The Week the Middle East Proposed Marriage and Moscow Sued a Bank It Cannot Find

Let us begin, as all great absurdist theater must, with the number that broke my calculator.

A Russian court has ordered Euroclear to pay around $250 billion over frozen assets. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars. That is not a fine. That is a ransom note written by someone who has already lost the hostage. Euroclear, for its part, issued a statement clarifying that it does not recognize the Russian court's jurisdiction, which is lawyer-speak for 'we are not even reading this email.'

I spent a long time in stand-up comedy. I once performed in a basement in Kharkiv for eleven people and a dog. That was my most credible audience. It still had more legal standing than this ruling.

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Item Two: Saudi Arabia has floated a Middle Eastern non-aggression pact with Iran and regional states, according to reporting in the Financial Times and Middle East Eye.

Let me translate this for you. Two countries that have spent decades funding opposite sides of every conflict in the region have decided, apparently, to try... not doing that. This is like your two most chaotic uncles announcing at a family wedding that they are starting a joint meditation practice. You applaud. You do not turn your back.

To be fair, I have been wrong about Middle Eastern diplomacy before. I was also wrong about cryptocurrency, my first marriage, and the structural integrity of a particular joke I told in Gdańsk in 2019. Optimism is not dead. It is just on a watchlist.

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Item Three: Ukraine conducted what is being widely described as a large-scale drone attack that killed three people in the Moscow region, according to BBC reporting. Russia also confirmed a death in the Belgorod region from a separate Ukrainian strike.

Meanwhile, Russia returned 528 bodies to Ukraine, according to Kyiv.

And the Wall Street Journal ran a headline declaring that Ukraine is no longer playing a losing game.

I want to sit with all three of these facts simultaneously, because together they form a sentence that would have been unprintable in 2022: Ukraine is hitting Moscow, Russia is returning its dead, and the Western press has noticed a shift. This is not optimism. This is arithmetic. Slow, grinding, devastating arithmetic. I am from Kyiv. I am allowed to note the arithmetic without smiling about it.

Forward-looking sentence will come at the end. I promised you jokes first.

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Item Four: In Turkey, a flower grown in the fields of Antalya is reportedly selling for 150 Turkish lira per stem, with orders flooding in from across the country.

I include this item not because it is geopolitically significant but because it is the only story this week that involved something growing instead of something burning. Also, the phrase 'from field to fortune' appearing in the same news cycle as a $250 billion court order that nobody will pay is the kind of contrast that used to be called irony and is now just called Thursday.

Turkey, for those keeping score at home, is simultaneously hosting peace talks, qualifying a national football squad for the World Cup, and producing luxury flowers. I respect a country that multitasks. I also respect a flower that costs 150 lira, which means it is more expensive than most things and will still die in a week. Much like most peace processes, now that I think about it.

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Item Five: Saudi Arabia is also, separately, twenty-six days away from the anniversary of the moment its football team stunned Argentina — the eventual World Cup champion — in what remains one of the most statistically unlikely results in tournament history.

I mention this because Saudi Arabia proposed a regional non-aggression pact, ordered approximately everything from NVIDIA last year according to widely reported figures, and also once beat Argentina.

There is a version of geopolitical analysis where you track GDP, alliance structures, and energy exports. Then there is my version, where you notice that the country doing the most ambitious diplomatic floating this week is the same country that made an entire planet spill its coffee during a group stage match.

Never count out the team nobody is watching.

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So here is where we stand as of Sunday, May 17, 2026. A court issued a quarter-trillion-dollar judgment into the void. Two ancient rivals floated a handshake. Drones reached the Moscow suburbs. Bodies came home. A flower cost 150 lira. Turkey is going to a World Cup. And somewhere in all of this, the Institute for the Study of War published its May 16 assessment, which I read so you do not have to, and which confirmed that the situation remains, in the technical military sense, a situation.

I started this column because I needed somewhere to put the absurdity. It turns out the absurdity does not fit anywhere. It just keeps arriving, weekly, like a subscription you cannot cancel.

The question I leave you with is the one nobody in any of these stories has answered yet: when the court orders the unpayable, when the pact is floated but not signed, when the drone reaches the capital of the country that started the war — what exactly comes next, and does it come with footnotes?