Advocates of public transport have an ambitious proposal: make it free. But doing so hardly increases ridership, takes few cars off the road and starves the system of money. Instead, funds should be spent on expanding and improving services. Congestion charges do a better job of reducing traffic. And there are more effective ways to help the poor; making transport free is a handout to the middle class and rich too.

Starting tomorrow Russia is holding parliamentary elections in which the state has stacked the deck for Vladimir Putin’s party in every conceivable way. Voters are suitably cynical. The other day in this newsletter I mentioned the Soviet joke “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Now the charade is “we pretend to vote and they pretend to campaign.”

On tonight’s episode of The Insider, our editors will discuss what they learned on their recent trip to visit an elite Ukrainian drone unit. Check it out from 6pm London time (1pm in New York).