I want to tell you about a woman named Daria Boyarskaya, because her story reveals almost everything about the condition of the Western liberal order in the spring of 2026.

Boyarskaya is a Russian national who today serves as a senior adviser at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna, one of the central institutions of European democratic oversight. She moved directly from university into Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and built her career inside state-linked institutions. In 2019, she sat inches from Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Osaka, serving as his personal English interpreter during his meeting with Donald Trump. Very few people outside the Kremlin have ever been in that room. Positions of that kind are never assigned casually. They require demonstrated loyalty, absolute discretion, and a proven alignment with the priorities of the leadership being served.

In 2022, Poland’s internal security agency declared her persona non grata. Warsaw concluded that her activities posed a meaningful risk of influence operations damaging to Poland’s international standing. A NATO ally looked at her background and said: not here, not now, not under these conditions. That judgment reflected a hard-earned understanding that certain affiliations carry implications that do not disappear simply because someone changes jobs, receives a new title, or moves to a different city.

Now fast forward to today. Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered its fifth year and reshaped Europe’s entire security landscape in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. In this context, Boyarskaya is coordinating the........

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