The Global Fight for Freedom

Vladimir Putin is obsessed with longevity.
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He has committed $26 billion to a national longevity program — gene therapy, bioprinting, organ transplants. Last year, he told Xi Jinping humans might one day live to 150. He reportedly bathes in Siberian deer blood.
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This week brings more evidence Putin's grip on Russia and its neighbors is weakening. The fear he once struck abroad is now felt in Moscow. When men who rule by fear are no longer feared, they all suffer the same fate.
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The deer blood won't matter. Putin won't live to see 2028.

Headlines

1. Defiant Armenians Ignore Putin's Threat
2. The Campaign Striking Fear Into Moscow
3. Another "Fujishock" Hits Peru

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

Putin's threats are rarely subtle.
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On May 29th, nine days before their election, he reminded Armenians the Ukraine war "began with [its] attempts to join the EU." The message was clear: vote against Moscow at your peril.
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Putin believed Russia still held sway here. Russia had spent two centuries as Armenia's protector. A 1774 treaty gave the tsars Putin emulates the right to shield the Ottoman Empire's Christians, and Armenians, a Christian people ruled by Muslim empires, learned to look north for rescue.
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The bond was then forged with blood.
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When the Ottoman Turks set out to annihilate the Armenians in 1915, murdering up to 1.5 million, it was Christian Russia that armed the survivors and gave them refuge. But the protection always carried conditions, and it failed when it mattered most.
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Those conditions came due under Nikol Pashinyan. Armenia's prime minister, a journalist turned protest leader, rode a peaceful 2018 uprising into office, ending twenty years of pro-Russian rule. He kept faith with Moscow until 2020, when Azerbaijan crushed Armenia in 44 days as its Russian “ally” stood aside.
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In 2023 Azerbaijan stormed Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave Russian troops were stationed to defend, and Moscow did nothing as more than 100,000 Armenians fled their homes. Pashinyan stopped waiting. He made peace with Azerbaijan and reached for Turkey, whose border has been sealed against Armenia for thirty years.

By 2024 he had frozen Armenia's seat in the Kremlin's six-nation answer to NATO, and swears he won't go back. He was not alone. In 2019, 57% of Armenians called Russia their "closest friend"; by 2024, 14% did.
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So Putin pressed every lever he had left. He demanded Armenia hold a referendum pitting Europe against Moscow's bloc, threatened to strip Armenian migrants of their right to work in Russia, and recalled his ambassador. His man on the inside was Samvel Karapetyan, a billionaire who made his fortune in Moscow and bankrolled the Church leading the protests against Pashinyan.
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When the tycoon vowed to enter politics and topple the government, Pashinyan jailed him. Russian state television called for his head. Putin made his threats.
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But Armenians didn't flinch.
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On June 7th, they delivered Pashinyan a decisive parliamentary majority, crushing the pro-Moscow opposition.
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Putin's leverage has not vanished. A Russian garrison still sits at Gyumri, Russian gas still heats Armenian homes, Russian wheat still fills Armenian bread.
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Pashinyan may not be canonized as a democratic saint. It's difficult to discern from the outside whether jailing the opposition and arresting clergy was necessary to wrest a nation from Moscow's grip, or democratic backsliding by another name.
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But Armenians have made their choice: reconciliation over revenge. West over East. Liberty over control.
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Their triumph is a global one.
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​Sources: New York Times, Meduza (Russia), OC Media (Georgia), European Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment

In 2024, a Ukrainian court charged Russian three-star General Igor Kirillov with directing the use of chloropicrin—a WWI-era choking agent—against Ukrainian soldiers. Over 2,000 had been hospitalized. Three were killed.
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Yet Kirillov sat comfortably in Moscow, over 400 miles from the front. What was the point?
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The next morning, he didn't notice the electric scooter parked beside his apartment entrance—until it exploded, killing him and his aide instantly. The court was providing legal cover: legitimizing his killing under international law before the bomb arrived.
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Welcome to "wet works"—the old KGB term for assassination operations—a reference to the blood left behind. The irony is exquisite: Russian intelligence pioneered this tradecraft. Ukraine inherited it, now turning it against them.
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The Security Service of Ukraine has been running “wet works” campaign on a scale not seen since WWII—eliminating generals, weapons engineers, naval commanders, and propagandists deep inside Russia.
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The campaign’s leaders seem to enjoy dark humor. When a Russian submarine commander was shot seven times during his morning run in 2023—for ordering a missile strike that murdered 23 Ukrainian civilians—Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov reportedly "liked" his final logged run on social media.
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The campaign has expanded methodically. Generals first, then scientists—the lead designer of Russia's KH-69 cruise missile was shot dead near Moscow in 2024 during a morning walk. Then came propagandists who justified the slaughter.
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Each target yields sweet justice: the men who ordered strikes on Ukrainian kindergartens and maternity wards now die the same way their victims did—without warning, without mercy.
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The generals are unnerved. A leaked European intelligence report revealed that Putin has spent weeks at a time in an underground bunker in Krasnodar, stopped visiting his Moscow residences, and extended Federal Protective Service coverage to ten additional generals.
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But bodyguards offer little protection against exploding scooters.

In 1990, Peru was on the brink of total collapse. The radical, left-wing military experiments of the 1970s and economic mismanagement of the 1980s had triggered a catastrophic spiral.
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The state was printing unbacked money to fund inefficient, bleeding nationalized industries (is there another kind)?. The result was hyperinflation that raged over 7,000% annually. Long lines for bread and milk snaked through Lima's crumbling streets. Meanwhile, the Maoist terrorists of the Shining Path bombed electrical grids, plunging the capital into darkness and pushing a fragile democracy to the edge.
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Into this vacuum stepped newly elected President Alberto Fujimori. He had actively campaigned against free-market reforms, promising populist protection. But reality forced his hand.
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Bending Fujimori's ear was a brilliant Peruvian economist named Hernando de Soto, who had brought the Nobel laureate—and Dispatches hero—Friedrich Hayek to lecture in Lima a decade earlier and now carried his blueprint: trust the spontaneous order of the market, destroy price controls, give legal property rights to the poor.
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The result became known as "Fujishock."
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State subsidies vanished. The price of gasoline surged by 3,000%. But within days, the central bank stopped printing money, market prices stabilized, and goods flooded back into stores. It was a stunning victory for Hayekian economics.
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For the next three decades, Peru grew faster than almost every country in South America. Inflation, once the worst on earth, held in the low single digits. Poverty fell by half as Venezuela collapsed into hunger and Argentina lurched from default to default.
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But in 1992, Fujimori executed a military-backed autogolpe (self-coup), dissolving Congress to enforce his reforms. De Soto resigned in protest.
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Peru had achieved an economic liberation, but not a political one.
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36 years later, Fujimori's daughter, Keiko, may have finally learned that you cannot have one without the other.
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he ran on fiscal discipline, deregulation, and protecting the Central Reserve Bank from political interference. On the political side, she has offered something rarer for a Fujimori: an admission. "My father's government wasn't a dictatorship,” she said during the campaign, "but I think that at times it was an authoritarian government. I do acknowledge that." Whether acknowledgment becomes action is another matter entirely.
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Her opponent, leftist Roberto Sánchez, promised a new constitution, doubled state spending, and partial nationalization of Peru's mineral wealth. In Hayek's words, Sánchez was proposing The Road to Serfdom.
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With 98.6% of ballots counted, Fujimori leads by 18,300 votes out of nearly 20 million cast—50.05% to Sánchez's 49.95%. Sánchez hasn't conceded, claiming irregularities without evidence, but EU observers declared the vote proceeded normally. Keiko’s lead will likely hold.
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But Peru has had nine presidents in a decade. Congress has become a cartel. Courts bend to power. Judges get bought, impeachments get weaponized, and anti-corruption investigations get buried by the same legislators they target. Keiko's own party has been complicit in all of it.
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A Fujimori win keeps Peru off The Road to Serfdom, and another socialist has been vanquished. That is a genuine victory.
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Whether Keiko governs differently than her father is the only question that matters now.
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​Sources: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, Americas Quarterly

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