The Kremlin has newly said it is ready for dialogue with Washington and open to ideas for ending the conflict in Ukraine, but still says it will not compromise on Russia's core aims.
A senior Russian diplomat has stressed that any future talks must align with President Vladimir Putin's position. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov stated in an interview published by national media on Friday that Russia is open to proposals that are in line with "realities on the ground."
"The Russian Federation is ready to listen to any reasonable proposals and ideas that are in line with the goals set by the Russian president and meet the ‘realities on the ground’," Ryabkov said.
"At this stage, it is more important to what extent Washington is able to influence the decisions of the Kyiv regime and its European sponsors, who still dream of a ‘strategic defeat’ of Russia," he added.
via ReutersThe remarks suggest that the Kremlin is responding positively and openly to recent overtures initiated by Washington.
"US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has indicated the need to put forward new ideas toward a settlement, and we are ready to listen to them if this constitutes the mentioned 'efforts' of the Americans," Ryabkov continued.
"We remain open to dialogue with Washington, but that does not mean that we will abandon our fundamental positions," he added.
Time is working against Ukraine and its Western backers in Europe, "something they will have to reckon with," Ryabkov additionally pointed out.
President Trump has this summer signaled that his outlook on Ukraine's chances on the battlefield may have softened or changed of late:
By the time Trump and Zelensky met at a NATO summit in July, the American president said the Ukrainian leader had “been very effective” in the war. “We’ve actually developed a good relationship,” Trump added.
But as Ukraine’s strikes have intensified, so have Russia’s — and Kyiv faces major challenges in defending against them because of shortages of American Patriot air defense missiles.
Zelensky, for his part, has been explicit that the new long-range strikes are meant to force Moscow to the negotiating table under conditions that favor Kiev.
The LA Times has recently outlined significant developments this summer, which are part of this risky strategy:
The feeling in Moscow is that it’s extremely unlikely Washington will authorise Starlink coverage for Ukrainian strike drones operating inside Russia because doing so would set a dangerous precedent likely eventually to backfire on the Americans.
The US benefits enormously from… https://t.co/JQwD4VWdXk
But there are still no signs that Russia's own retaliatory strikes are letting up - instead they are intensifying and becoming more and more deadly - also at a moment Ukraine's air defense munitions and capabilities are dwindling fast.
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 22:10Authored by Felix Yang via the Mises Institute,
The total fertility rate needed to sustain a population is 2.1. Averaged over 2020-2024, South Korea's stands at 0.78, Taiwan's at 0.89, and Hong Kong's at 0.79. Mainstream demography still treats these as cultural anomalies, when they are in fact the terminal readings of a century-long experiment in administrative intervention.
The standard explanation blames housing costs, changing values, or the burden of raising children in a modern economy. Examined through the lens of praxeology - the deductive logic of human action - that explanation gets the causation backward.
Childbearing is, at bottom, a long-horizon investment: a rational actor accepts a low time preference, sinking two decades of capital and labor into a payoff that only matures across generations. That calculation depends entirely on a stable institutional environment in which the link between sacrifice and reward holds. Modern interventionism, the self-reinforcing pattern Mises identified in which each intervention's side effects become the pretext for the next, has severed that link through six distinct mechanisms.
The first is fiat-currency inflation. Since the Federal Reserve's founding in 1913, the dollar has lost more than 96 percent of its purchasing power. Money's evolved function as a store of value across time has been replaced by a bureaucratic IOU that depreciates by design. A family cannot rationally sink twenty years of capital into a child when the currency in which that capital is denominated is being quietly devalued year over year.
The second is the socialization of old-age support. Pay-as-you-go pension systems are, by their own actuarial logic, generational Ponzi schemes: they accumulate no real assets and depend entirely on new entrants to pay existing claims. The US Social Security Trustees project the OASI trust fund will exhaust its reserves by 2033, at which point benefits fall automatically to 77 percent of what has been promised. Once old age depends on the political solvency of a pooled fund rather than on the number or quality of children a person raises, raising children loses its economic rationale as an intergenerational contract.
The third is medical monopoly. Administrative licensing and price controls replace price rationing in healthcare with queue rationing; the scarcity remains, only relabeled. In Canada, the median wait from referral to specialist treatment now exceeds thirty weeks, the longest in the Fraser Institute's thirty-three years of tracking; an estimated 24,000 Canadians died last year while still waiting for treatment they were promised for free. When survival itself becomes a bureaucratic waiting list, family planning becomes an act of faith rather than calculation.
The fourth is the nationalization of education. Before compulsory public schooling, private and community-funded education had already brought English literacy to roughly 85 to 90 percent in Britain and the United States. Compulsory schooling was not introduced to fix a market failure; Prussia's own architects of the system said openly that its purpose was to discipline the individual will to the needs of the state.
Modern public education systems - lacking any price mechanism or profit-and-loss discipline - level toward mediocrity, forcing families into a second, private tuition market simply to buy back their children's competitiveness. Demographer John Caldwell's Wealth Flows Theory shows that fertility collapses precisely when the direction of intergenerational wealth reverses, from children supporting parents to parents indefinitely subsidizing children, a reversal driven above all by the spread of compulsory schooling.
The fifth is the stripping of housing sovereignty. Zoning and land-use regulation manufacture artificial scarcity, transferring wealth from young families to entrenched incumbents under the banner of protecting communities from externalities. A natural experiment between two American cities makes the point starkly. Houston has rejected zoning by popular referendum three times - in 1948, 1962, and 1993; its price-to-monthly-rent ratio (PM/R, sale price divided by monthly rent) sits near 108, and its total fertility rate holds at 1.98. San Francisco - fully regulated under the California Environmental Quality Act - has a PM/R above 360 and a fertility rate of 1.49. Even Houston's relatively favorable outcome still falls short of replacement, because housing freedom alone cannot offset the other five nooses operating at the federal level.
The sixth is administrative relief. When government nationalizes a function that was once a community mutual-aid contract grounded in local knowledge, it does not eliminate poverty; it manufactures a self-perpetuating administrative class with every incentive to manage poverty rather than end it, along with well-documented adverse selection. In the United States, the extension of welfare benefits conditioned on remaining unmarried is directly implicated. In Thomas Sowell's research, the rise of single-parent households among black Americans increased from roughly 22 to 67 percent between 1960 and 1985.
These six mechanisms compound each other rather than operating in isolation, closing a systemic trap across four dimensions of family sovereignty: the financial, the physical, the temporal, and the spiritual. Rome ran the same experiment two thousand years ago.
Bread-and-circuses welfare, currency debasement from a near-pure silver denarius to a five-percent-silver disc, and the administrative capture of the yeoman farmer class produced, over four centuries, the same terminal outcome: infant abandonment recorded in the papyrus record of Roman Egypt, and a city of a million reduced to roughly 100,000 residents by the sixth century.
The conclusion is not a call for better-designed subsidies. Every subsidy is simply a further extension of the same interventionist logic that caused the collapse in the first place. Each of the six nooses was, in its own time, sold to families as a trade: surrender this piece of sovereignty, and the state will guarantee that safety in return.
Benjamin Franklin's words - later carried into Hayek's The Road to Serfdom - exposed exactly where that trade always ends: those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The family bore that trade six times over and has a falling fertility rate to show for it - the safety was never delivered, and the liberty is gone.
The only path back is the restoration of private property and the family's own sovereignty over its financial, physical, and intergenerational decisions.
Felix Yang is the author of "Why the Cradle Stands Empty: How Interventionism Strangles Fertility."
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 21:45