Will there be nuclear war? Will Russia win the Ukraine offensive? Will my son survive?
As the Kremlin presses ahead with its military intervention in the pro-Western country, more and more Russians are turning to astrologers.
In Russia’s second city of Saint Petersburg, bespectacled Elena Korolyova receives clients in her apartment, where two cats prowl between piles of books.
Photo: AFP
“People want to know what will become of Russia, cut off from the rest of world,” the 63-year-old said.
Astrologers, psychics and mediums have for years been popular in Russia, and particularly turbulent years have seen demand for their services increase.
As the country reels from a barrage of unprecedented sanctions over Ukraine, more and more Russians are turning to astrology as they peer into the future.
Korolyova, a grey-haired philologist by training who rose to fame in the former imperial capital through word of mouth, seeks to reassure her clients.
She predicts that Moscow will not only survive the economic storm, but also emerge victorious.
“The global cataclysm will intensify in September, but Russia will come out of it stable and prosperous,” she said.
Korolyova charges 5,000 rubles (US$90) per consultation and says — without wanting to reveal any numbers — that since President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 requests from clients have increased. In the first week of the conflict, the number of searches for “astrologer” more than doubled on Russia’s main search engine Yandex — from 42,900 on Feb. 19 to 95,000 on March 5, according to the company’s keyword statistics.
POLITICAL ASTROLOGY
In Moscow, another prominent astrologer, Konstantin Daragan, who made a name for himself by claiming to have predicted the coronavirus pandemic, also says Russia will win on the ground in Ukraine and in its clash with the West.
“Russia will become the center of the world after the conflict,” he said on social media recently. Originally from Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas that the Russian army has been seeking to conquer, the aeronautical engineer turned astrologer claims to have advised ministers, bankers and even members of Ukraine’s secret services in the past. Having left for Moscow after pro-Western authorities came to power in Kyiv in 2014, he supports the Russian military intervention, even if his hometown of Lysychansk has been ravaged by fighting.
For him, too, business is booming. His “School of Classical Astrology” doubled its student numbers since Putin launched the Ukraine intervention, now counting around 200 in Moscow.
STAR WARS
Sociologist Alexei Levinson of the independent Levada research center said that an attempt to read the stars is a way of making sense of reality for many “confused” Russians.
“Faced with a universe that has collapsed, some prefer to take stars as guides rather than their leaders,” he said. “Astrology today is a kind of psychotherapy or new religion.”
Anna Markus, one of Daragan’s students in her 50s, said she looks to the stars for “logic in events on Earth.”
“Russia is designated as the only culprit of the conflict, but it is obvious that a third country is the real culprit,” she said.
She has a star chart that she claims proves the US is guilty.
Over the border in battered Ukraine, the stars, predictably, show the opposite. Astrologer Vlad Ross, who is popular in Ukrainian media, says that Putin is “gravely ill” and “will not survive past March 2023.”
“Saturn is the sign of Russia against Uranus, the sign of Ukraine. Our victory is imminent,” assured another star Ukrainian astrologer, Angela Pearl, in a video viewed more than a million times since mid-May.
Desperate Ukrainians are turning to astrologers for a sign that their loved ones on the front will survive or if they will have to flee advancing Russian troops.
Ukrainians want to know “if nuclear war will happen, if they should leave their country, if their loved ones are in danger”, astrologer Olena Umanets said.
“Russia will explode in March 2023,” predicted the 38-year-old former musician, who fled Ukraine for Switzerland. Her US$100 online consultation reassured one client, a 46-year-old television producer in Kyiv named Kristina, worried about her husband who is fighting on the frontline.
“My husband just called me. He thanks God for having survived the night,” she wrote to her astrologer in June. “Thank you for having encouraged me to pray for him, it relieved me to share this responsibility with the stars.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
RSS