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“What is cooler than a family of 44 million?” asks a phrase on a mural in central Kyiv. 44 million was the estimated Ukrainian population before Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the mural, painted after it started, rhetorically appeals to national unity. Despite Ukrainians answering this question with “nothing”, the figure is far from correct – and may always be unreachable.

In almost two years of all-out war, about six million Ukrainians have left the country. Before the invasion, three million were working abroad, where they have mostly stayed since. Each new day they strengthen their ties with their host countries, and lower the chances of ever coming back.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy understands the negative effects of depopulation. In his New Year’s speech, traditionally perceived as policy-setting, he said a rather controversial phrase: “I wish everyone who is still hesitating [about whether to come back] to make a bold choice next year ― […] to find themselves here, because it’s the only place on earth where we can all say: we are at home.”

Many will probably do otherwise. According to the leading Ukrainian demographer, Ella Libanova, most of those abroad will never come back. During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, a third of the refugees never returned ― and most of those wars ended in less than two years. It’s worth noting that Ukrainian refugees are mostly well-educated. “70 percent of women refugees have finished university. Do you think aging Europe is interested in keeping them there? It definitely is!” Libanova said in a recent speech.

What can be done? A postwar baby boom is not expected: since the 1960s Ukrainian women haven’t been leaning towards having many children. So the key to making a family of 44 million again lies in tolerance of other nationals. Hopefully economic growth will attract people from faraway cultures ― and Ukrainians will have to kindly accept them, says Libanova.

“I have been strongly opposed to so-called ‘forced solidarity’ for years, and while I was still head of the European Council,” said Donald Tusk at the beginning of this year.

The Polish Prime Minister, in power since last December, has the same restrictive view on migration as the previous national-conservative Law and Justice government.

‘Forced solidarity’ is a name given to the EU’s asylum deal where member states are obliged to take asylum seekers to the EU or pay fines.

Poland’s two largest parties are opposed to the migration agreement. The majority of the Polish population is against immigration. At the same time, Poland has invited 100,000s of foreigners from distant countries to work in recent years, due to labour shortage. A visa-scandal has erupted, which is currently being investigated by the Polish parliament. Former government members are suspected of taking bribes to allow easier access to visas for migrants from Africa and Asia.

I have been a journalist in North Macedonia for 16 years and for two thirds of that time, my work has been hampered by outdated and wrong official data.

Up until 2022, when the country finally completed an overdue census, not even the head of the statistics office could tell me the exact population. Officially it was 2.1 million, but that number was from 2002, as the country scrapped the 2011 headcount.

In most countries, headcounts are regular operations carried out for practical reasons at ten year intervals. Here, the process raises delicate ethnic issues about the size of the ethnic Albanian community versus the Macedonian majority.

Macedonian nationalists always wanted a result that would show the country’s Albanians were less than 20 percent of the population. It is the threshold that gives Albanians certain rights under the 2001 accord. The Albanian side, as expected, wanted the opposite and has been pushing for including its diaspora members in the census.

In 2011 the country scrapped the census mid-process, realising that nationalists on both sides had probably doctored the numbers so much that nobody would believe the results.

How did that leave us for over a decade? With wrong policies derived from those wrong numbers. So whenever I wrote about the fertility or mortality rate, gross domestic product, economic or social policies, migration, I and everybody else guessed at the true picture.

Now we have the new data. The country has lost nine percent of its population over two decades and now has 1.8 million. Projections say by 2050 we will fall to 1.4 million due to migration and a low fertility rate. Unsurprisingly, the ethnic ratio has not changed much as all equally seem to want to leave.

At the end of the day, ethnic bickering has discredited the process and many do not fully trust the new data. By politicising ethnic ratios we have forgotten why we need a headcount in the first place.

The number of financial benefits for families in Hungary is unprecedented. Married couples where the wife is under 30 are entitled to an interest free loan of 11 million HUF (30,000 euros) which they don’t have to pay back if they have three children. They can also take out a subsidised loan of 50 million HUF (130,000 euros) to buy a house, as a few examples.

The problem? The plan is not working. 2023 saw an all-time low in Hungarian births.

It appears Hungarian couples prefer good schools, proper healthcare and fair wages over hand-outs for babies. None of these alternatives seem to be on offer by the government.

Over the phone, the voice of Léa Marco, 29, sounds confident. “I don’t feel the need to have a child. I feel complete without becoming a mother. I want time for myself.” Almost one in ten French citizens, most of whom are in their twenties and thirties, share her opinion.

“If we still lived in the world I grew up in, I might think about having a child without having to worry all the time about the planet’s future,” says Zelda Hogrel, a 27 year-old teacher, who loves children. “I work in summer camps with kids, but I don’t feel the need to have a child of my own.”

Never since WWII have there been so few births in France. President Macron has called for “demographic rearmament”, making the low birth rate a national struggle. This patriarchal injunction to start a family has angered many women.

“As a teacher, I already feel I’m doing my social duty. I’m not the one who’s going to ‘rearm’ France,” says Léa Marco. “We all know that having a child brings out the inequalities in a couple. Women have to think of everything, take care of their baby and their partner. Moreover, the pressure to be a ‘good parent’ is much stronger than a few decades ago: you have to invest yourself completely in your child.”

Like her friend Zelda Hogrel, she believes there are ways of being part of a family other than having children in a heterosexual couple.

“For the past four years, I’ve been taking a foster child on vacation, and I even considered adopting her when she had problems with her mother,” explains Hogrel. “Investing in the education of a child you love is also something that makes sense to us.”

While Russian embassies in neighbouring countries shrunk due to the expulsion of diplomats suspected of breaching protocol, Moscow’s mission in Serbia has grown since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. 

Moreover, a Radio Free Europe investigation in March 2023 suggested that at least three diplomats who were blacklisted by EU member states had resurfaced in Serbia. Leaked documents appeared to show these diplomats had ties to Russian intelligence.

They are still recognised by the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which means they’re still in Serbia.

Since the beginning of the war, Russia has increased its staff in Belgrade from 54 diplomats in February 2022 to 68 in February this year, Serbian Foreign Affairs Ministry data shows.

“Increasing the number of diplomats usually means that this country is very important and the activities in that country are increasing, whether they are legal or illegal,” says Predrag Petrovic, research director at Belgrade Center for Security Policy.

Another RFE revelation alleges that a Russian diplomat and alleged spy expelled by the European Union for “illegal and disruptive actions” was serving as a long-term election observer of the Belgrade OSCE mission.

After the Serbian early parliamentary and local elections in December 2023, the opposition held protests because of irregularities in the vote, which were also confirmed by the domestic NGO CRTA and the OSCE election observation mission. 

Serbian PM Ana Brnabic said the state had collected information about these demonstrations from foreign intelligence agencies, especially the Russians.

“This sends the message that Serbia is closely tied to Russia in terms of intelligence as well,” says Petrovic.

These examples back up claims that Serbia is Moscow’s regional proxy and a “small Russia in the Balkans”, which is certainly bad, Petrovic adds.

A common view of a spy is someone highly intelligent, successful, ambitious and, due to their side hustle, rich. 

This may be true in peace-time or in movies, but when the enemy is at the gates, or has already invaded, most spies are different. They aren’t dolled up in tuxedos, sipping Vodka Martinis and driving a gadget-decked Aston Martin, but opportunistic misfits sensing  injustice, fearing poverty and prone to greed.

This is what happened in Ukraine when Russia invaded in 2022.

While the Ukrainian military was on the move, the occupiers had to assess the best targets around the country, so needed eyes on the ground. They enlisted hundreds of locals, focusing on those who felt disadvantaged since Ukraine’s independence.

These were Soviet nostalgists, prone to conspiracy theories, and those who were successful many years ago, but had since lost their wealth and influence. Russians promised to bring them from rags to riches as soon as they came to power.

In the occupied areas, such people became collaborators. The last two years of the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine are dotted with such examples. Here are two of them.

Kyrylo Stremousov used to be a fringe journalist in Kherson, pushing USSR nostalgia and spreading Covid denialism. In spring 2022, he became deputy governor of the occupied Kherson region. Six months later, while the town was still under Russian control, he died in a suspicious car crash.

Liudmyla Byeloushchenko used to be a cinema director in Kakhovka, a now-occupied town on the Dnipro. In the 1990s, Kakhovka couldn’t afford a municipal cinema, so Liudmyla started selling apples on the local market to get by. When the Russians came, she agreed to lead the town’s cultural centre, to help spread Russian propaganda.

The takeaway for other countries is short: paying attention to the disenfranchised pays off, so they won’t become your enemy’s allies in the future.

Hundreds of Russian diplomats have been expelled from the EU since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some 70 had to leave Germany for another shady reason: it’s claimed they used their diplomatic immunity to illegally gather information for the Russian secret services.

The presence of Russian agents disguised as diplomats in Germany has been an open secret for years. For a long time, however, the government in Berlin didn’t dare act against them, fearing Russia would retaliate by expelling real German diplomats.

It comes as no surprise that Germany, as an arms supplier to Ukraine and a training centre for Ukrainian soldiers, is a main target of Russian espionage. Experts estimate there are as many agents working in Germany today as during the Cold War. They will increasingly resort to undercover methods again.

“James Bond is romanticised. Real life is much tougher. There is no happy end,” Alexey Vasilev told me.

It was late summer six years ago and we were talking between a glass wall in a prison in north-east Estonia, where Vasilev was serving a four year sentence for spying against Estonia on behalf of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

He wasn’t a master spy. In fact, he was caught trying to conduct the first task his coordinators had given him. He had lost his income, his mother had been forced out of her apartment in St Petersburg, and he had legal bills to cover. Only 21 years old, he had lost his perspective in life.

I have interviewed people like Vasilev before and since, but this was the only time I actually felt sad about a Russian intelligence agent.

I remembered about Vasilev when we broke the news last week about how Latvia’s MEP Tatyana Zhdanok worked on behalf of the FSB’s Fifth Service. The contrast between Zhdanok and Vasilev couldn’t be larger.

Whereas Vasilev was a naive student hoping to become James Bond, Zhdanok has been blatantly pushing and promoting Kremlin ideology in the heart of the European Union for decades. She was not motivated by money, but by ideology. Throughout that time, the European Parliament’s impunity and Latvia’s inadequate legal system have protected her from prosecution.

Luckily, the outcry from fellow MEPs and the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, has been vocal (unlike when we revealed a few months ago that Russia’s top diplomat at the EU is suspected of carrying out Russian intelligence functions in Brussels).

Still, Zhdanok will probably come out of this scandal with barely any condemnation. Hopefully, being outed as an FSB agent will at least deter someone else from chasing  Bond-like dreams that never come true.

Farmers are protesting across Europe, and the far right is championing their cause. In reality, the protectionist narrative of the protestors clashes with the neoliberal economic agendas of some examples of the extreme right, explains Guillermo Fernández-Vázquez, author of ‘What to do with the extreme right in Europe. The case of the National Front’.

We are seeing widespread protests among farmers across Europe. How is the far right exploiting these protests?

Almost all European far-right groups are proposing what they call ‘protecting’ the sectors of the economy which they consider strategic from a national or purely electoral point of view. They complain that the EU imposes too many controls, which makes the primary sector uncompetitive in respect to third countries.

What is the situation in Spain?

In Spain it is quite striking: [far-right party] Vox, in its attempt to become the party of the farmers, is the one most publicly highlighting the demands of the agriculture sector, which complains about competition from North Africa. In the last elections, Vox electoral posters in the countryside, apart from the general slogan ‘Vote what matters’, there was another that said ‘Vota Vox, vota campo’ (Vote Vox, vote for the countryside). 

It was very obvious that Vox wanted to be identified as a party of the farmers. But this is a protectionist narrative that clashes with the liberal economic measures in their party programme.

How does this duality between protectionism and liberal economic measures clash?

The European radical right (with the exception of France), has put much more emphasis on cultural identity than on economy. The economy was an excuse to talk about their main problem: immigration. And this is still happening.

For example, in Castilla y León, where Vox holds the vice-presidency, on the one hand they publicise this protectionist discourse and at the same time they push for classically neoliberal measures in parliamentary votes, such as eliminating subsidies to employers and trade unions. 

In reality, it is a project that is still quite incoherent economically. It creates difficulties between the more clearly liberal wing and other discourses that sometimes emerge. There is a discordant polyphony.