1 entry tagged ukraine war. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Great Power That Can't Use SWIFT "Our country can either be a great power, or it will not exist at all," Dmitry Medvedev told regional party officials on September 16. That's the Kremlin's own case for why the war continues — existential, civilizational, not up for negotiation. I wanted to know what that case looks like from the inside, and once I went looking, I found something more concrete than rhetoric sitting right next to it: $300 billion frozen, a payments system Russia no longer trusts, and a very specific, very measurable pivot toward crypto rails that started well before this month's headlines.