The war in Ukraine is causing severe psychological strain among civilians in conflict-affected areas, where conventional mental healthcare is hard to deliver. Research in environmental psychology, lifestyle medicine and digital health suggests that simulated nature exposure can reduce stress, improve mood and aid recovery from depression. Nature contact is a core pillar of lifestyle psychiatry, alongside activity, nutrition and sleep. We propose technology-assisted forest bathing via virtual reality or screen-based experiences as a feasible, low-cost, culturally adaptable option, scalable through humanitarian and community frameworks, for Ukrainians unable to access care.

This article looks at the understudied process of strategic narratives’ reception in authoritarian states at times of military crisis. Using the Russia–Ukraine war as a case study, the article conceptualises the reception of strategic narratives as identity work and as a reaction to the government’s attempt to weaponise Russians’ national identity and its important element, patriotism, to mobilise support for the war. Relying on interviews with Russians living in the country when the invasion started, triangulated with Public Sociology Laboratory (PSL) data, the article develops a model that shows three modes of reception shaping Russians’ engagement with and interpretation of patriotic narratives through the prism of identity – alignment, separation, and ambivalence – and two mechanisms of management of perceived identity threat – compartmentalisation and withdrawal. This model shows that Russians’ understanding and evaluation of the war goes beyond a simplistic typology of supporting/rejecting and is not conditioned by the type of media they consume. More broadly, the article shows that even in authoritarian states, reception is still conditioned by narratives’ resonance with audience identity and the emotional load they impose. Moreover, in a time of crisis, repetitive and highly emotional messages may cause a wear-out effect and decrease narratives’ effectiveness.

In 2021, Russia and Belarus supplied 41% of EU imports, but following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, trade with both countries collapsed. EU import demand is estimated by exporting country, and a choke‑price approach is used to recover the trade costs implied by sanctions. The results indicate high implied tariffs on Belarus (43.0%) and Russia (49.4%), while the United States and the rest of the world experienced large implied “subsidies” 70.0%, and 166.2%, respectively. Despite large and statistically significant cross‑price elasticities suggesting substitution toward Ukraine, trade gains accrued primarily to the United States and ROW.

This article argues that in asymmetric international relationships, gratitude functions as a technology of disciplinary power through which material assistance is converted into moral indebtedness. Unlike material conditionality, which constrains what subordinate actors can do, gratitude constrains what they can say, claim, and be within the relationship, delegitimizing resistance by recoding it as emotional deviance. Integrating Maussian gift theory, emotional-regime analysis, and speech-act approaches to emotion, the article theorizes a specific causal sequence: material assistance is framed as a morally valorized gift, which generates a debt of gratitude, which prescribes an emotional performance of acknowledgment and deference, which in turn constrains the subordinate actor’s capacity to contest donor authority. Empirically, the argument is developed through a comparative emotional-discursive analysis of two structurally asymmetric alliances: the Soviet-Cuban relationship during the 1962 Missile Crisis and the U.S.-Ukraine relationship (2022–2025). Across both cases, great powers mobilized gratitude as a reactive disciplinary instrument, deployed to reassert authority at moments when influence risked erosion. The article contributes to the emotional turn in IR theory by demonstrating that hierarchy is mostly sustained through emotional regimes that prescribe what subordinate actors must feel, display, and acknowledge.

In this article, I explain how ideology in Russia’s war against Ukraine has been formulated within specific genres and discourses that are reminiscent of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival has often been used to conceptualise forms of democratic resistance to authoritarianism. Yet alternative readings have always questioned this notion of carnival as liberation, and instead present the Bakhtinian carnival as a potential space and time of violent lawlessness and transgression. I use these contested readings to argue that ideology in Russia’s war is articulated and enacted through the carnivalesque, using forms of transgressive humor, grotesque imagery, and profane language. I use evidence from Russian social media channels, broadcast media, official discourse, and cultural production to support this Bakhtinian framing. The carnivalesque framing of wartime ideology enables Russia to mobilise and demobilise different parts of society simultaneously. It permits social distancing from the war for the Russian public, and enables the leadership to blur and obfuscate ideological tenets, while legitimising the creation of a space of exception in Ukraine, in which transgressive practices are normalised. In this way, carnival is a highly effective discursive mechanism for the transition during wartime to a more consolidated ideological regime in Russia.

On February 24, 2022, Russia escalated its aggression against Ukraine. In addition to a staggering civilian death toll (i.e., ≥ 14,383), the Russo-Ukrainian War had generated approximately 5,752,670 refugees as of October 31, 2025. While scholarship on the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees has centered on the three largest EU destinations—Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic—Spain has emerged as the fourth major host. Given its unique history as a colonizer and that Spanish news outlets demonstrably dehumanized refugees from the Syrian Civil War, we ask: How have Spanish news outlets textually and photographically portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees? Conceptually, we entwine Water Metaphors, Off-Whiteness, Orientalism and Sentence-Image. Through a Descriptive Content Analysis and a Visual Framing Approach, we examine the news coverage from El Mundo (n = 97) and El País (n = 119) between February 24 and March 15, 2022. We argue that, although both news outlets employed Water Metaphors that conventionally connote dangerousness (e.g., Avalanche), such meanings were textually and photographically disrupted through non-Orientalist, Off-White re-racializing lenses. Consequently, Spanish news outlets portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees as “Oriental European Others” whose movement was compelled yet “civilized” and whose whitened visibility rendered them absorbable by the “Western European Us”, thereby co-constructing distinctive “Contingent Safe Waters”.

This article traces how the Court of Justice of the European Union has developed a doctrinal framework for EU sanctions against Russia under Regulation (EU) No 269/2014. This case law forms a coherent body of reasoning reconciling post-Soviet legacies with contemporary geopolitical imperatives and evidential rigour. By refining the meaning and temporal scope of accountability within the listing criteria, the Court defines the vocabulary guiding asset-freezing decisions and maps Russia’s interwoven networks of power, capital, and state influence. This case law reveals a gap between law and societal expectations of justice, leaving unaddressed the enduring post-Soviet privileges underpinning Putin’s regime.

This article explores how asset confiscation and redistribution mechanisms can enhance the operational efficiency and accountability of Ukraine’s patrol police, with the Odesa region serving as a case study. Drawing on comparative insights from the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Canada, the research employs a mixed-methods approach combining legal, empirical, and statistical analysis (2019–2023). The findings indicate that, although patrol police performance and transparency have improved, the lack of a structured framework linking recovered criminal assets to local policing initiatives constrains long-term sustainability. Adapting international best practices, the study proposes legislative and institutional reforms to ensure that confiscated assets are transparently reinvested in patrol operations, officer training, and community safety programmes. The results contribute to ongoing discussions on aligning Ukraine’s asset recovery mechanisms with EU standards and strengthening public trust through accountable resource management.

This article investigates the 2022 Yahidne war crime, during which Russian forces confined approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, to the basement of the local school. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the authors explore satellite images of unfolding events and the enduring material traces of the occupation—drawings, abandoned toys, military rations, propaganda newspapers, spent military equipment and damaged infrastructure. They consider how these traces contribute to processes of collective memory and to the transformation of the site’s significance through public memorialisation, reflecting on the role of contemporary archaeology in documenting and interpreting material legacies of recent conflict.

There is increased public attention directed to the topic of weapons trade and this is a positive development because enhanced scrutiny holds a promise of bringing more accountability to the field that has long been obscure. This article reviews the possibility of criminal prosecutions of corporate officials for supplying weapons to Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or a similar forum. The Nuremberg Trials planted seeds for such an endeavour by holding several industrialists criminally liable. Yet, modern international criminal law has so far largely stayed away from defining the scope of individual criminal responsibility for corporate officials. The case studies in this paper reveal that the moment is not ripe for commencing actual investigations at the ICC. Nonetheless, a future consensus is slowly building through (often failed) attempts to use legal or policy avenues to define the standards of conduct in the weapons trade.