model that reconciles socio-economic revitalization with the preservation of one of the most important wetland complexes in the Basque Country. Investigative journalism isn't free. We've chosen a completely free, ad-free website that relies solely on reader support. Donations or subscriptions HERE And to receive our newsletter: https://www.leshumanites-media.com/info-lettre
Olivier Masmonteil: painting the landscape, then exploring the invisible
Olivier Masmonteil, Sans titre 5, 2024, Huile sur toile, 180x160cm Extensive interview followed by portfolio review: painter Olivier Masmonteil looks back on the three major phases of his artistic life — from his apprenticeship to the “destruction” of painting — and his quest for a pictorial language capable of capturing not only the visible landscape, but also what lies beneath it, echoing the profound transformations of the world around him. Olivier Masmonteil, born in 1973 in Romilly-sur-Seine, is one of the most unique French painters of his generation. Based in Paris, he draws inspiration from his childhood in Corrèze and his almost constant travels. Long identified as a ‘landscape painter,’ he has turned this seemingly academic genre into a veritable laboratory where intimate memories, art history and fantasies of the horizon are replayed. Trained at the Académie Jacques Gabriel Chevalier in Brive and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, Olivier Masmonteil persisted in painting even when he was told he would soon die, claiming a scrupulous, technical craft, patiently built up over time. His landscapes, often composed from memory, function as sensitive cartographies where memories of Corrèze, reminiscences of long journeys and indirect references to the great masters, from classical painting to the modern avant-garde, are superimposed. Since 2012, the artist has broadened his scope to other genres – portraiture, nudes, still lifes – while continuing to revisit the collective memory of painting through vast series, like chapters in an ongoing pictorial novel. Remaining faithful to figurative art but working with layers, collages and shifts in scale, he composes images in which the horizon becomes a motif, a vanishing point and a philosophical question, inviting the viewer to inhabit the painting rather than contemplate it from a distance. His recent exhibition ‘Parfois j'ai peint le paysage’ (Sometimes I painted the landscape), presented from November 2024 to January 2025 in the Salons Aguado of the Hôtel d'Augny in Paris, continued this reflection on the persistence of landscape in the contemporary era: far from the postcard, the canvas becomes a territory of experimentation where the desire to paint, doubt, and the stubborn joy of continuing to look at the world confront each other. Olivier Masmonteil in his Paris studio, March 2019. Photo by Frédéric Elin. INTERVIEW Isabelle Favre - You believe that an artist's life, particularly that of a painter, is built in three stages. Is this also true for you? Olivier Masmonteil - In my own story, I see three chapters. Chapter 1, the possibility of painting. Chapter 2, the pleasure of painting, and Chapter 3, destroying painting. I have observed these three stages in the life of a painter in the great artists I admire. With Titian (who died in 1576 in Venice), it began with his apprenticeship with Bellini, the first chapter of the possibility of painting. Then he became the greatest Mannerist painter in Venice: this was the second phase. Finally, in the third phase, his palette darkened: he lost his son, and Venice was ravaged by the plague. We sense that something else was inhabiting him. In the 19th century: Claude Monet. During his apprenticeship with Eugène Boudin, he was introduced to outdoor painting. Then began the great Impressionist phase. At the age of 50, the series appeared: haystacks, Rouen cathedrals, the bends of the Seine, and then, of course, the water lilies: we sense that there is another concern in his painting. Closer to home, Pierre Soulages: after a period of apprenticeship, then a period of lyrical abstraction, the Outrenoirs I also found these three phases of life in the parable of the camel, the lion and the child told by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: first, the camel's journey through the desert, with its culture and education. Then comes the lion phase, the phase where we address the world with a feeling of omnipotence. And then, in the last phase, the child must kill the lion in order to rediscover, in a way, the innocence of the beginning. We find the notion of eternal return... In concrete terms, how did you approach these three chapters? Olivier Masmonteil - Initially, with my original landscape; I grew up in Limousin, in a village near Tulle, Saint-Fortunade. It was the landscape around me that inspired me, I did a lot of fly fishing: there were rivers, waterfalls, skies. I learned to paint by looking at the landscape. Then, after my first exhibitions, I wanted to understand the language of painting by studying that of the greatest painters. I began to draw inspiration from them, copying some, working in a profusion of subjects and painting styles. Finally, in 2024, I felt the need to evolve my painting once again, to go a little further, and I realised that I was entering chapter 3, which I call ‘Destroying painting’. I find that this ultimately corresponds well with my current attitude towards landscape, a more sensory attitude towards the invisible aspects of landscape, which forces me to destroy everything I have learned. Destroying landscape in painting, but is there an underlying idea about the evolution of the landscape around you? Olivier Masmonteil - Yes, I'm approaching this period in my work at a time when the world is collapsing around me, that is to say, the rivers where I learned to fish are disappearing; little by little, they are losing their life. The Dordogne River, where I fished a lot, is disappearing. There are no more insects, no more fish. It's very sad. Some of the rivers where I learned to fish with my grandfather have completely disappeared; they've dried up. Some trees are dying. Inevitably, my relationship with the landscape is changing. That's my subject, and my subject is dying. So I paint it in a more sensory way, seeking the invisible aspects of the landscape. It's a change of motif: from a visible motif, the tree, the river, the waterfalls, to an invisible motif, the wind, the heat, a form of light, motifs that are much less tangible, difficult to represent, either with photography or with painting. Music has been able to represent it, classically Vivaldi's The Four Seasons: when you listen to this music, you hear, you ‘see’ spring, but it is not a visible representation. Are you trying to represent these invisible figures? Olivier Masmonteil - In fact, it's more of a presence than a figure or a representation. We sense that there may be a character in the painting, we sense that there may be a river, but it is not materialised by what represents it. It is materialised by the emotion it can provoke, by colours. Suddenly, one colour becomes more liquid, another colour more material. And oil painting allows that. To achieve this, it took me 25 years of painting to understand the tools of painting and, at the same time, to understand how to represent things from the invisible world. You have painted a lot in series, and even several series at once. Can you describe this way of working? Olivier Masmonteil - First of all, there are technical reasons: oil paint takes a certain amount of time to dry, so every time I work on a painting, I have to wait a week or ten days before I can pick it up again. This gives me time to start others. These series evolve according to the format and what I am trying to evoke: some series are more about the night, others are more about a season or a type of environment. I usually start several at once, five or six paintings in a series. Often, working on several paintings at the same time means that the paintings feed off each other. A solution I've found on one painting, I test on another; an accident that happened on one painting can make something else appear on a painting next to it. Working on several paintings at the same time, in different formats, allows me to explore a subject in different ways. Are you saying that a painter spends more time looking at their painting than painting it? Olivier Masmonteil - In painting, the actual time spent working is very short compared to the time spent thinking and observing. Again, it's a technical issue because you have to let it dry. But that's not all. No, not only that. When a painting seems finished, I usually hide it so I don't see it for 10 days. Because it's a way of letting it rest a little, and when I turn it over to look at it again, elements stand out that need to be changed, or conversely, I say to myself, ‘Now it's finished, everything works correctly.’ You mentioned the different sizes of the canvases you work on. What do these differences create? Olivier Masmonteil - I classify paintings into three sizes: those smaller than me, those larger than me, and those that are my size. The ones smaller than me are 50 cm by 60 cm maximum. With these paintings, you have a more intellectual relationship; you sit in front of the canvas, as if you were writing, you intellectualise much more, you have to use much less material, so more subtle things happen. In the paintings that are larger than me, we are totally immersed; these paintings involve the body, it's almost like dancing in front of the painting, we are forced to make big gestures. There is this relationship with the body and immersion in the landscape, as if the body were in the landscape. With the intermediate sizes, there is a confrontation between the body and the mind, how to manage to blend the two. In another phase of your work, you revisited, in your own way, the paintings of masters, of painters who have marked the history of art. Can you explain what motivates you, what you want to create through this work? Olivier Masmonteil - This work is part of the previous chapter, 'The pleasure of painting ‘. Each painter has their own language, and I wanted to understand the language of those I loved. I wanted to try to learn to speak ’Vermeer‘, to speak ’Poussin‘, to speak ’Titian‘, to speak “Courbet”, to speak ’Monet". The only way we can acquire this language as painters is by copying, to try to understand how these painters used colour, how they used their palette, how they worked their brushstrokes, how they created their paintings. After entering into this language through copying and beginning to understand it, I wanted to bring it into a language that was my own. I tried to see how I could make Vermeer's language my own, how I could bring it back to myself, starting from him. Is there a form of dialogue, then? Olivier Masmonteil - Yes, there is a form of dialogue. When you copy a painter, you feel like you're talking to them. And there were some quite unsettling moments in the studio, with the certainty that the palette we had found was the palette Vermeer had used at that moment. Then, all of a sudden, you say to yourself, ‘He used that blue!’ And that blue, if I mix it with the pink he used just before, gives me the purple of another element in the painting. You rediscover how a particular colour was used by that painter; in a way, it's like a recipe. Does colour play a decisive role? Olivier Masmonteil - I think colour plays a role for all painters, but... it's not the same. And then there have been developments throughout the history of art. During the Renaissance, pigments were diversified and oil painting was invented. Venice was an important port where mineral and organic pigments arrived from all over the world. Colour exploded, making the Venetians ‘painters of colour’. At the same time, in northern Europe, Flemish painters invented oil painting. The Renaissance in painting was the meeting of north and south, the meeting of oil painting and colour. At that time, colour was worked on palettes in a linear fashion. That is to say, one started with one shade, moved horizontally to another, and composed one's colour in this way. In the mid-19th century, a scientist named Chevreul, who was very interested in colour, established the theory of three primary colours that could be used to create all the other colours of the colour wheel. Painters began to change the way they painted and to break down colour in a circular fashion. The invention of the paint tube made it possible to paint outdoors. All of this completely changed the way colour was used. More recently, chemical pigments have appeared, which have once again changed the way colour is used. The manufacture of colours became industrialised, which brought down the price of paint, making new approaches possible in the 20th century. You mention the price of paint for painters. Are you also sensitive to forms of elitism on the part of viewers, to the recent financialisation of art? Olivier Masmonteil - Painting has always been associated with power. Since Lascaux, painting has had something magical about it. It certainly served to explain myths; the first painters were probably shamans. Later, paintings were used to represent battles, the power of kings and princes, and the power of the church, in the service of power. In the 17th century, the bourgeoisie began to take an interest in painting, which became an outward sign of wealth in their homes. In Flanders, as in Italy and France, painting, while becoming more democratic, remained the preserve of a certain bourgeois class who could commission paintings. In the mid-20th century, avant-garde movements attempted to challenge bourgeois painting: artists such as Marcel Duchamp, the Supports/Surfaces group, etc. In the 1980s, painting began to be the subject of real financial speculation: people bought paintings in the hope of reselling them at a higher price. This made the fortune of auction houses, led to the rise of galleries, and fuelled the fantasy that a painting bought for €5,000 could later be worth several million. So this led to the financialisation of the art world. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988, everyone wanted to own a Basquiat painting, which triggered a surge in prices. Since then, many ultra-wealthy people have sought to speculate on art. It is made up of unique pieces. In a capitalist market, a unique piece is extremely valuable when it can be reproduced infinitely. In a consumer society where clothes can be manufactured infinitely, objects can also be manufactured infinitely. Art creates unique objects. In my opinion, we have reached the peak of this speculation with paintings worth several million. Some living painters are challenging the financial value placed on their own paintings, saying that because people focus so much on the money they represent, they no longer look at them. A parallel can be drawn with speculation on wine: people buy a bottle of Pétrus, but they don't drink it because it's too expensive. In the end, no one knows what Pétrus tastes like because no one wants to drink it and everyone keeps the bottle in their cellar. In the same way today, some paintings no longer leave their vaults. Are artists currently taking action to combat this trend? Olivier Masmonteil - Exactly. To combat this speculation. Last October, Art Basel Paris took place [FIAC - The International Contemporary Art Fair, which had been held every year since 1974 in October in Paris, ended in 2022 and was taken over by the Swiss group MCH, owner of the Art Basel fair, a ‘brand’ - Editor's note]; it is the global contemporary art market. I went to visit it: most of the stands had paintings worth several million euros. Clearly, the purpose of this fair is not to admire the beauty of the paintings, but to find out how much they are worth and whether buying a particular work of art is a good investment. In an attempt to break out of this system, there are more and more initiatives by painters. One example is the use of multiples: lithography, engraving and all printmaking techniques allow several copies of a work to be made, which brings down its price. In addition, some artists refuse to sell their works above a certain price. The difficulty lies in not being taken over by the market. As far as I'm concerned, if I sell a work for €5,000 tomorrow, I try to make sure that the person is actually buying it for its artistic value, because they like the painting and are not going to resell it for much more in six months' time. In a way, we choose the people we sell our paintings to. What role do galleries play? Olivier Masmonteil - Some gallery owners exhibit a successful artist and ask them to always do the same thing. Or the gallery owner says to themselves, ‘I'm exhibiting this artist and I'm going to get a very big collector to buy their work, which will increase its price’. Very few gallery owners say, "What I like is this artist's approach, and I'm going to support them for as long as possible to see how far they can take this journey, this approach ." I work very little with galleries to avoid these pitfalls. The rare gallery I do work with is the Antoine Dupin Gallery: I like it very much because what interests them is seeing how I develop my work. To this end, it tries to promote and, of course, sell my work, but at a price that we both agree is fair, without trying to inflate it to excessively high levels. This would deprive a number of people of the opportunity to purchase a work and would also be at odds with my desire to maintain a certain degree of sobriety. I am sensitive to arguments in favour of ending consumer society. I don't need to sell at high prices because I don't want a big car. I don't want to sell something that I can't afford to buy myself. I don't want to spend money unnecessarily. My work as a painter is enough for me, and the money I earn is perfectly sufficient for me to live a very happy life. Do you place a lot of importance on the collective? Olivier Masmonteil - The profession of painter is often seen as something very solitary. This has not always been the case in the history of art. Until the mid-19th century, painters worked in studios. There were lots of people around them, people who ground the pigments, people who prepared the backgrounds and the canvas frames. It was inevitably a collective endeavour. The studios communicated with each other. Some apprentices moved from one studio to another. More recently, artists have worked in a slightly more solitary manner, but they still enjoyed getting together. In the Impressionist movement, Renoir and Monet, for example, exchanged ideas and worked together a lot. We can see their two paintings entitled La Grenouillère [a guinguette on the island of La Grenouillère on the bends of the Seine downstream from Paris, editor's note]: they painted side by side, comparing their approaches to the same subject. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and others would gather around the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, surrounded by poets, to work together, frequent the same cafés, exchange ideas, discuss and debate painting. This spirit lives on. When I went to work in Germany, I saw that this collective spirit was very much alive. I tried to import it to France. Today, once again, many artists are coming together to work together. Do you also have an educational approach? Olivier Masmonteil - I enjoyed doing that for about ten years, but today I prefer to devote myself much more to my work. There was a time when I tried to do a lot of teaching because I met many artists who came to discuss painting with me and I realised that they had no knowledge of art history, many gaps in their technique, and many did not really know how to draw. Instead of trying to advise them, I decided to make videos to give them some ideas for how to work. I worked with Lefranc-Bourgeois and we worked on different aspects: using colour, oil painting, mediums, stretching canvas, drawing better. With all these short videos, I wanted to convey that painting is a real profession, and that it is a profession that can be learned. For me, it took 10 years: 5 years of study with a teacher of classical painting and drawing, then 5 years at art school trying to understand contemporary painting and question it. So I tackled chapter 1, which we talked about: perfecting my artistic education, enriching it with reading, reading about art history, reading philosophy, everything that constitutes the background you need to have when you want to paint. Today, many people go out and buy paint and a canvas and do whatever they want on it. It's very exhilarating to do whatever you want on a canvas. It's a lot of fun. Like a child playing with paint. In nursery school, children are given paint. They have fun, they do all sorts of things. It's very exhilarating. But when you want to become a professional painter, you have to know how to question, how to develop your own language. To develop your own language, you have to acquire that of others. It takes practice and time. I just read a short book of interviews between Charles Juliet and Fabienne Verdier. She describes her apprenticeship in calligraphy. She went to Asia for ten years to meet a master calligrapher. She slept in front of his door for three months so that he would agree to teach her. He told her it would take ten years. When he finally agreed, she rejoiced, ‘That's it, I'll be able to draw.’ But her master made her sit and contemplate a landscape for a year. He told her, ‘Before you learn to represent things, you must learn to look.’ That's exactly what I experienced when I learned to draw. Learning to draw is learning to look. And that takes a long time. ... and involves new experiences, constantly? Your recent return to outdoor painting? Olivier Masmonteil - When I was at art school, I was exposed to the outdoors, which I really enjoyed. As I said, I worked outdoors a lot when I was 20-25, when I had my studio in Limousin. Three or four years ago, I revisited that experience. I really wanted to get out of the studio and reconnect with the landscape. And I rediscovered this totally different way of painting when you're outdoors. That is to say, you can't necessarily paint what you see, because what you see is constantly changing. The light changes, the clouds change. You have to paint something else. And that's where, little by little, I became aware of this necessity: trying to paint the invisible aspects of the landscape. When I went back to the studio, I had to remain completely immersed in this feeling in order to be able to paint, especially memories, the memory of all those landscapes that had shaped me. Once or twice a year, I now do outdoor sessions where I go away for three weeks to a month to work on a landscape. I can see it in the morning, in the evening, during the day, when it rains, when the weather is fine. And all this variety of light, atmosphere and landscape feeds into the work a little more. In June 2025, I had the chance to have an exciting experience. I was able to paint the Water Lily Pond. I was able to go there after the garden closed. I was all alone on the pond, trying to confront this subject that Monet had created and painted for 20 years. I love these paintings very much. I tried to understand what he was painting and why he had built this pond and why he was able to paint it for years until his death. Interview by Isabelle Favre, October 2025 PORTFOLIO Sans-titre, 2024. Huile sur toile,180x160cm Sans-titre, 2024. Huile sur toile,180x160cm Souvenir de paysage, 2025. Huile sur toile, 110-x-130-cm Série "Paysages effacés" Voyages effacés, 2021. Huile-sur-toile, 55x46cm Voyages effacés, 2021. Huile-sur-toile, 162x130-cm Madagascar, souvenirs effacés, 2019. Huile-sur-toile,120x100cm Madagascar, souvenirs effacés, 2019. Huile sur toile,100x120cm REMINDER. 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14 décembre. Jour d'élection, en direct du Chili
Gael Yeomans, porte-parole de Jeannette Jara, candidate de gauche à l'élection présidentielle au Chili. Photo DR With Victoria Luz, our young new correspondent in Latin America, and in exclusive partnership with a Chilean media outlet that shares our values, Les Humanités is travelling to Chile for the day and evening to cover the presidential election. As an appetiser to this continuous feed (first results at 11 p.m., and until then, news briefs, articles, exclusive analyses, surveys, interviews, etc.): a portrait of Gael Yeomans, the young campaign manager for Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate; and an exclusive interview in French with Isabel Allende. PICTURE OF THE DAY Top of publication. Gael Yeomans, 37, is the spokesperson and campaign manager for Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate in the Chilean presidential election. Born in 1988 in Rancagua (a Chilean city in the central zone, capital of the province of Cachapoal and the Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins region, located about 100 kilometres south of Santiago, it now forms a conurbation with Machalí, in the heart of an agricultural and wine-growing area also marked by copper mining), Gael Yeomans belongs to a generation that burst onto the political scene through street activism rather than traditional parties. A lawyer trained at the University of Chile, specialising in social security, she has established herself as one of the most prominent figures on the left, emerging from student and feminist movements. Having been involved in the Communist Youth and then in libertarian collectives, Gael Yeomans helped found the Frente Amplio before becoming the first president of Convergencia Social, Gabriel Boric's party. Elected as a Member of Parliament in 2017 in a district of Santiago, she represents the working-class communities in the south of the capital and saw her vote share increase significantly when she was re-elected in 2021. In Parliament, she heads the Labour and Finance committees, where she advocates for reforms in pensions, workers' rights and gender equality. In 2025, she reached a milestone by becoming campaign manager for Gonzalo Winter, the Frente Amplio's presidential candidate, confirming her role as a key strategist for the progressive camp. An outspoken feminist and heir to the ‘estallido social’ protests, Gael Yeomans embodies a left that is both institutional and grassroots, seeking to transform the momentum of the streets of Santiago into a lasting majority at the ballot box. NEWS OF THE DAY In the aftermath of the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the entire French press repeated it in every possible and imaginable way (based on an AFP dispatch that lazy editors did not deem necessary to verify?): the far right is ‘at the gates of power’. Bucking this tremendous media tsunami, we were the only ones in the French press to take a closer look and offer a different perspective: ‘In Chile, Jeannette is holding on’ (HERE) and ‘In Chile, it's over, but not yet’ (HERE). The news has already confirmed what we suspected: as we wrote on 17 November, Franco Parisi, the ‘populist’ candidate who came third with 19.71% of the vote, did not succumb to the siren calls of José Kast, the son of a Nazi (and Pinochet nostalgic). In an interview with the Argentine daily La Nación, the leader of the ‘Partido de la Gente’ (People's Party) believes that Kast ‘has no credible plan’ and that Jeannette Jara is ‘a good candidate’. Some of his voters will follow his instruction to cast a blank ballot, but many will vote for Jeannette Jara, even though she is a communist... The outcome is far from certain, as the two major Kast-Jara debates have seriously damaged the image of the far-right candidate as the favourite, who now appears to be on the defensive rather than presenting a solid programme. During their last televised face-off, Kast failed to reverse the momentum: the duel was deemed bitter and confusing, and many analysts believe that no decisive ‘Kast effect’ has occurred in the days leading up to the vote. Mirroring this, Jara spent much of the end of the campaign making promises on security, a favourite theme of the right. She has taken a much firmer stance on crime, the ‘overoles blancos’ (1) and trafficking, while relying on measures already put in place by the Boric government: the ‘Calles sin Violencia’ (Streets without Violence) plan, increased police presence in working-class neighbourhoods, and, above all, a new municipal security law that formalises the role of cities in prevention, joint patrols with the police, control of public spaces and support for victims. In other words, far from arriving unarmed on this terrain, the left-wing candidate can claim very concrete tools already signed and financed by the executive, while Kast continues to promise an authoritarian restoration that is more incantatory than quantified. (1). The ‘overoles blancos’ are groups of hooded high school students who cover themselves in white protective suits to carry out violent actions in certain iconic high schools in Santiago: these groups are clearly organised by the far right to create a sense of fear. According to information from humanités, this movement was conceived by Alexis López Tapia, leader of the neo-Nazi movement ‘Patria Nueva Sociedad’ in the 2000s and mastermind of a nebulous international constellation called ‘Nationalism and Socialism’, which borrowed the notion of ‘molecular revolution’ from Deleuze and Guattari to create panic, with the help of Catholic and conservative media, based on violent pseudo-insurrectionary movements aimed at destabilising the state. TODAY'S THREAD To closely follow the day and night in Santiago, Chile, we had planned to send Victoria Luz, our new young correspondent in Latin America (outside Colombia, where we have other correspondents). The problem is that she is a student (studying journalism) in Mexico, and a return trip from Mexico City to Santiago costs around €550 (plus incidental expenses while there), which is well beyond our financial means. So we will do open-source journalism as we have learned to do, but also relying on an exclusive partnership with a Chilean media outlet that is similar to us: The Clinic. This newspaper was founded in 1998 as an anti-Pinochet satirical weekly, mocking Pinochet's arrest in London, hence its name, taken from the London Clinic where the dictator was being treated. Today, it has become a pure player in political and social news with a strong tradition of biting humour and investigative journalism. Its tone remains marked by irreverence, caricature and derision, but the site also publishes more traditional investigations, political analyses, columns and reports, particularly on politics, social movements and human rights. The director of The Clinic is now journalist Pamela Castro (photo opposite), and the editor-in-chief is Maximiliano Chávez, under the editorial responsibility of Rodrigo Munizaga. Live news feed from Chile: the first results will be announced and analysed from 11 p.m. Until then, continuous coverage: news briefs, articles, exclusive analyses, surveys, interviews, and more. Here : https://www.leshumanites-media.com/en/post/chile-2025-special-report-and-news-feed Isabel Allende. Photo Sipa Press QUOTE OF THE DAY ISABEL ALLENDE, ‘For love, we do things we wouldn't do out of fear.’ "Women are in danger. There is a return to the far right, and also to fascism, which places women in a submissive role and wants to keep them at home. There is a lot of talk about the traditional woman. In the United States, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a ceremony was held in a stadium, where politics and religion were mixed. People were on their knees, arms raised, comparing Charlie to a prophet, a martyr, Christ. Women must therefore be very careful, because all religions are patriarchal and want women to remain submissive. It is very easy to lose the rights that we have acquired over years of struggle – those of our grandmothers, our mothers – to obtain what we have, which is not yet the end of patriarchy. We continue to live in a patriarchy. But we can lose what we have. In the United States, the right to abortion, which was a federal right, has been lost. It is now up to the state, and there are attempts to remove contraceptives. The goal is for women to be pregnant, ignorant and kept at home as much as possible. (...) Chile is a democracy with very strong institutions. It has a constitution, good or bad, but people comply with it. There are clear rules. And I have enormous confidence in Chile. I think we are a country of the centre, and that whenever we go to extremes, things go wrong. We are always trying to get the pendulum to stop swinging so much and settle in the middle, because that is who we are. And I think that after what we have been through historically, we take great care of our democracy. (...) I write constantly about Chile or about people who come to Chile. I have been away from my country for more than 50 years, but people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ “From Chile,” I reply. Why am I Chilean? I don't know, I wasn't even born here. I was born in Peru. And I spent a few years here when I was little, in my grandfather's house. Then my mother married a diplomat and I started travelling everywhere. I then spent a few years here, married, but very few. Then came the military coup in 1973. I left Chile and became an immigrant in the United States. So why am I Chilean? I have no idea. And why does this land attract me? I don't know. And the land that attracts me most is the south, where I've been the most. When I was little, my grandfather had sheep on a farm in Argentine Patagonia. And once a year, for shearing season, he would take the train south to the end of the line, then trucks, then he would cross the mountains on muleback, and on the other side, Argentine gauchos would welcome him and take him to the farms. These were two-month trips. One year when I was suffering from anaemia, I must have been nine years old, my grandfather took me with him. And that journey through the mountains, forests and volcanoes was unforgettable. It has stayed with me to this day and is my landscape. (...) When I was little, we lived in my grandfather's house, where there was an invisible line separating the part where the family lived and where visitors were received, and the back courtyards, which were like another planet. This division, this social injustice, has marked me throughout my life and disturbs me greatly. (...) I cannot give hope, because hope cannot be given. But I can talk about my experience. I was born in the middle of the Second World War. At the time of the Holocaust, of atomic bombs. Human rights did not exist, the United Nations did not exist. There were 50 million displaced people in Europe alone. After all the horror of that period, those terrible years that saw the emergence of fascism, communism and Nazism, many good things happened. Many good things happened after that; humanity reacted. (...) While it is true that there are times like the one we are currently experiencing and like the one we experienced then, which are very serious, very difficult, causing many deaths, much pain and much violence, history tends towards more progress, more inclusion, more democracy. We are not going backwards. It may seem like we are moving in circles, but we are moving in spirals. (...) In De amor y de sombra, I wrote a sentence that I have often regretted: that fear is the strongest emotion, the most powerful feeling. In fact, I believe it is love. Out of love, we do things we would not do out of fear. And the most impressive love for me, since always, is that of mothers, of all species. We would not exist as a species without this incredible capacity for love that mothers have." (Isabel Allende, excerpts from an interview with Rocío Montes and Andrea Moletto, El País, 24 September 2025) At 83, Isabel Allende, a distant relative of Salvador Allende (her father, diplomat Tomás Allende Pesce, was a first cousin of the Chilean president assassinated in 1973), is now the most widely read Spanish-language writer in the world, with tens of millions of copies sold and translations into more than forty languages. Born in Lima in 1942 into a family of Chilean diplomats, she grew up in Peru, Chile and various Latin American countries, an experience of uprooting that would become one of the recurring themes of her work. A journalist and columnist before devoting herself to novel writing, she was brutally forced into exile after the 1973 coup d'état, first to Venezuela, then to the United States, where she settled in the late 1980s. It was in Caracas that she began The House of the Spirits, born from a long letter to her dying grandfather, which became a worldwide success, blending family saga, Chilean political history and a touch of magical realism. Since then, she has continued to write: from De amor y de sombra to Eva Luna, from historical novels such as Inés del alma mía to the memoirs of Paula, where the illness and death of her daughter transform writing into an act of mourning and survival. Her work explores memory, exile, the status of women and the Latin American imagination, in a rich, narrative language that appeals to both popular readers and academic audiences. Based in California, Isabel Allende claims a dual Chilean and North American identity, and an unapologetic feminism that also informs her foundation dedicated to the rights of women and girls. At over 80 years of age, she continues to publish, travel and comment on Latin American current affairs, revisiting history – from the civil war of 1891 to the coup d'état of 1973 – to shed light on the fears and authoritarian excesses of the present.
Chile 2025. Special report and news feed
To follow the presidential election in Chile, a news feed, supplemented by an evolving dossier (articles, analyses, investigations, interviews...), live access to which was reserved for our subscribers. So, in the end, it was Kast , the son of a Nazi officer. He had no platform, except to cultivate fear. He managed to rally the votes of the "liberal" bourgeoisie, the very same class that had so readily accepted Pinochet's dictatorship; but also, no doubt, of the "ordinary people" who were easily duped by aggressive propaganda. The other media outlets were right (the defeatist press, soon to be collaborationist). But Jeannette Jara, the candidate of the entire left, had garnered "only" 26.85% of the vote in the first round. With 40% of the votes cast in the second round, she considerably improved her score. But it wasn't enough to beat Kast. Clearly, Jara suffered from her "communist" label. For many Chileans today, communism is no longer Cuba but Venezuela. And they see the concrete consequences of the Maduro regime: there are now more than half a million Venezuelans refugees in Chile (out of nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have chosen exile). Most of these undocumented migrants are condemned to poverty. And extreme poverty obviously fosters crime. In other words: the "communist" Nicolas Maduro (staunchly supported in France by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who sees him as a model of the "democracy" he would like to establish here under the guise of a Sixth Republic) is the main architect of the defeat of another, genuine, communist. This lesson should be pondered. Don't despair, though. In Chile, all is not lost. First, Kast won't really have a majority in Parliament to govern. Second, outside of political parties, Chilean "civil society," embodied by young figures, has managed to form and organize itself. It hasn't had its last word. Thank you to those who were kind enough to follow this special edition live from Chile, which required a considerable effort from us, given the extreme modesty of our resources. To conclude this segment, before further analysis in the coming days, here's one more song, "Cuando cuando," by Joé y el Toro. It's a song about love, politics, and hope: "Just tell me how long / I'll wait for you as long as you want / I'll wait until the day cows fly / and the planets align / Just tell me there's a chance / However slim / I'll wait for you until the day / it rains upwards / and the mountains move / Just tell me how long, when, when, when / I'll sit and wait for you, until you tell me / when, when, when, when / I'd move mountains if you told me / when, when, when, when / Even if that day is far away / And there is no when / Invent a when / And I'll keep waiting / If you need time, I'll give it to you, it's free. / I'll wait for you until the day winter is hot and summer is cold. / Luckily I'm patient. / You're lucky." I will wait for you until the day you simply can no longer love me. Just tell me when. I will sit and wait until you tell me when. I would move mountains for you if only you would tell me when, when, when. Even if that day is far away, and there is no when, invent a when that I will continue to wait for. 10:59 PM . Ouch, things are moving fast. Kast is back in the lead, but there are still 80% of the ballots to count. In the meantime, another song, with Mon Laferte, "Otra noche de llorar": Another night to cry. Let's hope not... 10:55 PM . 33,215 votes counted (less than 5%). Kast: 52.62% Jara: 47.38% The result is expected to be much closer than everyone predicted (except for the humanities ). A song to listen to while waiting for the final results, featuring Francisca Valenzuela Song in Chile is part of a long history where rural folklore, protest songs, rock and hip-hop intersect, with some great figures who have become political as well as musical symbols. Pioneers and Nueva Canción Violeta Parra: a founding figure, collector of folklore and author of songs that have become classics, she paved the way for a popular song rooted in the peasant world and social struggles. Víctor Jara: singer, director and activist, linked to Popular Unity, whose voice became emblematic of the Nueva Canción Chilena before his assassination after the 1973 coup. Nueva Canción groups: Quilapayún, Inti‑Illimani, Illapu, but also Patricio Manns, Rolando Alarcón, Margot Loyola, Isabel and Ángel Parra, who combine Andean instruments, political poetry and support for popular movements. From dictatorship to pop/rock Under the dictatorship, part of this movement went underground or into exile, while Chilean rock and pop took over the role of social critic (Los Prisioneros foremost among them). From the 2000s onward, a new generation revisited this legacy: Los Bunkers, Gepe, Javiera Mena, Manuel García, Francisca Valenzuela, among others, combined political memory with the codes of pop, rock, and electronic music. Contemporary Voices Today, two female names dominate the international scene: Ana Tijoux, a French-Chilean rapper, who mixes hip-hop, jazz and political lyrics (feminism, anti-racism, social struggles) and whose tracks like "1977" or "Somos Sur" have become references in Spanish rap. Mon Laferte, a singer who blends bolero, rock and pop, and whose songs like "Tu falta de querer" have propelled her into international charts, while also embracing a feminist and committed stance. Underlying it all, Chilean song has often served as a soundtrack to the great moments in the country's political history – Unidad Popular, dictatorship, social estallido – which explains its symbolic weight in the collective imagination. 9:55 PM . The polling stations close in 5 minutes. Photo by Victor Reyes. 9 p.m. The results of the vote by Chileans in France are not yet known. Jeannette Jara is far ahead with 56.85% of the votes, 62.9% in Spain, 67.85% in the Netherlands, 74.82% in Norway, 75.71% in Denmark and 86.59% in Switzerland. In contrast, José Antonio Kast, son of a Nazi officer who "took refuge" in Chile at the end of World War II, obtained... 95.45% of the votes in Israel! Kast also came out on top in China and the United Arab Emirates. ANALYSIS Kast's Rasputin Tonight, if the far-right candidate, José Antonio Kast, is elected, who will be in his entourage? Cristián Valenzuela, the political strategist closest to José Antonio Kast José Antonio Kast's inner circle did not spring up overnight in 2025: it is rooted in two solid matrices of the Chilean right, the UC Law Faculty of the 1980s (1) and the galaxy of the Jaime Guzmán Foundation (2). Around the Republican candidate gravitate a group of former university classmates, trained in Gremialism (3) under the tutelage of Guzmán, and a younger generation from the foundation, now in charge of the party's intellectual and programmatic apparatus. In the inner circle are lawyers and business engineers who have known Kast for four decades and see themselves as the "crisis committee" capable of calling him at three in the morning to adjust a move or secure a strategic shift. These Derecho UC alumni—Julio Pérez, Patricio Dussaillant, Marco Antonio González, and others—carry the long memory of the project of an authoritarian, Catholic, and anti-statist right wing, as it was forged at the university and in Guzmán's work on the 1980 Constitution. The second core group was formed from the Jaime Guzmán Foundation, a veritable training ground for far-right leaders, from which several of the masterminds of the Republican campaign emerged. Lawyer Cristián Valenzuela plays the role of chief strategist there, often described as Kast's "brains," in charge of communication and ideological framing, while younger figures, such as Sebastián Figueroa or the lawyer Carmen Sosa, work on the profile of a future cabinet and on the legislative translation of campaign promises. Cristián Valenzuela is the lawyer and political strategist closest to José Antonio Kast, often described as the "mastermind" or "Rasputin" of the Republican campaign. A law graduate from the Catholic University (Derecho UC) and trained in the Gremialist school of thought associated with Jaime Guzmán, Valenzuela first worked as a legislative advisor at the Jaime Guzmán Foundation, then in government offices within the right wing (chief of staff at the Undersecretariat of Finance and later at the Ministry of Energy under Piñera). He subsequently became director of development at the UC law school and executive director of the think tank Ideas Republicanas, the Republican Party's policy laboratory. Several investigations have, however, highlighted his remuneration as an "expert" in the System of High Public Administration, responsible for selecting senior officials, even as he attacked public employees in a viral op-ed, calling them "parasites," which fuels criticism of his dual role as a far-right strategist and a consultant paid by the state. The network surrounding Kast thus combines personal loyalty with doctrinal density. His inner circle provides Kast with an ideological framework that goes far beyond the figure of the "anti-establishment family man": a right-wing "republican" project embracing the Guzman legacy, articulated around an ultraliberal vision of the economy, a repressive conception of public order, and unwavering moral conservatism. Behind a few faces under 40, brought to the forefront to appeal to female voters and the urban middle class, the heart of the machine remains controlled by white men from the same university background and the same foundation, for whom the ideal Chile resembles more the ordered utopia of the 1980s than the demands for equality and diversity championed by the social upheaval. See also, on the humanities : “Chile, the faces of the far right,” published on December 19, 2021 (a brief portrait of the Chilean far-right, nostalgic for Pinochet): https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-les-visages-de-l-extr%C3%AAme-droite (1). Faculty of Law of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country, founded in 1888 to train legal elites from an explicitly Christian perspective. (2) The Jaime Guzmán Foundation is a Chilean conservative right-wing think tank, created in 1991 to perpetuate the ideological legacy of Senator Jaime Guzmán, the principal architect of the 1980 Constitution. The Jaime Guzmán Foundation is considered one of the main centers of thought for the Chilean right, with a strong presence in Congress through consulting contracts funded by parliamentary groups. Accredited as an NGO with consultative status at the UN, it combines doctrinal work, training of professionals, and legislative lobbying, serving a conservative agenda regarding society, family, and human rights, and an ultraliberal agenda regarding the economy. (3) Gremialism (gremialismo) is a Chilean right-wing political movement that emerged in the 1960s at the Catholic University of Santiago around Jaime Guzmán, and which subsequently provided the ideological framework for a segment of the current right wing. Doctrinally, Gremialism combines the social doctrine of the Church, anti-communism, national Catholicism, and the defense of a society structured by strong "intermediary bodies" between the individual and the state. This vision justifies both the critique of party democracy and support for a "subsidiary" authoritarian state, as later enshrined in the 1980 Constitution, of which Guzmán was one of the principal architects. Even today, the Jaime Guzmán Foundation and a portion of the republican right explicitly claim this legacy. REPORT: The Mapuche, an indigenous people of Chile, fear for their future under the far right From left to right: The Truful River (or Truful-Truful), an Andean river in the Araucanía region of southern Chile, famous for its waterfalls and volcanic canyons ; Millaray Huichalaf (center of photo) is a Mapuche-Huilliche machi (spiritual and healing authority) and one of the central figures in the defense of the Pilmaiquen River in southern Chile; The first hydroelectric power station on the Pilmaiquen, built in the mid-20th century, is located opposite of a botanical garden managed by the Mapuche people which showcases native trees. The Mapuche, Chile's largest Indigenous group, have endured centuries of struggle. They first resisted the Inca conquest, then the Spanish. They fought back when the fledgling Chilean state annexed their territories and when military dictator Augusto Pinochet devastated their communities by ending collective ownership, allowing the confiscation and sale of their lands to logging companies. Now, the Mapuche, who make up about 12% of Chile's 19 million people, fear a more violent chapter in their history is yet to come, as the country prepares to elect its next president on Sunday in an election expected to hand power to the far right. “The situation will worsen with a far-right government. Our prisons will hold more Mapuche people,” says Mapuche political scientist Karen Rivas Catalán, 37, from her lush property where chickens graze. The frontrunner to win Sunday’s election is José Antonio Kast, a former ultraconservative legislator who promises to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and grant emergency powers to the military and police to fight crime. His rival, the communist Jeannette Jara, who represents the ruling coalition, has also adopted a law-and-order platform to appeal to voters. The Mapuche people are in the crosshairs of a planned repression. A turning point for the Mapuche came during the 2019 social uprising, when Chilean protesters demanding a change to the country's market economy adopted the Mapuche flag and breathed new life into their cause. Leftist President Gabriel Boric came to power promising to withdraw troops from their lands and replace the dictatorship-era constitution with one that would enshrine their rights. But Boric quickly redeployed the army. Mapuche armed groups attacked security forces. The government extended the state of emergency. Voters rejected the proposed constitution, which would have brought about radical social change. The Mapuche conflict simmering in the rolling hills and verdant forests of southern Araucanía is one of the most delicate issues facing Chile's next president. But unlike previous presidential elections, possible solutions to this unrest have barely been mentioned in a campaign focused on voters' fears about organized crime and illegal immigration, to the detriment of almost everything else. When the Mapuche people were mentioned, it was in the context of plans for a severe security crackdown. The latest version of Kast's platform promised that his government would "use all constitutional, legal, and administrative tools, all intelligence and technological means, all the force and all the resources necessary to eradicate terrorism in the region." Kast concluded his campaign in Temuco, a southern city widely considered the capital of the Mapuche people. In a fiery speech delivered from behind bulletproof glass, Kast declared that the Araucanía region around Temuco was "stricken by fear, terror, and vandalism." "These are cowards who attack at night, their faces covered, and who forgive nothing, respect no one's rights," he said of Mapuche militants who have carried out sabotage attacks against soldiers and logging companies they consider invaders of their ancestral lands. "We are going to dismantle this group," he added, to the cheers of his supporters. For years, the region has been under the control of Chile's militarized police, whom the Mapuche accuse of using excessive force. The group's distrust of the state has intensified in recent years with scandals such as the killings of civilians by security forces, including that of an unarmed young Mapuche farmer in 2018. In a dramatic case, a police intelligence unit was investigated in 2017 for fabricating evidence to falsely implicate Mapuche people in terrorist activities. The trial of the accused officers is ongoing. The indigenous group fears a return to the conflicts of the dictatorship era. For Angelina Cayuqueo, 58, a Mapuche language teacher, this election is existential. She is consumed by a “terrible fear” that, under a Kast government, her community will relive the traumas of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. “We already fear that things will turn out like they did under Pinochet, because that’s what they intend to do,” she says, while picking cherries on her land. During his two previous presidential campaigns, Kast repeatedly expressed his desire to amend a land restitution law enacted after Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, which allows the Mapuche to reclaim ancestral lands seized under the dictatorship. At his last rally, Kast criticized the program, calling it a way "to expropriate land and give it to those who occupy it illegally." Although hundreds of thousands of hectares that had been given to non-Mapuche farmers and logging companies during the dictatorship have been returned to the Mapuche in recent decades, the program has done little to change the marginalization and endemic poverty of this group. "For them, it's not right that we, the Mapuche, are getting our land back," says Angelina Cayuqueo. "They wish the Mapuche people had never existed in history." Victor Caivano and Isabel Debre / Associated Press 6:15 PM 6 PM MAJOR INTERVIEW Claudio Fuentes, political scientist: "Polarization is not perceptible in daily life, but it is very strong at the political level." Claudio Fuentes, director of the UDP's Institute for Social Science Research, explains why Chilean polarization is more noticeable in the public sphere than within families, and how different social "niches" are grappling with the choice between hope, fear, and resignation. He adds that Chile has not shifted to the right, according to his polls. "In terms of priorities, this middle segment wants more government intervention, wants guarantees, wants protection, wants the police, but also wants a certain level of security and protection, which is what Kast promises." There has been much talk about polarization. Do your survey responses reflect this? Examining the findings, we find that many Chileans still identify as centrists, for example, or say they have no problem sitting down at a table with someone of a different political opinion. Regarding polarization, we asked the following question: to what extent do you feel polarized within your family, extended family, friends, work, country, and politics? And, generally, there's a perception that there isn't polarization in my immediate circle, but that it exists at the national level, and particularly in politics. The perception of polarization isn't present in daily life, perhaps due to a kind of bubble effect: we spend time with people who are closer to us and, consequently, we have fewer ideological disagreements. But it's very strong at the political level. In other words, polarization is perceived as a national phenomenon, but one that doesn't affect my personal life. You said you wanted to know what Chileans talk about, since they don't really talk about politics at the dinner table. So what do they talk about? Security and immigration, which are the topics addressed by the presidential candidates, or do they talk about other things? The issue of fear and insecurity is clearly a topic on the table. I don't know if it comes up in Sunday dinner conversations, but it certainly does in chats with friends. People are living in a state of alert, due to this mass media coverage, in addition to the sheer volume of information. The other very prominent issue concerns economic instability, the feeling that things are not working very well. The other phenomenon is a desire to have a better time, a better quality of life. A desire to travel, to go out, to have healthier relationships—and this also generates conversations. Today, Chile is very segmented into niches; conversations will be very different depending on the group you're talking to, whether it's young or old, high or low socioeconomic levels. Photo Carlos Rodríguez / The Clinic The latest Clima Social poll asked respondents about their feelings regarding the second round; 42% had negative words, and the most repeated were "hope" and "fear". First, this is a long cycle, following five years of uninterrupted elections. This is the first time we'll have two years without elections. So there's clearly election fatigue. Second, there's a mix of emotions. On the one hand, those with more positive and hopeful feelings are the Kast voters. People who identify with the right tend to have a more optimistic view of the end of the government; the idea of change is important. The progressive "tribe" is very uncertain; they're very afraid of losing their social benefits. This represents about 35 to 40% of people who are afraid of what's to come. Afraid of what? Because of security concerns and the armed forces, the erosion of social rights is very pronounced in this segment. And there's another segment that's optimistic and tends to lean more to the right. They tend to want things to change quickly and radically. I think Kast targeted this segment well—the desire for radical change—which is what he proposed in his platform. And then there's a segment we've estimated at around 20%, almost 30%, which is what we call "resigned pragmatism." That is, they want things, they want things to happen to them, but they also have a certain sense of resignation. A certain frustration, a certain way of saying, "I have to keep working." But they want things to change: they want jobs, they don't want this feeling of insecurity. And this segment, which is very anti-political, is very affected by this. This segment is against politics in general and doesn't believe in it much, but they still have to go and vote. Can we establish a link between these 20% and some and the voters of Parisi? Yes, absolutely. That's where Parisi's voter base lies. It consists of the most disadvantaged social classes, the lower middle class, primarily men. These are segments of the population that are very concerned, first and foremost, about security, then about employment and economic growth. You also asked respondents how they saw Chile's future over the next four years, and the dominant response was "optimistic" or "very optimistic." Is this because Chileans are shifting to the right? Are many relieved by the end of the Boric government? First of all, I think Chile hasn't shifted to the right. Because when you look at what it means to be right-wing and what it means to be left-wing, being right-wing is generally linked to a certain way of thinking, a certain worldview. For example, right-wing people in Chile are more pro-market. They are less fond of the state, so they are more conservative on issues of individual liberties, abortion, euthanasia, and sexual diversity. The left wants more government intervention, but it is also more supportive of individual liberties. What we've seen in the polls is that these ways of thinking remain more or less stable, and that in fact, this middle segment, which will determine the outcome of the election, voted first against the left-wing constitution, then against the right-wing constitution. So, can we say that all of Chile has shifted to the right? No, it depends on the circumstances. And I think we're currently in a situation where the demand from this particular segment is very favorable to order, very eager to restore a certain social order. And Kast promises them that. I think that, following the logic that all of Latin America has followed regarding the replacement of governments, they're saying to themselves: we need change, let's give Kast a chance. But there's a segment, 40%, that will continue not to vote for Kast. In your polls, a large majority of Chileans support abortion in three cases, euthanasia, sex education, and gender education, which also marked the campaign. It's important to know that even if Kast is elected, in terms of values, there has already been an irreversible shift in Chile. Absolutely, that's the great paradox of this election: you have a candidate who had to hide or not mention a part of his platform that, according to him, concerns individual liberties, and which could cost him the election. He knows that if he addresses these issues, he'll lose voters. For example, women. In general, since Bachelet's first term, starting in 2006, they began voting more progressively, and this trend has continued. In fact, it was women who gave Boric the victory. Today, women are much more liberal than men on these issues: abortion, euthanasia, sex education in schools, the morning-after pill—all these issues. And yet, they are more inclined to vote for Kast. Why? Because security has become the number one priority. So it's not that women are less liberal; they haven't become radicalized in that direction. Given this week's debate, one of the biggest challenges for the next president will be unity. Ultimately, it comes down to a choice between a Republican and a Communist candidate. How do you unite the electorate after that? How do we govern this country? Absolutely, I think this will pose a problem during the next term. The current Congress is more polarized than the previous one, there are fewer channels of communication between its members, and its political experience is less, as it includes many more newcomers in the areas of legislation and negotiation. And with very different visions for the country between the Kast camp and the progressive wing, managing this next administration will be very difficult. Is Chile likely to experience four very turbulent years if Kast is to lead the country? Much will depend on his ability to address the urgent issues he has identified—immigration, crime, and economic growth—without infringing on certain rights. If Parliament decides to ban abortion in three cases, there will obviously be a feminist backlash. Or to limit working hours to 40 per week, which has been the subject of debate. That's why he was careful to emphasize that he wouldn't do that, because he knows that once he started doing so, it could increase the level of conflict. But I think there will be a waiting period; in Chile, there has always been a period of adjustment. Based on the responses of those interviewed, is it possible for a communist candidate to be elected in Chile? I think the probability is low, because of course, the history of the Communist Party has a much stronger symbolic weight, and therefore it is very difficult for a person affiliated with the PC to become president... At noon in Chile (4 p.m. in France), Jeanette Jara: voted. 5 p.m. (1 p.m. in Chile). Gas fraud With a cloudy sky and With temperatures reaching 13°C, the Chilean capital experienced a somewhat cool election day in the morning, with the high expected to reach 20°C in the afternoon. By 10:00 AM, according to Servel ( the public body that organizes and oversees elections in Chile) , 98% of the votes had already been counted. As in the first round, long lines began forming at police stations for those wishing to abstain from voting. José Antonio Kast voted at 10:00 a.m. The left-wing candidate was expected around noon to vote in Conchalí, and she had already spent a few minutes with the press this morning after arriving at her mother's house in the same municipality, where she had breakfast with her family. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., but in Punta Arenas, President Boric exercised his right to vote in this second round (photo opposite). In this context, he declared: “Today, for the last time as President of the Republic, I exercised my right to vote. This is an opportunity to emphasize that we must never take this right and this duty for granted. We must protect it, respect it, and honor it. We must also be aware of the responsibility that it entails. The decision of each of you has an impact on the common destiny of our homeland.” A little later, former President Michelle Bachelet voted at La Reina. When asked whether her support for Jara, should Kast win, might affect her intentions to join the UN, she said: “It is not for me to decide the foreign policy of the president-elect. Now, the truth is that I have my principles and I don't sell out. I have my principles, and no one doubts my electoral choice. I think some people thought I wouldn't do anything because I had to protect my electorate. But the truth is, if I go to the United Nations, it will be for the same reason, without fearing pressure from anyone. A UN candidacy is a matter of state, not political affiliation.” Meanwhile, one of the morning's controversies was the official complaint filed with Servel by Jeannette Jara's campaign team regarding an unprecedented situation involving the gas company Lipigas. Some of its customers received text messages explicitly urging the company to vote for far-right candidate José Antonio Kast in the second round: "Lipigas with Kast #Evopoli. Vote for Kast. #NoMigrantsDelincuentes. At Lipigas, we are committed to rebuilding our country! #ChileXlosChilenos #NoMigrantes #CaribeñosAlCaribe," read the curious message sent by the company to its customers via the LipiApp. The company responded by claiming its accounts had been hacked. The first news reaching Chile regarding the second round concerns the closure of polling stations abroad. New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, among others, were the first countries to open the polls for the 160,000 Chilean citizens voting abroad. According to unofficial figures, bad news arrived from New Zealand for Jeannette Jara in this second round. She obtained 68% of the vote, compared to 28% for Kast: the percentage seems promising, but it is the lowest result obtained by the left in that country (in 2021, Gabriel Boric won with 86% of the vote). Headline of the newspaper Le Monde , this morning at 6 a.m.: "chronicle of a defeat foretold". Yet Le Monde has a special correspondent on the ground. Proof of her professionalism: she left her home to go to the center of Santiago (she wouldn't dare venture beyond the affluent neighborhoods) to Plaza Baquedano, which is under construction and surrounded by wooden barriers. There, she still managed to meet Evangelina Gonzalez, a 37-year-old shop assistant. She is the only person "interviewed" (one sentence) in the entire article. Truly great journalism! In the Maule region, 196 free transport services are operating at 100% to transport voters from rural areas to their polling stations. 4:00 PM. Defeat or victory: fear or love? 2:15 p.m. In memoriam. Violeta Parra Violeta Parra (1917-1967) is the great founding figure of modern Chilean popular song, a singer, composer, poet, visual artist, and tireless collector of rural folklore. Born into a modest family of musicians and farmers, she traveled throughout the Chilean countryside from the 1950s onwards to collect songs, cuecas, and romances, which she recorded, rearranged, and broadcast on the radio, while also composing her own works. In the 1950s and 60s, her stays in Europe, particularly in Paris, established her as an ambassador of a reinvented Chilean popular culture, before her return to Santiago where she created a Museum of Folk Art in Concepción and later the "Carpa de La Reina," a space for concerts and creative expression blending music, visual arts, and neighborhood life. Her repertoire—from "Gracias a la vida" to "Run Run se fue pa'l norte" and "Volver a los 17"—became a cornerstone of the future Nueva Canción Chilena, through its way of embracing love, poverty, injustice, and popular dignity. Violeta Parra committed suicide in 1967, at the age of 49, leaving behind a dazzling body of work that still influences Chilean and Latin American song, as much through its melodies as through its conception of art as an act of memory and resistance. 2 p.m. In the rearview mirror Since May 2021, there have already been 104 publications dedicated to Chile. Some reading suggestions to get up to date. In 2021-2022, around the time of Gabriel Boric's election and the work of the Constituent Assembly: July 7, 2021. Chile: Elisa Loncon, for History https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-elisa-loncon-pour-l-histoire For Javier Agüero Águila, a professor of philosophy, the Mapuche academic Elisa Loncon, elected on July 4th as president of the Constituent Assembly of Chile, "is making democracy speak in a completely different way from how we have been taught to conceive of it. She is deconstructing the endogamous ecosystem of a political class which, in its incestuous self-reproduction, had given itself the means to prevail eternally." November 21, 2021. Chile: a coin toss https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/le-chili-%C3%A0-pile-ou-face Left or far-right? Two years after the massive social movement of 2019, Chile's future will be decided at the ballot box this Sunday, November 21. Presidential elections, but also legislative and senatorial elections, where independent candidates could emerge, such as Fabiola Campillai in the suburbs of Santiago, a factory worker who lost her sight after being shot by police. December 19, 2021. Chile, the faces of the far right https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-les-visages-de-l-extr%C3%AAme-droite Gabriel Boric won the second round of the presidential election with 55.8% of the vote: he embodies a "generation of thirty-somethings" ready to take over. But the far-right candidate, José Antonio Kast, garnered 44.13% (he had come out on top in the first round with nearly 28% of the vote). In his wake, 15 deputies entered the Chilean parliament under the banner of the Social Christian Front. A brief look at the Chilean far-right sphere, nostalgic for Pinochet. Elisa Loncon: "Moving forward in the recognition of diversity and fundamental rights" https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/elisa-loncon-avancer-dans-la-reconnaissance-des-diversit%C3%A9s-et-des-droits-fondamentaux Elected president of Chile's Constituent Assembly, tasked with drafting a new constitution for the country, Mapuche academic Elisa Loncon gave an interview to the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle. Despite the obstacles in the process, she shared her hopes for a more egalitarian and inclusive country. Chile. Time to Live, by Daniel Ramirez https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-le-temps-de-vivre-par-daniel-ramirez Referencing a 1972 song by Osvaldo Rodríguez, philosopher Daniel Ramirez analyzes the election of Gabriel Boric to the presidency of Chile, the culmination of a long and seemingly endless wait, but one that must not ignore the obstacles that will arise along the way. Without illusions or messianism, the youth of a future world is nonetheless possible. December 22, 2021. Chile: Elisa Loncon resigns as president of the Constituent Assembly https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-elisa-loncon-quitte-la-pr%C3%A9sidence-de-l-assembl%C3%A9e-constituante She paved the way. But the presidency of the Constituent Assembly in Chile is a rotating one. After six months in office, bolstered by the election of Gabriel Boric, Elisa Loncon is preparing to hand over the reins on January 4th. Who will succeed her? The humanities are placing their bets on a 42-year-old scientist who campaigned for an ecological constitution. March 11, 2022: From Allende to Boric, the return of the left in Chile https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/d-allende-%C3%A0-boric-le-retour-de-la-gauche-au-chili Elected on December 19th against the far-right candidate José-Antonio Kast, the young and new president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, takes office this Friday, March 11, 2022. Economy, migration tensions, the Mapuche question, new Constitution: what difficulties await him for the first months of his term? March 12, 2022. Gabriel Boric: "Together on the path of hope" https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/gabriel-boric-ensemble-sur-le-chemin-de-l-esp%C3%A9rance "We are deeply Latin American, and from this continent, we will ensure that the voice of the South is once again heard and respected in a changing world, in the face of all the challenges we face," said the new Chilean president Gabriel Boric yesterday in Santiago, during his inaugural address. September 4, 2022. Chile: A historic day for rebuilding https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-une-journ%C3%A9e-historique-pour-se-re-constituer Approve or reject? Chile votes to approve or reject a new Constitution, drawn up by a citizens' assembly, which would turn the page on the Pinochet years, a mix of dictatorship and unashamed neo-liberalism, and which would set Chile on the path of a true ecological revolution. September 5, 2022. Chile: The reasons for a failure https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-les-raisons-d-un-%C3%A9chec Defeated in the December 2021 presidential election, the far-right, nostalgic for Pinochet, has had its revenge. With record turnout, though marked by youth abstention and a campaign polluted by a multitude of fake news, Chileans rejected the proposed new Constitution by 61.9%. Two years earlier, however, 78.3% had overwhelmingly supported a constitutional change. Chile will have to wait a while longer to escape the extreme neoliberalism of the left. The heirs of the "Chicago Boys," who had rallied to Pinochet, have once again managed to keep the social and environmental demands that brought the left to power on a tight leash. And this time, without a coup. September 7, 2022. Chile, at a crossroads https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/chili-%C3%A0-la-crois%C3%A9e-des-chemins Cabinet reshuffle, difficult continuation of a constitutional revision process, defeat of the environmental movement, blocking of pension reform… What lessons can be learned from the victory of the "Rechazo" in the referendum of September 4th? And also: November 24, 2021. Chile on the road to gay marriage https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/le-chili-en-route-vers-le-mariage-gay December 30, 2021. Chile, with or without lithium? https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/le-chili-avec-ou-sans-lithium Nature, a subject of rights? After Ecuador, will Chile be the second country in the world to enshrine this principle in its future constitution, currently being drafted? One issue is already attracting attention: lithium extraction, of which Chile is the world's second-largest producer. While this material is considered essential to the transition to "green energy," it causes serious ecological damage in the Atacama Desert, where it is extracted. And the anger fueled by powerful mining interests, the water crisis, and inequality is pushing Gabriel Boric's Chile to rethink the use of its resources. Somini Sengupta, a distinguished journalist for the New York Times, investigated the matter. January 6, 2022. Cheers, Chile! https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/%C3%A0-ta-sant%C3%A9-chili Following a marathon election, 39-year-old María Elisa Quinteros succeeded Elisa Loncon as president of the Constituent Assembly. Her vice-president, a sexual diversity activist, is 32. She is a public health researcher, he is a rural doctor. It goes without saying that healthcare reform will be central to the next Constitution. And let's not forget environmental issues. This Friday, January 7, demonstrations took place across the country against new lithium mining concessions that the outgoing president wants to grant to multinational corporations. January 2, 2022. Estefanía Leigthon, aka Stfi!, the youth of Chilean muralism https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/estefan%C3%ADa-leighton-alias-stfi-la-jeunesse-du-muralisme-chilien One of her latest works, Equality, is a 60-meter-high mural painted on a 26-story building in Santiago. A self-taught artist, Estefanía Leighton, aka Stfi!, already has a substantial body of work behind her at the age of 33, scattered throughout Chile, Latin America, and Europe. Chilean muralism remains a particularly vibrant art form. February 22, 2022. The last of the Yaghan people. With her, a language disappears. https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/la-derni%C3%A8re-des-yaghans-avec-elle-une-langue-dispara%C3%AEt In Chile, Cristina Calderón dedicated her life to preserving the Yaghan language. May 24, 2023. Dried grass and other bits of straw (logbook entry, 05/24/2023) https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/herbes-s%C3%A8ches-et-autres-f%C3%A9tus-de-paille-journal-de-bords-24-05-2023 What is certain is that Chilean director Felipe Gálvez Haberle will not win the Palme d'Or. His film Los Colones ("The Settlers") is being presented out of competition in the "Un Certain Regard" category. The film takes place in 1901, in the far south of Chile, and recounts the genocide of the Ona Indians in Tierra del Fuego, a vast and fertile territory that the Western white aristocracy of the time relentlessly sought to "civilize." November 20, 2024. The (Indigenous) Uprisings of the Earth https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/les-soul%C3%A8vements-autochtones-de-la-terre Twelve portraits. Twelve testimonies. They came from Russia, the United States, Chile, Ecuador, Vanuatu, Brazil, Nepal, Chad, Papua New Guinea, and Borneo to make the voices of Indigenous peoples heard at the Baku Climate Conference. Are we ready to listen to what these advocates for the common good are telling us, in all their simplicity? October 22, 2025. Indigenous voices calling for a change of course https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/des-voix-autochtones-pour-changer-de-cap The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) congress, recently held in Abu Dhabi, voted to recognize ecocide as an international crime. The congress was also marked by the first World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature. This is not an exotic issue: as the rightful guardians of life on Earth, Indigenous peoples are now demanding to be fully involved in the governance of their territories. Activists and scientists, artists and community leaders: the proof in ten portraits.