The World Blog by humble servant.

Prologue: The Sanctioned Spark In the shadowed corridors of Western power, where the air reeks of entitlement and the ink of treaties long forgotten, the first fissures appeared not with thunderous declarations, but with the quiet click of a SWIFT switch. It was the winter of 2022, when the collective West—led by a stumbling United States under the ghost of Biden's faltering gaze—decided that economic Armageddon was the cure for geopolitical unease. Russia, that vast bear of the East, had dared to reclaim what history had etched in blood and frost: sovereignty over its borders, its narratives, its unyielding will. In response, the sanctions rained down like digital confetti at a funeral. SWIFT, that invisible artery of global finance, was severed. Russian banks, frozen in the ether, watched as their arteries turned to ice. Oligarchs' yachts bobbed listlessly in seized harbors from Monaco to Miami, their champagne flutes shattered on marble decks. Assets—trillions in sovereign w...