August 2025

Aug 30, 2025

Featured • Von der Leyen calls Putin a ‘predator’, RT, Aug 30, 2025

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has escalated her anti-Russia rhetoric, calling President Vladimir Putin a “predator” and reciting NATO’s familiar talking point about a looming Russian threat to justify the EU’s push for accelerated militarization. The remarks came on Friday in Riga, where the EC chief appeared alongside Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina at the start of what she described as a tour of the “EU’s frontline states”. The route includes Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland -all bordering Russia or Belarus- as well as Bulgaria and Romania. “Putin is a predator,” von der Leyen claimed, accusing his mysterious “proxies” of targeting European societies “for years with hybrid attacks, with cyberattacks.”

She went as far as to accuse Moscow of engaging in the “weaponization of migrants,” without providing specifics and omitting the bloc’s own controversial open-door policies, which have fueled internal backlash for over a decade. She argued that the alleged Russian threat warranted the EU’s rearmament plan. “So, as we strengthen Ukraine’s defence, we must also take greater responsibility for our own defence,” she said. In March, von der Leyen floated a plan to raise €800 billion ($934 billion) through debt and tax incentives to re-arm the EU. The European Council later approved a €150 billion borrowing mechanism to fund the initiative. Moscow has repeatedly condemned what it calls the West’s “reckless militarization,” while dismissing allegations of any intent to attack NATO or EU states as “nonsense.” Russian officials, including President Putin, have accused Western leaders of fearmongering to justify inflated military budgets and cover up economic failures.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently accused the EU of sliding into what he described as a “Fourth Reich,” saying the bloc had “plunged into a Russophobic frenzy, and its militarization is becoming uncontrolled.” After US President Donald Trump ruled out any prospect of NATO membership for Kiev, European backers of Ukraine shifted to discussing “Article 5-like guarantees.” Policymakers have also considered sending troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers and creating a buffer zone with Western patrols. Russia has rejected the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine, in any form. Moscow insists that any peace settlement must ensure Ukraine’s demilitarization, denazification, neutral and non-nuclear status, and recognition of the territorial realities.

Security guarantees for Ukraine must be the result of a settlement of the conflict with Russia, not a precondition for negotiations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Kiev has demanded security guarantees from its Western backers as a prerequisite to a peace deal. Moscow has not ruled out guarantees in principle, but opposes efforts to design them without Russia’s participation. At a press briefing on Friday, Zakharova said any guarantees must be based on an “understanding that takes into account the security interests of Russia.” She added that a settlement must ensure Ukraine’s demilitarization, denazification, neutral and non-nuclear status, and recognition of the territorial realities.

"It is necessary to understand that providing security guarantees is not a condition, but a result of a peaceful settlement based on eliminating the root causes of the conflict in Ukraine, which, in turn, will guarantee the security of our country,” she said. Zakharova criticized the Western proposals put forward so far, warning they would only “lead to destabilization.” “The options proposed by the Collective West are one-sided, built with the obvious expectation of containing Russia… they increase the risk of NATO being drawn into an armed conflict with our country,” she said, adding that they would “secure Kiev’s role as a strategic provocateur on Russia’s borders.”

The woes keep mounting in sad, stricken Europe; and unfortunately, there is no hope yet in sight. The current class of European leaders is inarguably the worst in history, and all of their plans for remediation appear almost intentionally designed to make things even worse. For instance, now hyper-militarization and war are being sold as the elixir for Europe’s ails.

No matter what happens, we can count on the European elites growing their circles ever smaller and tighter in order to centralize power, stifle dissent, and retain their slipping hold on the reins. It’s one of the few assurances in life: death, taxes, and the cabal’s self-preservation.

This recent representative news hits it home—Schwab cleared of wrongdoing, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink appointed to lead the WEF.

Aug 29, 2025

Featured • Why 3,350 New Bombs For Ukraine Will Not Make A Difference, Moon of Alabama, Aug 29, 2025

Featured • Donald Trump Still Does Not Understand the Russia’s Position Regarding Ukraine, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 28, 2025

I continue to believe that it is more important to watch what Donald Trump does rather than focus on what he says. However, his remarks during the meeting of his cabinet earlier this week regarding negotiations to end the war in Ukraine are alarming and merit attention. When asked about Sergei Lavrov’s comment that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not legitimate, Donald Trump dismissed the statement, saying:

It doesn’t matter what they say. Everybody’s posturing. It’s all bullshit, okay. Everybody’s posturing.

He characterized Lavrov’s remarks—and the broader Kremlin rhetoric on Zelensky’s legitimacy—as meaningless showmanship, emphasizing that such claims should not obstruct peace efforts. Trump did not directly defend Zelensky, but instead focused on downplaying the significance of Russia’s statements and suggested that “everyone is just putting on a show” in ongoing negotiations.

I believe that Trump genuinely believes this, and he is dangerously mistaken. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov are not posturing when they try to explain to clueless westerners that they do not believe that Zelensky is the legitimate President of Ukraine.

...Ignore what Trump says, watch what he does. Deploying ERAMs is not a gesture of peace or de-escalation. While it is possible that this action was taken without Trump’s knowledge, now that the information is public he has not countermanded the order.

The countries of the Old World are intoxicated by militaristic frenzy. Like spellbound moths, they flock to the destructive flame of the North Atlantic Alliance. Until recently, Europe still had states that understood: security could be ensured without joining military blocs. Now reason is giving way to herd instinct. Following Finland and Sweden, Austria’s establishment – egged on by bloodthirsty Brussels – is fueling public debate about abandoning its constitutionally enshrined neutrality in favor of NATO membership. Austrian society is far from enthusiastic about the idea. The New Austria liberal party, led by Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger and eager to embrace the bloc, won less than 10% of the vote in the last election. By contrast, the opposition Freedom Party of Austria, which firmly opposes blindly copying Brussels’ militaristic agenda, received support from 37% of citizens. But in today’s Europe, when has the will of the people truly stood in the way?

...Against this backdrop, opinions were voiced in Vienna that a “faltering pacifist consensus” and the “Russian threat” offer a historic opportunity to break free from the “shackles of the past” – namely, to scrap neutrality. Yet neutrality is woven into the very fabric of Austria’s statehood, re-engineered by the Allied powers after World War 2. It is enshrined in the three binding 1955 documents: the Moscow Memorandum, the State Treaty for the Re-establishment of an Independent and Democratic Austria, and Austria’s own Federal Constitutional Act on Permanent Neutrality. These documents are the country’s legal foundation.

...Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states explicitly that no provisions of a country’s internal law may serve as justification for violating an international treaty.

...The hawkish faction of Austria’s elite must grasp the full scale of foreign-policy losses that would follow from abandoning neutrality and joining NATO. Today, Vienna is a hub for multilateral diplomacy, hosting around 20 intergovernmental organizations. This ensures its engagement in global processes and the development of legal frameworks to address emerging challenges and threats. The decision to establish offices of the UN, IAEA, OSCE and OPEC in Vienna was largely predicated on its non-aligned status, which provides an effective platform for dialogue and regional cooperation.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz has made a moderate media splash and ruffled some feathers in his own ruling coalition with the Centrist Social Democrats (SPD). Using the platform of a regional party congress of his CDU Conservatives in Niedersachsen, Merz has delivered a speech that immediately attracted national attention and will be remembered for one phrase.

“The social [welfare] state, as we have it today,” the chancellor declared with appropriately dour mien, “can no longer be financed by what we are achieving economically.” Put differently, severe budget cuts on social issues are coming. And since that is a policy operative since, at the latest, 2003, there really isn’t so much left to cut. Merz is promising his people more of a bad time.

His people. Not, however, the ultra-corrupt political anti-elite of Ukraine. Just before Merz’s claim that Germany cannot afford what it used to offer to Germans who pay for it, his government promised €9 billion ($10.4 bn) per year for Ukraine in 2025 and 2026, for now. That is on top of the €44 billion already sent that way. Germany is the “second-largest backer” of the Kiev regime in the world, as its obviously thoroughly detached finance minister Lars Klingbeil emphasizes with a perverse pride that must sound like a bad joke to many of his compatriots.

...In the spring, his U-turn on public debt, to finance Germany’s new militarism on – exuberant – credit, was not only a massive breach of trust regarding especially his own conservative voters. Shamelessly exploiting a legal loophole, Merz also executed this radical reversal – many in his own party called it betrayal – by relying on parliamentary majorities that had already been cancelled by an election.

Likewise, Merz’s coalition then proceeded to break promises regarding an energy tax relief as well as benefits for mothers. Germans are angry, but there is no sign that Merz and his government care. Consequently, according to a fresh poll by the reputable INSA institute, 62 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with their government.

And yet, there is a hard core of authentic Merz, shaped by his own wealth, a very privileged life without material worries, and his long career as an overpaid member of the supervisory-board network nobility, at BlackRock and elsewhere: if there is one thing Germany’s leader is sincere about, it is his iron will to make the less well-off bleed more and work even harder, while making sure that those as materially comfortable and safe as himself get even richer. Call it neoliberalism with an unsmiling German face.

The upshot of Merz’s blatant upper-class bias is, as a perspicacious German observer has put it, a de facto escalation of the ongoing re-distribution of income, wealth, and life chances – from those below to those above.

Hungary has sued the EU over its decision to use frozen Russian assets to fund military aid for Ukraine, a move adopted despite Budapest’s opposition. Western nations froze an estimated $300 billion in Russian assets after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 – some €200 billion of which is held by Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. The funds have accrued billions in interest, and the West has explored ways to use the revenue to finance Ukraine. The lawsuit challenges the European Council’s decision last year to channel military aid to Ukraine through the European Peace Facility (EPF), which reimburses countries that send weapons to Kiev. Implemented in February, the measure directs 99.7% of interest generated from frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine, providing an estimated €3-5 billion ($3.5-5.8 billion) annually.

In a case first filed with the EU Court of Justice and later transferred to the General Court, Hungary is demanding to “annul the decision… on allocating funds to assistance measures for supplying military support to the Ukrainian Armed Forces” and to “order the defendants to cover the costs.” Budapest contends that the EPF acted unlawfully by bypassing its veto, arguing that Hungary is not a “contributing member state.” “As a result, the principle of equality between Member States and the principle of the democratic functioning of the European Union were infringed because a Member State was deprived, unjustifiably and without a legal basis, of its right to vote,” the filing says.

Aug 28, 2025

Featured • SITREP 8/28/25: Trump Scoffs at Russian Interests in Gross Display of Hubris, Simplicius, Aug 27, 2025
It's not just Trump. It's the whole DC blob. Trump, overall, is just doing the lowbrow "Trump version" of what others express in more learned tones. He has succumbed to the Swamp.

 • Majority Of Americans Don't Believe Trump Can End Wars In Ukraine, Gaza, But..., ZeroHedge, Aug 27, 2025

The survey showed that 59% of respondents believe Trump would be unsuccessful in resolving the war in Ukraine, while 64% say he would be unable to bring an end to the conflict in Gaza. But despite this broad skepticism concerning the end-result, two-thirds of Americans still support Trump’s initiative to negotiate a resolution to the war in Ukraine. The survey indicated it was conducted online within the United States on August 20-21 – among 2,025 registered voters, and so it was days after Trump’s historic summit with Putin in Alaska. The polling shows that Americans saw the effort of direct US-Russia talks in a positive light. So far, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has firmly rejected any territorial compromises, and there’s no indication that the Trump White House has piled much pressure on him to do so.

But Trump is pushing for NATO-style security guarantees for Ukraine, which the Kremlin is in turn rejecting this (assuming it involves Western boots on the ground). Responsible Statecraft describes: Rather than seeking security for all, Europe is still seeking partial security, only for Ukraine.

Aug 27, 2025

 • Trump envoy sets new timeframe for ending Ukraine conflict, RT, Aug 27, 2025

US special presidential envoy Steve Witkoff has said Washington hopes to see the Ukraine conflict resolved by the end of 2025, citing Moscow’s “peace proposal on the table” and ongoing meetings with Russian and Ukrainian representatives. Speaking at a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Witkoff said he will be “having meetings all this week” on Ukraine and other global conflicts, “and we hope to settle them before the end of this year.” In a follow-up interview with Fox News, Witkoff said that although Trump had expressed frustration with both Moscow and Kiev, the Russian side has at least “put a peace proposal on the table.”

In the swirl of the Ukraine war, headlines rarely fail to shock. Yet the latest spat between Kiev and Budapest raises a question that would have been unthinkable two years ago: has Ukraine effectively opened a second front – albeit hybrid, rhetorical, and economic – against an EU state? The immediate spark was the Druzhba (“Friendship”) oil pipeline that still delivers crude from Russia to Central Europe. Several Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the pipeline in recent weeks, halting supplies to Hungary and Slovakia. A Ukrainian commander, known by the call sign Madyar, publicly admitted involvement. For Hungary and Slovakia, this was more than an economic disruption. Both countries rely heavily on the pipeline, and in response, their leaders called on the European Commission to guarantee supply security.

Retired Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny, widely seen as a potential successor to Vladimir Zelensky, has called for education programs that highlight members of the neo-Nazi Azov military unit as role models. As Ukraine’s former top military commander and now ambassador to the UK, Zaluzhny is considered one of the country’s most popular public figures. Polls suggest he would likely defeat Zelensky if presidential elections were held, and Western governments are reportedly courting him as a possible future leader. In an interview published on Saturday Zaluzhny praised the Soviet Union’s approach to memorializing historic figures and suggested Ukraine adopt a similar model using fighters with the controversial regiment – which is accused of war crimes and recognized as a bastion of militarized neo-Nazism – as examples of proper behavior.

Aug 26, 2025

Featured • Trump as ‘Myth’ is understood in Moscow. They reciprocate, Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, Aug 26, 2025

The western Security State narrative of “we are winning”, or at least, “they are losing”, has been so powerful – and so universally accepted for so long – that it, of itself, creates a huge dynamic, pressing for Trump to persist with the Ukraine war. Facts regularly are twisted to fit this narrative. This dynamic has not yet been broken.

And Trump is trapped too, into supporting the Israeli slaughter – with the images of massacred and starved women and children turning the stomach of the younger, under 35, electoral demographic in the U.S.

These dynamics – and the economic blowback from the ‘Shock and Awe’ tariff attack to fracture BRICS – together threaten Trump’s MAGA base more directly. It is becoming existential. Epstein; the Gaza massacre; the threat of ‘more war’, and job worries is roiling not just the MAGA faction, but American young voters more generally. They ask, is Trump still one of ‘us’, or was he always with ‘them’.

Without the base behind him, Trump likely will lose the Midterm Congressional elections. Ultra rich donors pay, but cannot substitute.

What emerged from Anchorage therefore is a meagre intellectual framework. Trump minimally decided to no longer stand in the way of a Russian-imposed solution for Ukraine, which is, in any case, really the only solution there can be.

There is no missing the fungibility inherent in the U.S. stance toward Russia over the years, decades, and centuries — the extent, I mean, to which it is changeable according to changing geopolitical circumstances. It is not merely possible that the reigning Russophobia of our time will at some point pass. History’s lesson is that this is probable — maybe even inevitable.

But one man’s horse-trading and dealmaking will not make this happen, and I would say this is so especially if the man is Donald Trump. History itself will do this work. Its wheel will turn such that America’s alienation from Russia, and by extension the non–West, will prove too costly. This is already the case, providing one is willing to look instead of pretending otherwise.

At a certain point, to put this another way, refusing to accommodate the emergence of the new world order that stares the West in the face as we speak will come at a higher price than accommodating it.

In so many words, Donald Trump proposes an accommodation of just this kind. The extent to which his démarche toward the Russian Federation succeeds will be the extent to which America proves able again to transcend the Russophobia into which it has once more fallen.

Trump may not, once again, understand this, but I don’t see that this matters overmuch. He has taken a step on a path. For now it remains to see how far down America is prepared to go.

Aug 25, 2025
Sorry for not posting the last couple of days. A bit busy here.

Featured • Ukraine - Zelenski Rejects Giving Land As Fascists Promise To Kill Him, Moon of Alabama, Aug 25, 2025
Thank you b, for saying the quiet part out loud. The far right holds veto power in Ukraine, through violence. Ever since Maidan.

Featured • U.S. Approved Sale Of Thousands Of Especially-Crafted Long-Range Missiles To Ukraine, South Front, Aug 24, 2025

The administration of United States President Donald Trump had approved the sale of 3,350 especially-designed, long-range missiles to Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on August 24.

The sale will be a part of a $850 million arms package largely funded by European countries and includes other items, according to the newspaper, which noted that the deliveries of the missile, officially codenamed Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM), should begin within around six weeks.

WSJ said that approval of the sale was delayed until after Trump held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It also revealed that Ukraine will have to get the approval of the Pentagon every time it wants to use the new missile.

While WSJ provided some details on the ERAM, a closer look at the missile came last month from Aviation Week, which reviewed documents on the project released in open access.

The ERAM is basically a hybrid of a guided aerial bomb and a small-sized cruise missile. It has a 260-kilogram warhead, with armor-piercing or high-explosive action. The estimated range is 463 kilometers, the minimum speed is Mach 0.6 or 740 kilometers per hour.

It’s worth noting here that the range of the missile is just enough to allow Ukraine to target the Russian capital, Moscow.

...The report on the missile sale came just days after Ukraine unveiled a locally-made, ground-launched cruise missile dubbed Flamingo with an alleged range of 3,000 kilometers and a warhead weighing around 1,150 kg. Kiev said that it was planning to produce seven such missiles a day in two months.

These recent developments appear to be a part of efforts meant to put more pressure on Russia as it prepares to engage in higher-level talks with Ukraine.

Both the ERAM and Flamingo should be considered a serious threat. Nevertheless, there are grounds to question the specifications of these missiles, and the projected production.

Kiev’s backers in Europe want the conflict in Ukraine to continue, unlike US President Donald Trump, who seems to have genuinely embraced the path of diplomacy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Speaking in an interview with NBC aired on Sunday, Lavrov said that the reaction of many European officials to the summit in Alaska, and also their rhetoric during follow-up talks several days later involving Vladimir Zelensky, revealed that the European NATO nations remain as bellicose as ever about the Ukraine conflict. “The reaction… of these European representatives and what they were doing… indicates that they don’t want peace. They say we cannot allow the defeat of Ukraine. We cannot allow Russia to win,” Lavrov said.

Meanwhile, the minister noted that US President Donald Trump has opted for another approach. “We respect President Trump because President Trump defends American national interests,” he said, adding that the US leader seems to respect Russian President Vladimir Putin for doing the same for his country. “What… they discuss between themselves is not a secret. We want peace in Ukraine. President Trump wants peace in Ukraine,” Lavrov stressed. He also noted that Russia and Ukraine came close to a peace agreement early in the conflict during talks in Istanbul. “We proposed several times a peaceful resolution on a diplomatic basis. And as I said, it was not us who blew up the deal… in April 2022. It was personally [then-UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson and… several officials from the Biden administration, the French and the Germans.”

During those negotiations, Russia and Ukraine discussed a draft agreement that entailed a neutral status for Ukraine, a scaling back of Kiev’s military, and security guarantees. Moscow has accused Johnson of intervening to urge Kiev to reject the proposed deal and continue fighting, a claim the ex-UK prime minister has denied. Following the Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump held talks with Zelensky and several European leaders, which focused on potential security guarantees for Kiev. Several European governments have also floated the idea of deploying troops to Ukraine once the conflict ends, a step Russia has described as a red line.

While speaking to Lara Trump about the ongoing Russiagate review efforts, Devin Nunes notes, “The only thing that President Trump and this administration can do, is make sure that whoever can be held accountable, are held accountable, and that this doesn’t happen again; that these people are taught a lesson, so that this doesn’t happen again.” But there’s something even more revealing within the interview. Context: Devin Nunes is the chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an alternative mechanism to review and analyze global and domestic intelligence information – with overlay against truth and reality that underpins the issue(s). Action: Accepting the intent of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, now insert the recent DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s directive to stop information sharing with allied countries as it specifically relates to President Trump’s efforts to create a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.

Back to the interview: Here’s the statement that really deserves to be emphasized: “Imagine where we sit today, with all the things going on around the world, and the President has to have the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, his own intelligence board, all making sure the intelligence is not weaponized. I mean it’s rather incredible, this is something that is unprecedented [sic] in the United States of America.” Think about that remarkable context. Essentially what Nunes is saying is that Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard and Devin Nunes (et al) cannot trust the operational embeds under the agency heads within the United States Intelligence Community. Think about that, as it is said out loud. This is exactly what CTH has been trying to hammer home for years.

The modern IC system is now designed to be a rogue apparatus, disconnected from the traditional framework of executive control. The people who operate within that fourth branch of government are not constrained by the power or authority of the executive. This is exceptionally dangerous. We elect a President (Executive), we elect representatives (Legislative), the Executive and Legislative create the Judicial, who exactly is controlling the Intelligence Branch? Many, too numerous people to count, have dismissed my warnings about how this system is operating. Here we have the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and current Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, saying exactly the same thing.

Ratcliffe, Gabbard, Patel, Blanche, Bongino, Bondi, Rubio and all of the Nunes advisory team, are trying to keep the IC system operators from targeting President Trump via weaponized, purposefully manipulated, intelligence information. By direct and unassailable implication, this means rogue influence operations are taking place external to the ability of executive to curtail them. As Devin Nunes is noting, the Office of the President is taking active measures to work around the intelligence agencies. This rogue nature of the intelligence apparatus is an example of how the CIA seemingly operates in places like Ukraine without President Trump or Director John Ratcliffe having any power over the activity. (emphasis added)

Russia, China, BRICS/SCO need to be on red alert 24/7. The Peace is War front is already in the process of converting themselves into the NBT front: nuclear threats, bioweapons and terror attacks. Russia may have the Dead Hand – which will exterminate any attacker. The NBT front at best has the scrawny dead hand of a dead man walking. (emphasis by ZH)

Now, merely a week out from when Presidents Trump and Putin met in Alaska, the White House’s admirable peace efforts seem to be unraveling and even hopelessly stalled. Many independent-minded analysts had from the very start said that this conflict will ultimately be settled on the battlefield. The Wall Street Journal too seems to be coming around to this view: On Monday, President Trump boasted about quickly brokering peace to end the bloody Ukraine conflict. By Thursday, he was saying that Kyiv had no chance of winning the war without new attacks on Russia. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense,” Trump posted on social media. “Interesting times ahead!!!” His turnaround underscored the fading optimism about Trump’s latest push to end the war.

Indeed this is another example of the West trying to have its cake and eat it too, as Trump strongly hints that Ukraine must take the offensive while simultaneously lamenting that Putin and Zelensky are not getting together in a hoped-for summit. Trump is essentially saying Ukraine cannot win the war unless it launches attacks on Russia. “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump had explained further in his Truth Social statement. The WSJ in its analysis then turns to one of the big factors which is sure to stymie talks from Moscow’s point of view: security guarantees for Ukraine: U.S. and European officials are still negotiating the makeup of a peacekeeping force that would aim to deter future Russian attacks against Ukraine if a peace deal was reached. Even that idea was quickly rebuffed by the Kremlin and raised questions about Trump’s willingness to commit to a major role for the U.S. military.

With much of his plans still unrealized, Trump is confronted with the uncertainties that have dogged him for the past seven months: How willing is he to pressure Putin, and how far is he willing to go in backing Zelensky? As we highlighted before, the ‘logic’ of this is contradictory and will lead nowhere.

Russia is open to talks with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky given that he is the “de facto head of the regime” in Kiev, but any deals could only be signed by a legitimate representative of Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. In a rare interview with NBC aired on Sunday, Lavrov did not rule out direct talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelensky “provided this meeting is really going to decide something.” However, the necessary groundwork for such talks, the foreign minister stressed, has not yet been done. Lavrov acknowledged that Zelensky is the “de facto head of the regime” but said that “the issue of who is going to sign the deal on the Ukrainian side is a very serious [one],” he said. “We would need a very clear understanding by everybody that the person who is signing is legitimate.”

The Ukrainian leader’s presidential term ended more than a year ago, and he has refused to hold a new election, citing martial law. Russia has since proclaimed him “illegitimate.” Lavrov also suggested that Zelensky’s calls for a meeting with Putin are “basically a game” and a way to strengthen the Ukrainian leader’s questionable legitimacy. “A game he is very good [at playing] because he wants theatrics in everything he is doing. He does not care about substance,” he said. Moscow sees no point in talks destined to yield no results due to Kiev’s position, Lavrov said, pointing out cases where Zelensky has directly defied US President Donald Trump. “Zelensky said no to everything… He clearly stated that nobody can prohibit him from joining NATO… he publicly stated that he is not going to discuss any territories.”

Russia maintains that any settlement of the Ukraine conflict must address the root causes of the crisis. Moscow insists that Ukraine must commit to block neutrality [bloc-neutrality], demilitarization, denazification, and recognition of territorial reality on the ground. Kiev has said that while Zelensky is ready to discuss Ukraine’s territorial disputes with Russia, it has no intention to recognize its losses.

Russia has no interest in seizing Ukrainian land but wants to protect ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people from persecution by Kiev, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. In an interview with NBC on Sunday, Lavrov was asked whether halting Moscow’s military offensive was the only concession it was prepared to make. ”We don’t have any interest in territories. We have the biggest territory on Earth,” Lavrov said. “What we are concerned about… is the people who live on those lands, whose ancestors lived there for centuries.”

Lavrov said Moscow’s goal is “to remove any security threats to Russia coming from Ukrainian territory” as well as “to protect the rights of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking people who believe they belong to Russian culture and Russian history.” “The only way to protect them against this Nazi regime is to give them the right to express their will,” he stressed. Lavrov went on to underscore that “Ukraine has the right to exist,” but it should be ready to “let people go.” He noted, however, that Ukrainian officials have consistently sought to dehumanize and portray as “terrorists” people in its five former regions that voted to join Russia in 2014 and 2022.

Since the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014, Ukraine has moved to sever centuries-long ties with Russia and introduced restrictions on the Russian language in the media. It has also sought to phase out Russian in schools, and impose broader curbs on its use in social life. Kiev has also embarked on a campaign to eliminate cultural ties with Moscow, particularly through its controversial decommunization campaign, which involved renaming cities, streets, and landmarks that bore Soviet-era or Russian-linked names.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has rejected US calls to withdraw its claim to Crimea or make any territorial concessions to Russia. In a speech marking Ukraine’s Independence Day on Sunday, Zelensky vowed to retake the peninsula, which is predominantly populated by ethnic Russians and overwhelmingly voted to join Russia after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev. He also pledged to reclaim the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which, along with Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, joined Russia in 2022 after referendums. “Here at the zero kilometer, this is a starting point where distances to Ukrainian cities are marked – to our Donetsk, our Lugansk, our Crimea,” Zelensky said in an address filmed at Kiev’s Maidan Square, the site of the Western-backed 2014 coup.

“All of this is Ukraine… and no temporary occupation can change that. One day… we will be together again as one country. It’s only a matter of time.”

US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has ordered all information about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations be withheld from US intelligence partners, CBS News reported on Thursday, citing sources. Several unnamed US officials familiar with the matter told the outlet that the memo, which is dated July 20, directed intelligence agencies to classify all relevant data and subject analysis as NOFORN – not to be shared with foreign partners, including members of the Five Eyes intelligence framework, which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. nThe reported memo strictly limits the distribution of such materials to the agency from which they originated.

European leaders do not want peace – Trump and Putin will come to an agreement – Europe is striving for Minsk III and thus for forever war.

Aug 22, 2025

Featured • NATO Trying to Game Russia Over Security Guarantees for Ukraine, and Moscow Says Nyet!, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 22, 2025
The most "active" Western leaders are more than salesmen than statesmen, including Trump of course. Russia has given Trump space to do his thing so he can neutralize his domestic and international opposition but Trump has wasted the gift. Russia is now bringing the entertaining performance to an end. Back to seriousness and hard work. Bordachev seems correct: the main point of the meeting in the Oval Office was to make explicit, and fully patent, Europe's subordination. This isn't new. Biden's destruction of Nordstream was pivotal in that regard. Bragging about doing it, before the fact, while Scholz stood there like an idiot. That was even more humiliating than last Monday's meeting.

 • SITREP 8/22/25: Peace Talks Unravel and the March Goes On, Simplicius, Aug 21, 2025
Modern land warfare explained, in this place and time.

 • Russia Attacks US-Owned Factory In Ukraine, While Insisting It Has Veto Power Over Any 'Security Guarantees', ZeroHedge, Aug 21, 2025

Now nearly a week out from last Friday’s historic Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the White House has had to temper its positive predictions on the peace process, after prematurely touting that a Putin and Zelensky bilateral meeting was on the horizon. By Wednesday the Kremlin had made it clear this is not yet the case. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued some non-committal statements, watering down what appeared an already vague commitment. A future direct meeting with the Ukrainian leader – a president which Moscow previously dubbed illegitimate – would have to be prepared “gradually… starting with the expert level and thereafter going through all the required steps.”

A separate Russian official has stated that “it shouldn’t be a meeting for the sake of a meeting” – highlighting that despite Trump’s strong diplomatic efforts, Russia remains ‘open’ but doesn’t consider the warring sides to have bridged key major gaps on peace terms just yet. On Thursday The Wall Street Journal underscored that there’s yet another key divide – the question of future security guarantees and how they will be monitored or implemented: Russia warned on Wednesday that it should effectively hold veto power over any action to assist Ukraine after a peace deal is reached, rendering planned Western security guarantees for Kyiv moot and delivering a setback to negotiations championed by President Trump.

Kiev is openly demonstrating it has no interest in long-term peace with Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, pointing to recent remarks by Ukrainian officials. Following the summit in Alaska between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, and subsequent talks in Washington with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and European leaders, the US administration said a peace deal had become more feasible. The White House described the outcome of the talks as progress, noting there was “a light at the end of the tunnel.” At a press conference on Thursday, Lavrov confirmed that significant progress had been achieved during the Alaska summit. However, he underlined that Ukrainian officials continue to comment on a possible resolution “in a very specific way that shows they are not interested in a sustainable, fair, long-term settlement.”

He pointed to a statement by key Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podoliak, who recently stated that Kiev would acknowledge that some regions are “de facto” lost to Russia. However, once Kiev secures security guarantees it would seek to regain them and demand that the West impose sanctions aimed at weakening Russia and damaging its economy. According to Lavrov, such rhetoric demonstrates that the Ukrainian leadership, encouraged by its Western sponsors, are pursuing goals antithetical to the joint efforts of Trump and Putin to eliminate the root causes of the crisis. Instead of working toward a settlement, Lavrov argued, Kiev and its backers want to aggravate those causes further by forming anti-Russian military alliances. He suggested that Ukraine’s refusal to discuss a settlement before receiving security guarantees is intended to preserve what he called the “neo-Nazi, Russophobic regime” in Kiev.

The minister also accused Kiev’s European sponsors of trying to “disrupt” the peace agenda by ignoring Russia’s interests and demanding security guarantees for a country “that professes neo-Nazi values, grossly violates the rights of national minorities, legislatively tries to exterminate the Russian language in all spheres of life, prohibits the canonical Orthodox Church.” “I hope this recklessness will fail and we will continue to follow the course agreed upon by President Putin and President Trump,” Lavrov said.

Aug 21, 2025

Featured • Ukraine's Future - A 'Steppe Corridor' - A Neutral, Transit-oriented State, Moon of Alabama, Aug 21, 2025

While Russia is confidently prosecuting the war in Ukraine towards its inevitable end.

Meanwhile the 'West' is still negotiating with itself about the conditions under which it will have to capitulate.

Discussions continue about 'security guarantees' for Ukraine even as the only serious ones are those that Russia is willing to give.

There you have it! The primary reason for the war in Ukraine — which the US-provoked — was to inflict a defeat on Russia that would compel it to join Team USA and help America corral China. While Mitchell is a smart guy, you can read for yourself that he completely misjudged the consequences of trying to isolate and weaken Russia. Instead of persuading Putin to submit to Washington’s hegemonic leadership and to eschew closer ties with China, the opposite has happened. . . Russia and China now enjoy closer economic, diplomatic, political and military ties than at any time in the history of both nations.

I must emphasize that much of the policymaking community in Washington is still convinced that Russia and China are not natural allies, and that the West can somehow engineer a divorce between the two nations. But Washington’s onerous sanctions on Russia, its massive support for Ukraine in the war with Russia, and its bellicose threats against China have, as I noted above, made the two fast friends and allies. You can also add India and Brazil to that list. A year ago, those two countries were not BRICS enthusiasts… now they are. Since Trump took the oath of office in January, he has succeeded in creating a unity of purpose and desire among the BRICS nations.

While Trump and his team are currently fixated on getting a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, I do not think they grasp the complexity of that task, nor do they appreciate that the real issue Russia will insist on addressing is the threat that NATO presents to Russia. Until that root cause is addressed, Russia will continue the war of attrition against Ukraine and move inexorably to the west.

A Ukrainian MP has admitted the loss of “several generations” in the country’s 3-year coflict with Russia. The comments from Ukrainian MP Artem Dmytruk follow reports that leaked military files indicate Kiev’s forces have lost more than 1.7 million troops – killed or missing – since 2022. Russian media outlets on Wednesday cited a digital card index allegedly acquired by hacker groups from Ukraine’s Chief of Staff said to contain names of dead or missing soldiers, details of their deaths, and personal data of their families. The entries suggested 118,500 troops were killed or went missing in 2022, 405,400 in 2023, 595,000 in 2024 and a record 621,000 so far this year.

Commenting on the reported losses, Dmytruk said: “The lists of the missing today contain more than a million people, and of course these people are most likely dead, while their families remain in complete ignorance. The situation is tragic, the situation is frightening.” He warned that villages had been emptied of men, including the elderly and disabled, and that Ukraine was facing “huge losses” and a “demographic crisis.” “We have lost several generations,” he said, urging peace on the grounds that both Ukrainians and Russians were dying. The reported figures far exceed official estimates. In February, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told CBS News that 46,000 of his soldiers had been killed since 2022, alongside about 380,000 wounded – numbers questioned in Western media. Moscow has also claimed higher Ukrainian losses, putting the toll at more than 1 million killed or wounded as of early this year.

The end of the war will shake the bloc up no less than the war itself, propelling the suppressed New Right to power.

The prospects for an end to the Ukraine War have never been so good despite continuing if dwindling Western European attempts to play spoiler, and with the exception, of course, of the almost-peace of spring 2022 that the West sabotaged. Since then, there’s been much water – or rather blood – under that bridge not crossed.

Now there is a real chance that the presidents of Russia and the US, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will compel – “persuade,” if you wish – both the Zelensky regime in Kiev and its remaining backers in NATO-EU Europe to return to reality: namely, to accept, if tacitly, that Russia is winning the war on the ground and that a later peace will only bring further unnecessary losses for Ukraine and its Western users.

Nothing, except death, is certain until it is in the past. This peace is still in the – hopefully near – future. Yet we can already think about its consequences. Regarding the 32 European countries that are either in NATO, the EU, or both, this is usually done with an eye to military posture, foreign policy, and the economy (oddly enough, in that order). How long, for instance, will it take for hysterical predictions of a Russian attack on at least the Baltics if not Warsaw, Berlin, and – who knows – Luxembourg, to wear off? What will happen to the new monster-debt-driven militarism? Will the NATO-EU Europeans ever be sensible enough again to rediscover diplomacy and cooperation with Russia? If so, when? Before or after they finally collapse under the weight of energy prices, deindustrialization, and public debt?

The answer to all questions above will depend on how the domestic politics of key European states develop. In that respect, the single most important question is about the future of Europe’s currently rising, even surging New Right (an umbrella term for parties that are commonly labeled, for instance, “right-populist,” “hard right,” or “far right”). But this logic also works the other way around. If the Ukraine War ends mostly on Moscow’s terms, as now supported even by Washington, this peace will inevitably influence politics inside NATO-EU Europe and in particular the chances of the New Right.

The New Right advance is especially significant in three key countries: France, Germany, and Great Britain. They have in common that their respective New Right parties – Rassemblement National (RN), Reform UK, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – are leading national polls. While this is similar to several other European states, such as Spain and Austria, the British, French, and German cases are special because of their economic and political weight.

Russia is ready to raise the status of its delegation-level peace negotiations with Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has announced. His remarks followed a summit between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska last week. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Lavrov said that the idea was floated by Putin following his phone call with Trump on Monday, which went on as the US president was holding talks with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and several key European leaders in the White House. It is unclear whether Lavrov’s reference to elevating the delegation status was hinting at the possibility of future Putin-Zelensky talks. Lavrov added that the new status of delegations would also imply the review of “a separate bloc [of questions] to address the political aspects of conflict resolution, alongside military and humanitarian issues.”

He said that Russia had suggested forming three working groups to discuss this agenda during the latest round of direct talks with Ukraine, but noted that Kiev “so far has not responded.” Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of direct talks in Istanbul this year, led on Moscow’s side by presidential advisor Vladimir Medinsky. The negotiations made no breakthroughs on the settlement of the wider conflict, but did lead to prisoner exchanges between the two sides. Lavrov’s remarks come in the wake of the Putin-Trump Alaska summit, which both leaders described as constructive, although it ended with no deal on Ukraine.

Trump’s meeting with Zelensky and the European leaders several days later ended with the US president saying that Kiev’s membership in NATO is out of question, and insisting on a direct Putin-Zelensky meeting. Putin has not ruled out a meeting with Zelensky in principle, but said it should be preceded with serious progress in negotiations on the conflict. Moscow has also voiced concern about Zelensky’s authority to sign any binding documents, given that his presidential term expired last year.

Ukraine has allegedly lost more than 1.7 million troops killed and missing, multiple media outlets reported on Wednesday, citing a digital card index reportedly from the country’s armed forces. Russian hacking groups have claimed to have obtained the information by gaining access to the personal computers and local networks of the Ukrainian General Staff. The database is said to include the full names of deceased soldiers, descriptions of the circumstances and places of their death or disappearance, personal data, next of kin, and photos. The entries suggest that since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Kiev’s forces have lost a total of 1,721,000 servicemen. 118.5 thousand were apparently killed in 2022, 405.4 thousand in 2023, 595 thousand in 2024 and a record 621 thousand in 2025.

Hackers from the groups Killnet, Palach Pro, User Sec and Beregini are said to have obtained terabytes of information about the Ukrainian military. Aside from personnel losses, the groups allegedly also possess the personal data of the command of the Special Operations Forces and the Main Intelligence Directorate, lists of all countries that have supplied weapons to Kiev and lists of all weapons transferred from 2022 to 2025. This Ukrainian casualty estimate far exceeds losses previously reported by Kiev.

In February, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told CBS News that since 2022, just 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with another 380,000 wounded. The estimate was widely questioned even in Western media, with the France’s Le Monde reporting last month that “the real death toll is likely much higher,” citing Ukraine’s increasing efforts to build military cemeteries. The Russian military has consistently reported higher casualties among Ukrainian servicemen, claiming their losses particularly surged following Kiev’s unsuccessful counteroffensive in 2023. As of February, more than 1.08 million Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded, according to Moscow’s estimates.

Aug 20, 2025

Featured • Trump Breaks Europe Over His Knee: Unprecedented Optics of White House 'Losers' Gathering', Simplicius, Aug 19, 2025

What we saw was another rehash of the same routine as in Alaska: talks are held, major “progress” announced, yet no concrete details or evidence is provided. In this case, the big achievement is said to be the agreement on a meeting between Putin and Zelensky, followed by a “trilat” as Trump calls it. The problem is, there is zero evidence the Russian side has agreed to any such thing.

Firstly, press outlets blared that Trump “phoned Putin” in the midst of his meeting with the Europeans—Trump himself promptly shot this down:

I post this example to again illustrate just how much disinfo noise is clogging the airwaves around this issue. And this contextualizes the remainder of the analysis, surrounding what Russia may or may not have agreed to. You see, just as easily as mainstream outlets lied about Trump’s call, they may be doing so about the now-circulating claims that Putin has “agreed to” meet with Zelensky.

The Russians have been playing things extremely close to their chests, even more than usual. It appears they have adopted a strategy of deliberate strategic ambiguity in order to give Trump the license he needs to play his game against the Europeans—and Ukraine—while the Russians sit back and watch.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is opposed to proposals by some European leaders to send troops to Ukraine, the daily Corriere della Sera reported on Monday. The issue reportedly arose during consultations before several European leaders and Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky traveled to Washington for talks with US President Donald Trump. The visit follows Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. According to the report, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke in favor of a joint European deployment, prompting Meloni to respond: “Russia has 1.3 million soldiers – how many should we send to be up to the task?”

In early March, Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the creation of a “coalition of the willing” to provide ground and air forces in a peacekeeping role if Kiev and Moscow reach a truce or a peace deal. The Italian prime minister instead advocated extending Ukraine protection akin to NATO’s Article 5, which provides for collective defense in case of aggression, without however formally admitting it to the bloc, Corriere reported. In March, she assured lawmakers in Rome that “sending Italian troops to Ukraine is a topic that has never been on the agenda.”

Germany, Poland, Spain, Romania and Croatia have all also refused to participate in a hypothetical military mission in Ukraine. Earlier this month, The Sunday Times quoted an anonymous UK defense official as acknowledging that “no one wants to send their troops to die in Ukraine.” Back in April, Sergey Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s National Security Council and former defense minister, warned that the arrival of NATO troops in Ukraine could trigger a third world war.

European forces should take part in future peacekeeping operations in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron told journalists on Monday. The proposal has repeatedly been rejected by Moscow as unacceptable and dangerous. Macron made the comments in Washington after a White House summit on Monday with US President Donald Trump, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, and several European leaders, who met to discuss possible terms for ending the conflict. Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Macron said that Ukraine must have a “strong army” and that Western Europe “will need to help Ukraine with boots on the ground.” He added, “We will need peacekeeping operations which allies of Ukraine are willing to supply.”

Aug 19, 2025

Featured • “All The King’s Men”: Zelensky And His Minders On The Carpet For A White House Marathon, South Front, Aug 19, 2025

Kiev’s behavior is often dismissed in public debate as illogical or little more than slogans. Yet if one assumes that Ukraine’s leadership was operating on the basis of undisclosed guarantees and potential scenarios for expanding pressure on Russia, the strategy looked more straightforward: pull Moscow in, wear it down, divert its resources, and wait for a new front to open — all while treating interim territorial losses as politically manageable.

On the European side, the picture was filled out by ambitions of “total deterrence,” reinforced institutionally by the new 5% defense-spending target and by some capitals’ willingness to discuss a potential peacekeeping role in any deal — even though Europe still struggled to outline a coherent plan without U.S. backing. That helped explain why the EU arrived at the White House as a bloc: to lock in tangible security guarantees while limiting the room for a quick bargain on terms Moscow might accept.

On the eve of the meeting, Ursula von der Leyen had put it bluntly: Ukraine, she said, must become a “steel porcupine” — too prickly for any aggressor to take on. It was striking metaphor, but one that hardly squares with reality. A sharper description of “collective Europe” today might be a Swiss Army knife without a blade.

For Europe, the priority that emerged in Washington was not only to deter Moscow but to push toward a systemic weakening of Russia through combined military and economic pressure. With the Fox News interview canceled, the summit ended on a note of uncertainty, leaving observers to watch how the three capitals will position themselves next.

After the talks, Trump sought to dispel some of that uncertainty by announcing preparations for a new meeting with Vladimir Putin, framing it as the next step in moving the process forward.

Nothing changed due to yesterday's meetings.

Ukraine offers $100bn weapons deal to Trump to win security guarantees (archived) - Financial Times, Aug 19 2025

Ukraine will promise to buy $100bn of American weapons financed by Europe in a bid to obtain US guarantees for its security after a peace settlement with Russia, according to a document seen by the Financial Times.

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Alexander G. Rubio @AlexanderGRubi2 - 2:22 UTC · Aug 19, 2025

The plan is for the US to sell weapons to the Europeans, who will then provide them to Kiev. However, the US doesn’t have the weapons to sell, the Europeans don’t have the money to buy, and Kiev doesn’t have the soldiers to use them. Other than that it's a foolproof plan.

Aug 18, 2025

Featured • Zelensky Drags Traveling Circus to Town for One Last Encore, Simplicius, Aug 17, 2025
I do not agree with the headline. Traveling circus, yes, but "one last encore," no. But Simplicius has a good deal of detail from various press accounts for the discerning reader. I am not very hopeful that the Trump administration has enough internal coherence to withstand the U.S.-EU MICIMATT.

Featured • Secretary Marco Rubio -vs- Margaret Brennan, The Last Refuge, Aug 17, 2025

MARGARET BRENNAN: Vladimir Putin did not give President Trump the ceasefire he sought. And now Putin says the root causes of the conflict have to be resolved in a peace agreement. Isn’t the root cause the fact that Russia invaded in the first place?

SEC. RUBIO: Well, ultimately, yeah. But I mean, what he means by root causes is this long historical complaints that we’ve heard repeatedly. This is not a new argument, he’s been making this for a long time, and it’s the argument that it’s Western encroachment. I don’t want to get into- it’s just so long. But the bottom line is that all of- you know, we’re not going to focus on all of that stuff. We’re going to focus on this: are they going to stop fighting or not? And what it’s going to take to stop the fighting. And what it’s going to take to stop the fighting, if we’re being honest and serious here, is both sides are going to have to give, and both sides should expect to get something from this.

And that’s a very difficult thing to do. It’s very difficult because Ukraine obviously feels, you know, harmed, and rightfully so, because they were invaded. And the Russian side, because they feel like they got momentum in the battlefield, and frankly, don’t care, don’t seem to care very much about how many Russian soldiers die in this endeavor. They just churn through it. So I think what the President deserves a lot of credit for is the amount of time and energy that his administration is placing on reaching a peace agreement for a war that’s not a war that started under him. It’s half, you know, it’s on the other side of the world.

That said, I mean, it’s relevant to us. But there are a lot of other issues he could be focused on. So tomorrow, we’ll be meeting with President Zelenskyy. We’ll be meeting with European leaders. We just met with Putin. He’s dedicated a lot of time and energy because he has made it a priority of his administration to stop or end war- stop wars or prevent them. And right now, this is the biggest war going on in the world. It’s the biggest war in Europe since World War Two. We’re going to continue to do everything we can to reach an agreement that ends the dying and the killing and the suffering that’s going on right now.

US President Donald Trump has endorsed a peace plan that envisages Ukraine ceding the whole of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics to Russia, the New York Times and Fox News have claimed, citing anonymous European officials. Moscow would then supposedly agree to cease hostilities elsewhere. The reports came in the wake of Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. Following the talks, the two presidents expressed hope that progress had been made toward a resolution of the Ukraine conflict. On Saturday, the NYT quoted its sources as saying that during the upcoming meeting with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and several Western European leaders at the White House on Monday...

Trump will propose that Kiev relinquish the areas of the new Russian territories in Donbass still under Ukrainian control. The Kremlin, in turn, would agree to cease hostilities along the current front line in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, which also became part of Russia after referendums in 2022.

Volodymyr Zelensky can end the conflict “almost immediately, if he wants to,” by recognizing Crimea as part of Russia and agreeing to Ukraine’s non-entry into NATO, US President Donald Trump said. “President Zelensky of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE. Some things never change!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social — blasting Zelensky ahead of White House talks with him and NATO allies. Top EU and NATO leaders — von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, Macron, Stubb, Meloni and Rutte — are all rushing to Washington to prop up Zelensky. Trump makes it clear: it is Zelensky’s choice — war or peace.

European leaders will join Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he meets with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, and Trump’s special envoy revealed Sunday a major concession that Vladimir Putin has made in hopes of reaching a peace accord. The leaders joining Zelensky include French President Emmanuel Macron, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary-General Mark Rutte, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, according to the BBC. On Friday, Trump met with Putin in Alaska to discuss how the three-year-old war could end.

The U.S. has been engaging in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the ongoing war that began in 2022. Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN Sunday that Putin agreed to “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine from the U.S. as part of a possible peace deal. “We agreed to robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing,” Witkoff told Jake Tapper. Trump on Sunday morning wrote on TRUTH Social that there was “BIG PROGRESS” on Russia and to stay tuned.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky will arrive in Washington on Monday for talks with US President Donald Trump, accompanied by EU top brass, German outlet Bild has reported. Joining Zelensky will be German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the tabloid wrote on Sunday. The trip follows Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, resolving the Ukraine conflict topping the agenda.

Following the summit, Trump signaled that he now favors a full peace settlement over a ceasefire, and that he may be open to a recognition of Russia’s new territories, consistent with Moscow’s position. Trump’s shift has “thwarted” the EU’s plans for Ukraine, Bild stated on Sunday. EU leaders have insisted that a ceasefire come first, and have rejected territorial concessions, as has Zelensky. Following the summit, Macron said the goal of the talks in Washington was to “present a united front” between Ukraine and the EU, and warned against showing “weakness” towards Russia.

Merz said the EU would continue to support Kiev, and that any negotiations needed to begin with a ceasefire. Von der Leyen rejected any notion that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia and threatened more sanctions on Moscow. Stubb is going to Washington to “help prevent any flare-ups between Trump and Zelensky and convince the US president to include Europe in any further talks,” Politico reported earlier. Zelensky’s previous visit to Washington ended in a heated exchange between the Ukrainian and Trump. Ukraine’s backers in the EU are “in a panic” following the Alaska summit, Russian economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who was part of Moscow’s delegation, has said.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has rejected US President Donald Trump’s call for a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev, reiterating that a truce has to be implemented before discussing details of a possible settlement. Zelensky made the statement on Sunday during a joint press-conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who will accompany him to Washington for talks with Trump on Monday. The Ukrainian leader claimed that Moscow had made “many demands” on the settlement of the conflict and that Kiev needs to be made aware of them. “If there are really as many as we have heard, then it will take time to go through them all,” he said.

According to Zelensky, it is “impossible” for Ukraine to negotiate “under pressure of weapons.” “It is necessary to ceasefire and work quickly on a final deal,” he insisted. Russia has repeatedly rejected Ukraine’s demands for a ceasefire, saying that a pause in the fighting would be exploited by Kiev to rearm and regroup its forces. The Ukrainian leader also rejected the possibility of making territorial concessions to Russia as part of a peace deal, saying that trading land is forbidden by the country’s constitution.

Von der Leyen insisted that “Ukraine must become a steel porcupine, indigestible to potential invaders,” repeating a metaphor that she has used before. She promised that the EU would keep working to strengthen the Ukrainian defense industry, especially when it comes to drone production. The European Commission head insisted that decisions regarding territory “belong only to Ukraine, and cannot be taken without Ukraine at the table.” The EU will continue trying to apply diplomatic and economic pressure on Russia, with its 19th sanctions package against Moscow currently in preparation, Von der Leyen said.

Aug 17, 2025

Featured • Visit to Alaska Was Timely and Very Useful - Putin, Sputnik International, Aug 16, 2025

 • Trump-Zelensky call ‘wasn’t easy’ – Axios, RT, Aug 16, 2025

The phone call between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky after the Alaska summit on Friday “wasn’t easy,” Axios correspondent Barak Ravid claimed on Saturday, citing a source with direct knowledge. Key European leaders later joined the call as well. Trump spoke with Zelensky for about an hour, according to Ravid. Also on the line were Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom had earlier taken part in the talks with the Russian delegation. The leaders of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Poland, as well as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, later joined the call, which lasted another 30 minutes, according to the journalist.

Ravid described the call as “not easy,” though he did not elaborate on this, adding only that Trump insisted that “a fast peace deal is better than a ceasefire.” The US president later confirmed the sentiment, writing: “It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” Zelensky said that during the phone call with Trump the two agreed that he would come on Monday to Washington to discuss in person the outcome of the summit.

Ukraine and its Western backers have for months been pushing for a temporary ceasefire. While Russia has never ruled out the idea, it has argued that such a step would allow Kiev to receive more Western weapons, continue forced mobilization, and recover its losses at a time when Russian troops are pressing their advantage on the battlefield. Meanwhile, both Putin and Trump praised the Alaska talks as productive. The US president said that they moved closer to resolving the conflict while urging Zelensky to “make a deal.”

The Putin-Trump summit was an unqualified success that could pave the way for peace in Ukraine, and the normalization of Russia-US relations for years to come. Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of research at the Russian Council on Foreign & Defense Policy, explains why. Three key reasons:

1. The summit “gave impetus” to Russia-US normalization on all fronts – from Ukraine and arms control to economic cooperation

2. Trump’s calls to Zelensky and European leaders in the meeting’s immediate aftermath signals that “negotiations were conducted on specific conditions for a final peace settlement,” not the ‘ceasefire as a prerequisite’ long demanded by Brussels and Kiev. This is “fundamentally important,” Suslov says

3. The summit was “historic” in the sense that it “made a great contribution to…laying the foundations of the future world order, a post-war world order. Because the Ukrainian conflict is, first and foremost, the largest and most severe military conflict in the world in the last few decades, and a concentrated expression of the hybrid war waged by the West against Russia.”

“The summit in Alaska was dedicated to ending this hybrid war,” demonstrating that the foundations for a future world order will be based on dialogue between great powers, on equal terms.

Now, Suslov says, it’s up to the Europeans and Zelensky to decide whether they accept the terms outlined by Putin and Trump. If they do, preparations for future meetings can begin. “If they categorically refuse, the United States will most likely completely suspend the transfer of US intelligence and stop deliveries and sales of weapons and military equipment to the Europeans for Ukraine,” which would “fundamentally and radically weaken Ukraine’s position on the battlefield and bring a Russian military victory much closer.” Suslov expects the ‘war party’ in Washington and Brussels to try to convince Trump to abandon whatever agreements were reached with Putin in Anchorage, but doesn’t expect Trump to “succumb to such provocations,” because he is much stronger politically than he was in his first term.

The second Trump administration is not on the defensive, but on the offensive, regarding the Russiagate hoax, and is in a position to accuse the Democrats of collusion and falsification in 2016, not the other way around. “Accordingly, Trump can withstand the pressure that will now be exerted upon him from Europe, from the American deep state, and from the American war party, including the terrorist extremist Senator Graham and so on,” Suslov says. Last but not least is the minutia of the summit, from the way Trump greeted Putin on the airport runway, to the flyover of US aviation, to the fact that Putin and Trump rode together in one car to the summit venue.

There was a visible “demonstration of personal affection between Putin and Trump for each other in a situation where the United States has been waging a hybrid war against Russia…and trying to inflict a strategic defeat on it” over the course of the past three years as a result of the policies of Trump’s predecessor. The overall tone, and demonstration of respect and personal sympathy, mark a “striking contrast” to the tone under the Biden administration, Suslov emphasized.

Do not expect Western mainstream media, NATO-EU Europe’s politicians, or the Zelensky regime and its surrogates to admit it, but there is no doubt that the Alaska summit between the Russian and American presidents was a success. Not a breakthrough either, but clearly also more than an “it’s-good-they’re-at-least-talking” event.

...Fundamentally, both sides – no, not only one – have scored what Western pundits love to call “wins”: The US has shown the EU-NATO Europeans that it and it alone decides when and how it talks to Russia and with what aims. The European vassals find this hard to grasp because it’s an application of genuine sovereignty, something they don’t have or want anymore. Russia, for its part, has shown that it can negotiate while the fighting continues and that it is under no legal or moral obligation – or any practical pressure – to stop fighting before negotiations show results it finds satisfying.

The fact that we know so little – at this point at least – about the specific, detailed content of the summit talks and their outcomes is, actually, a sign of seriousness. That is how diplomacy worth the name works: calmly, confidentially, and patiently taking the time to achieve a decent, robust result.

In that context, US President Donald Trump’s explicit refusal to make public what points of disagreement remain and have prevented a breakthrough for now is a very good sign: Clearly, he believes that they can be cleared up in the near future and, thus, deserve discretion.

...This is the single most important question about the future of what has been successfully begun (or really, publicly continued) at the Alaska summit. Russia has been exceedingly consistent and is giving no sign that it intends to become less predictable. But the West has been fractious and volatile. This is the moment when Washington has to stick to a course of normalization with Moscow regardless of what its European clients and the Ukrainian regime want. Ironically, not listening much to them, if need be, is best for their people as well.

Aug 16, 2025

Featured • Summarizing The Summit, Moon of Alabama, Aug 16, 2025

In an interview (vid) with Foxnews after the summit Trump was asked about imposing sanctions. He responded: "Well, because the meeting went so well, we don’t have to think about that now.”

There will be no ceasefire to freeze the conflict and there will be no sanctions. Both sides can count that as wins.

The task of ending the conflict was tossed off to Zelensky and Europe:

Without hesitating, Trump said that his advice to Zelenskyy after Friday’s meeting with Putin would be "make a deal."

On Monday Zelenski will be told to give up and to make peace with Russia. European protests against that will be ignored.

The Ukrainian crisis is front and center of the Putin-Trump summit in Alaska. Sputnik asked renowned geopolitical analyst, former Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter to weigh in on the high stakes meeting. First things first: the US president “doesn’t care about the geopolitical nuances of Ukrainian battlefield locations,” Ritter said. “If Putin can convince him that the quickest route to a ceasefire is for Ukraine to leave” Russia’s new territories “and say no to NATO, that’s it. That’s all that has to happen for a ceasefire.” The Russian military has mastered drone warfare, counter-drone warfare, and new battlefield tactics to the point where its advance has become “an irreversible process,” Ritter added, commenting on what happens if the peace push doesn’t pan out.

“There’s nothing that can be done. Nothing can be done to stop this. The advantage is 100% Russia, and we’re looking at the Ukrainians on the verge of total collapse,” the observer stressed. Trump’s base doesn’t want to continue fueling a proxy conflict against Russia, much less getting into a hot war with Russia over Ukraine, Ritter said. “Don’t worry about Congress. They don’t elect the president, and they will fall in behind the president, because if he can secure his base with a peace deal, he can ruin everybody in Congress, especially a Republican, who goes against him,” he stressed.

In November 2024, the CIA briefed Congress on the risks of a nuclear war breaking out, estimating that there was a “greater than 50% chance” thanks to the Biden administration’s decision to greenlight long-range ATACMS strikes into Russia, Ritter revealed.

“The director of plans of Strategic Command, the American military command that carries out nuclear war briefed a Washington, DC think tank in November that the United States is prepared for a nuclear exchange with Russia, (that means nuclear war) and that the United States thought they were going to win,” he said. “When this was briefed to Congress, I asked a senior Democrat…’when the CIA briefed you, did the CIA say the Russians were bluffing?’ He said no. The CIA said the exact opposite. He said but that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is that the Biden administration officials who were in that room said ‘oh we’re ready for that. If the Russians wanna play, we’re ready to go to nuclear war with them.’ This is the insanity that existed in November of last year!” Ritter stressed. (emphasis added)

Could Alaska lay the foundation for a new international order? Probably not. The very concept of a fixed “order” is fading. Any order requires an enforcing power – and none exists today. The world is moving toward greater fluidity, to the frustration of those who crave neat arrangements and predictable futures.

Even if a new balance of power emerges, it will not come from one meeting. The wartime summits of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin are not a fair comparison. Those were preceded by the most destructive battles in human history.

Fortunately, we are not in that situation now. The likely outcome in Alaska is the start of a long and difficult process, rather than an immediate settlement. But it is still of fundamental importance. In today’s world, only two states possess vast nuclear arsenals capable of ending human civilization.

This alone means that the leaders of Russia and the United States have no more important duty than to speak directly to one another – especially when they are, for now, the only invincible powers at the edge of the world.

Aug 15, 2025

Featured • Carefully and Gracefully, James Howard Kunstler, Aug 14, 2025
Pretty much spot on, IMO, except that the sentence that says, "He [Trump] abhors all the killing" has to be qualified by saying Trump doesn't seem to mind all the killing in Gaza, or if you prefer finds excuses for it. Also, Trump could end the killing in Ukraine pretty much immediately, if he cut off battlefield intel aid to Ukraine. Ukraine would have to throw in the towel ASAP. There are other things he could do to stop the killing, things he could have done before now, but Lindsay Graham and the rest of the Republican hawks, and the MICIMATT, would have his ass on a platter. No more support in the Senate, which is to say no more support for his presidency altogether.

Featured • Russia’s Summit Preparation Sends an Unmistakable Message to Washington and the World, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 14, 2025

I don’t know what the outcome of Friday’s summit between Russia and the US will be, but I do know that Russia is putting on a full-court press to show the rest of the world that it is serious about negotiating with the US, and is backing its words by the stature of the delegation it is sending. Based on Yuri Ushakov’s description of the schedule and the composition of the Russian delegation, the topic of how to end the war in Ukraine is not Russia’s only priority. I say this because the only Russian military rep who will attend the summit is the Defense Minister, Andrey Belousov. If the two sides were going to get into the nitty gritty of the war, I believe that General Gerasimov would have been included in the delegation.

Given the scant comments from the Trump administration about the schedule and the topics for discussion, it appears that Trump is deliberately obscuring the intent of the conference from Washington’s neocons and Ukraine’s ardent supporters. We have heard nothing about US preparations, but Vladimir Putin made sure that the world was informed today in detail about what Russia is doing to prepare for the meeting.

...The ball is now in the US court. If Trump ends the meeting with Putin and walks away, Putin and his delegation will have no doubts that the diplomatic opening to the US is dead. I hope that does not happen. I suspect that President Trump is looking forward to holding a press conference, accompanied by President Putin. There will be questions from US and Russian correspondents. That likely will happen around 1900 hours Washington time, which is 0200 hours in Moscow.

Aug 14, 2025

Featured • Some Thoughts On The Upcoming Summit, Moon of Alabama, Aug 14, 2025

Featured • Putin praises Trump’s peace efforts and floats potential nuclear deal at Alaska summit, Christian Edwards, Anna Chernova, CNN World, Aug 14, 2025

Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the Trump administration’s “energetic” efforts to stop the war in Ukraine and hinted that Moscow and Washington could strike a deal on nuclear arms control during their summit on Friday in Alaska.

In his first public comments since US President Donald Trump announced the Alaska summit, Putin on Thursday chaired a meeting of senior Russian officials at the Kremlin to brief them on the state of play in negotiations with the US on Ukraine.

“The current American administration… is making, in my opinion, quite energetic and sincere efforts to stop the hostilities, stop the crisis and reach agreements that are of interest to all parties involved in this conflict,” Putin said.

In his brief remarks, Putin said the summit with the US aims to “create long-term conditions for peace between our countries, as well as in Europe, and in the world as a whole.”

He suggested this broader peace can be achieved if, in the “next stages” of discussions with the US, “we reach agreements in the area of control over strategic offensive weapons.”

Many, by the way, have likened the current scenario to the Debaltsevo cauldron which happened right in the lead up to Minsk 2.0 in February 2015. Some fear that Russia’s breach has political motivations and is meant to be some final desperate land-grab before Putin buttons up the conflict with Trump. But clearly the Alaska meeting will bring no such conclusions: even the US State Department spokesman now says the meeting is “not a negotiations”, and seems more an informal feeler for Trump to dangle a few test carrots in front of Putin.

Several sources now report that Russian officials have again reiterated that all original Russian demands are still firm, to wit:

"Russia will not make territorial concessions in Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions. The territorial structure of Russia is enshrined in the country's constitution," - Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The European Commission is plotting to help oust Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban over what it considers his overly independent policy, according to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). The Hungarian leader has repeatedly clashed with Brussels in recent years, opposing EU military aid to Ukraine and Kiev’s bid to join the bloc. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “is seriously studying regime change scenarios” in Hungary, the SVR press service said in a statement on Wednesday. Brussels intends to bring Peter Magyar, leader of the Hungarian opposition Tisza Party – seen as “loyal to globalist elites” and “the main candidate for the post of Prime Minister” – to power in the 2026 parliamentary elections, “if not sooner,” according to the SVR.

Significant “administrative, media and lobbying resources” are being deployed to support Magyar through “German party funds, the European People’s Party and a number of Norwegian NGOs,” the Russian intelligence service said. Kiev, which has been “offended” by Orban’s opposition to Ukraine attempting to join the EU, is doing the “dirty work” and destabilizing the home situation in Hungary via its intelligence services and local Ukrainian diaspora, it added.

The Russian MoD’s warning about a plot to stage a fake incident in Chuguyev, Kharkov region to sabotage the upcoming Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska “positions Russia to expose the West and Zelensky’s deception if it occurs, undermining their credibility,” veteran geopolitical analyst Angelo Giuliano told Sputnik. It’s definitely not the first time Kiev and its backers have stooped to such tactics. “The Bucha lie, crafted by Ukraine and the West, derailed 2022 peace talks by framing Russia for war crimes,” Giuliano recalled, referencing the April 2022 Ukrainian neo-Nazi massacre of civilians who accepted Russian aid in a Kiev suburb after the withdrawal of Russian forces, which galvanized the West for long, costly proxy war against Moscow.

That was just the beginning, according to Giuliano, who also cited:

1. the constant shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, threatening to unleash a Chernobyl-like disaster on Europe, and blaming Russia (even though Russian forces control the plant).

2. the July 2022 bombing of a prison housing Ukrainian PoWs in a Russian-controlled area of the DPR, killing dozens, and designed to “silence Azov prisoners, preventing exposure of Western-backed neo-Nazis in Russian courts.” Also blamed on Russia, ironically.

3. the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline network, severing a major Russian energy artery with Germany. Sy Hersh revealed that the operation was carried out by US Navy divers with assistance from Norway. Russia still blamed.

“Despite the West’s propaganda machine—evident in Zaporozhye and Nord Stream—Russia’s readiness to counter this deception could limit its impact, though Western bias might still disrupt the Alaska summit. The Bucha playbook remains a potent tool for sabotage,” Giuliano warned.

Trump has good reason to want the summit to succeed. His effort to squeeze Moscow by pushing China and India to stop buying Russian oil has backfired badly. Far from isolating Russia, it triggered the worst US-India crisis in 25 years and drove New Delhi even closer to Moscow. It also encouraged a thaw between India and China, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi now set to attend the SCO summit in Tianjin. BRICS, which Trump has openly vowed to weaken, has only grown more cohesive. The Alaska summit is Trump’s chance to escape the trap he built for himself – trying to pressure Moscow through Beijing and New Delhi – and to show results on Ukraine that he can sell as a diplomatic victory. For Moscow, a successful summit would be a powerful demonstration that talk of “isolation” is obsolete – even in the West. It would cement Russia’s standing with the “global majority” and highlight Western Europe’s diminished influence.

The transatlantic split would widen, weakening Brussels’ claim to be Russia’s toughest opponent. Most importantly, Washington today has little real leverage over Russia, especially on Ukraine. If the summit yields a joint Russian–American vision for a truce or settlement, it will inevitably reflect Moscow’s position more than Kiev’s or Brussels’. And if the Western Europeans try to derail it, the US could pull the plug on all aid to Ukraine – including intelligence support – accelerating Kiev’s defeat. Not everyone in Russia is cheering. Many prominent “Z”-aligned war correspondents see the war as unfinished and oppose any truce. But they have been asked to stick to the official line. If the Alaska meeting produces a deal, they will be expected to back it – or at least use “cooling” language for their audiences. The Kremlin is betting it can manage this dissent.

Western Europe, for its part, will be watching from the sidelines. Its leaders are “scrambling” for scraps of information via secondary channels. The optics will underline a humiliating reality: for the first time in almost a century, decisions about Europe’s security will be made without the likes of Italy, France and Germany in the room. The location hints at other agenda items. Arctic economic cooperation, largely frozen since 2014, could be revived. Both sides stand to gain from joint development in the far north, and a deal here would be politically symbolic – proof that the two countries can work together despite the baggage of the last decade. Arms control will also be on the table. Moscow’s recent decision to end its unilateral moratorium on deploying intermediate-range missiles was almost certainly timed to influence the talks. Strategic stability after the New START Treaty expires in February 2026 will be a central concern.

If Alaska delivers, it could reshape the conflict in Ukraine and the broader Russia-US relationship. A joint settlement plan would marginalize Kiev and Brussels, shift the diplomatic center of gravity back to Moscow and Washington, and reopen channels for cooperation on global issues – from the Arctic to arms control. If it fails – if Trump bends to last-minute EU pressure – Moscow will continue fighting, confident that US involvement will fade. Either way, Russia’s position is stronger than it was two years ago. What’s different now is that the two powers with “all the cards” are finally back at the same table – and Western Europe is on the outside looking in.

Aug 13, 2025

Featured • Russia ‘has won the war’ – Orban, RT, Aug 13, 2025

Russia has already won the Ukraine conflict and it is now up to the West to acknowledge this, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. Orban made the remarks on Tuesday, shortly after he snubbed the latest joint EU statement in support of Ukraine issued ahead of the meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, scheduled for Friday in Alaska. Speaking to the ‘Patriot’ YouTube channel, the Hungarian leader said he partly opposed the statement as it only made the EU look “ridiculous and pathetic.” “When two leaders sit down to negotiate with each other, the Americans and the Russians … and you’re not invited there, you don’t rush for the phone, you don’t run around, you don’t shout in from the outside,” Orban stated. “If you are not at the negotiating table, you are on the menu.”

Moscow has already won the conflict against Ukraine, the Hungarian leader added, claiming that Kiev’s backers were in denial. “We are talking now as if this were an open-ended war situation, but it is not. The Ukrainians have lost the war. Russia has won this war,” he stressed. “The only question is when and under what circumstances will the West, who are behind the Ukrainians, admit that this has happened, and what will result from all this.” A member of both the EU and NATO, Hungary has consistently opposed Brussels’ policies on the Ukraine conflict since its escalation in February 2022, including weapons supplies to Kiev and sanctions against Russia. Budapest has also opposed the idea of Kiev joining either of the blocs.

European arms factories have been expanding three times faster than they did before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, with more than 7 million square meters of new industrial development since 2022, the Financial Times has reported. According to the FT’s analysis of more than 1,000 radar satellite passes, building activity at European weapons plants now suggests “rearmament on a historic scale.” Moscow has condemned what it calls the West’s “reckless militarization.” The study covered 150 sites across 37 companies, with the largest growth at ammunition and missile facilities. About a third of the sites reviewed showed expansion or construction as Europe “builds for war,” the outlet said.

Examples include a new Rheinmetall–N7 plant in Hungary, MBDA’s expansion in Germany to manufacture Patriot missiles, and a Kongsberg plant in Norway which opened in 2024. Western European leaders have described the buildup as essential to meet NATO targets, sustain military aid to Kiev and deter what they claim is a risk of Russian aggression. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has also called for building “Europe’s strongest army,” while his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has backed moves to reintroduce conscription. Moscow has repeatedly denied any intent to attack NATO or EU states, calling such claims “absurd” fearmongering aimed at justifying increased military spending.

Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Western European leaders were “trying to prepare Europe for war – not some hybrid war, but a real war against Russia.” He claimed the EU had plunged into a “Russophobic frenzy” and warned that its militarization had become “uncontrolled,” likening the trend to “historical events” and alleging that Western European nations are “transforming into a Fourth Reich.” Moscow has also consistently criticized Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, arguing they only serve to prolong the fighting and cause unnecessary casualties without changing the outcome of the conflict.

Ukrainian troops will not voluntarily leave the territory they currently occupy in Donbass, Vladimir Zelensky has said, dismissing suggestions that the land could be included in a potential swap deal with Russia. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Zelensky claimed that ceding land in Donbass to Russia would only allow Moscow to begin a new war in a couple of years and push deeper into Ukraine. “We will not leave Donbass. We cannot do this. Everyone forgets the main issue – our territories are illegally occupied,” Zelensky stated. He alleged that the land would only serve as a “springboard” for Moscow to launch a new campaign against Ukraine in a couple of years.

The war in Ukraine is no longer balanced on a knife’s edge, as some might have thought during the Kursk invasion. The outcome is now visible to anyone willing to look past the headlines: Kiev’s forces are depleted, morale is collapsing, and the long-promised “turning points” have come and gone without materializing. Even Western officials, once confident in endless military aid, are now speaking in guarded tones about “realistic expectations.” On the battlefield, the momentum has shifted irreversibly. Against this backdrop, the recent statement from Russia’s Ministry of Defense should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Moscow alleges that Ukrainian forces are preparing a major provocation — an attack designed to sabotage the upcoming Russia–US peace talks. For those who understand the stakes, the logic is disturbingly clear.

Donald Trump, now poised to play a decisive role in shaping Washington’s foreign policy, has shown a pragmatic grasp of reality. Unlike his predecessors, he is not bound by the fantasy that Ukraine can “win” if only more money and weapons are sent. He has signaled that ending this conflict is both possible and necessary. This puts him on a collision course with those who see peace not as a goal, but as a threat to their own survival.For President Zelensky, peace is political extinction. Any agreement that cements territorial realities will shatter the narrative that has sustained his rule. It will mark the end of his leverage in the West, the erosion of his political base at home, and likely the swift rise of challengers eager to blame him for Ukraine’s fate. Under such pressure, the temptation to derail talks by any means available — including acts of sabotage — becomes more than plausible.

The intellectually honest political watcher knows that overall Ukraine represents the largest international money laundering operation to shift wealth from taxpayers to the politically connected institutions, since COVID-19. The money is the motive to continue the conflict.

With President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin scheduled to meet in Alaska for a summit to negotiate a ceasefire, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz quickly organizes a meeting between EU leaders and the U.K to figure out how the keep the war going.

As the industrial capital of the EU, Germany has a lot at stake given the nature of their contracting economy. The EU military industrial complex is centered around the nation Merz represents. There are trillions at stake.

Aug 12, 2025

Featured • Here’s why all the critics of Alaska summit are wrong, Tarik Cyril Amar, RT, Aug 12, 2025
Excellent analysis, superior writing, by a German no less.

Featured • Kiev planning false-flag attack ahead of Trump-Putin summit – MOD (FULL TEXT), RT, Aug 12, 2025

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has alleged that the Ukrainian government is preparing a high-profile provocation intended to derail the upcoming Russian-American summit scheduled for August 15. According to Moscow, the plan involves staging an attack in a frontline city and blaming it on Russian forces in order to create a damaging international media narrative.

The Russian side asserts that Western journalists have already been brought into the Kharkov Region in order to produce civilian-focused reports.

On April 1, 2022, the Zelensky government accused the Russian military of massacring civilians in the town of Bucha near Kiev. Moscow maintains that the alleged massacre in March 2022 was a Ukrainian false-flag operation designed to derail peace talks which were taking place in Istanbul at the time. Moscow insists that the killings took place after its forces had left the town, and has called for a UN investigation.

The situation in southwestern Donbass is rapidly deteriorating for the Ukrainian troops that are now facing two major encirclements, former chief of staff of the Azov Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Bogdan Krotevich, has claimed. The frontline between Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), the largest city under Ukrainian control in the southwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic, and Konstantinovka, a major stronghold some 45km to the northeast of the city, has effectively ceased to exist, Krotevich claimed. “I honestly don’t know what exactly you are being told, but I can tell you: the Pokrovsk-Konstantinovka line is, without exaggeration, a complete f**k up. And this f**k up has been growing for a long time, getting messier every day,” he wrote in an open letter to Vladimir Zelensky which he posted on X late on Monday.

The city of Pokrovsk has been de-facto surrounded by Russian troops, while Konstantinovka is facing semi-encirclement, he claimed. The former Azov commander shared a map purporting to show the situation in the area, which corroborates media reports of a major Russian breakthrough to the north of Pokrovsk that emerged earlier in the day. “The systemic problem began with the thinning out of reserves, widespread fragmentation of units along the entire front line, reports about a ‘taken village’ touted as a victory despite failures in entire operational directions,” Krotevich wrote, accusing “parts” of the military leadership of a “complete lack of a strategic and even operational vision of the theater of operations.”

A similar alarmist message was produced by Taras Chmut, the head of the pro-military charity Come Back Alive. The crisis in Donbass has been brewing for about a year and a half, he wrote on X earlier in the day, predicting the Ukrainian military was about to begin losing land “by tens, hundreds of square kilometers” daily. “First, we failed at the platoon level. Then the company. Then it’s the turn of the battalion level. When it comes to brigades, the enemy will put into action its armored groups, which have been actively accumulating for a year, and will go to the rear, to the operational space,” he claimed.

Turkish newspaper Aydinlik published on Monday the bank accounts of companies based in the UAE involved in the corruption scheme of Volodymyr Zelensky’s cronies, about $50 million are transferred to the Middle Eastern country every month. Since last year, Ukraine has been rocked by allegations of corruption, which can “strike the Kiev government in the very heart,” the newspaper reported, adding that the main problem for Zelensky is that his inner circle is also involved in the corruption case. Zelensky’s closest circle transfers about $50 million a month to the accounts of two companies linked to Andrei Gmyrin, the alleged disposer of funds obtained through corruption, the newspaper reported.

A Polish political scientist and journalist, Prof. Adam Wielomski, has taken to social media to claim Western European leaders do not seek a ceasefire in Ukraine at all, while the U.S. and Russia have their terms set and ready to go. According to Wielomski, Trump and Putin have already made an agreement and will simply use their Aug. 15 meeting in Alaska to announce it “with great pomp and circumstance.” Meanwhile, talk of Zelensky being present at the meeting is in no way related to Zelensky having any say on the negotiated terms, he continues, but to show that Zelensky is on board and to have him sign the pre-arranged agreement. The issue, however, is that “Zelensky does not want to sign because he is afraid of being held responsible for losing the war.”

And Western Europe stands behind him “because it wants the war to continue despite the withdrawal of the Americans, as this will give it fuel and an excuse to eliminate American control over it in the form of NATO and give it a reason to create either a European Defense Union or to federalize the EU with a common foreign and defense policy.” Wielomski then asks the “intelligentsia” who will benefit the most, Kyiv or Moscow, from the Americans withdrawing, leaving Zelensky only with the U.K. and the EU to support it. News portal Do Rzeczy reported on a document signed over the weekend by European leaders, committing to continued support of Ukraine and financing its ongoing needs. President Macron, Prime Minister Meloni, Chancellor Merz, Prime Minister Tusk, Prime Minister Starmer, President von der Leyen, and President Stubb all signed the statement regarding “peace for Ukraine in connection with the planned meeting between President Trump and President Putin.”

Included in the document was their concern that serious negotiations can only take place under conditions of a ceasefire or a reduction in military operations and that Ukraine’s participation in any talks was critical to any peace being achieved. Both the White House and the Kremlin accepted President Zelensky’s request to join the talks, although no formal invitation was issued. Meanwhile, a senior member of Putin’s inner circle, Investment Envoy Kirill Dmitriev, has said that many countries are making “titanic efforts” to hinder an agreement between Russia and Trump. Dmitriev did not name specific countries but indicated that critics of the upcoming talks may attempt to sabotage the summit through diplomatic maneuvers and disinformation via the media.

Aug 11, 2025

Featured • Alastair Crooke : The Pressures on Trump, Judging Freedom, Aug 11, 2025
Excellent analysis of the upcoming meeting. Keith Kellogg in Kiev, causing trouble. (Fire that guy.) Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin in a panic. Kiev thinking of some major false flag or other incident to derail talks. Most insightfully, hawkish Republican Senate leaders wanting to reassert the Uniparty and take back the Republican agenda from Trump. This is particularly important, in my view, as Trump needs almost every single Senate vote to do anything. There has been almost no preparation for this meeting so don't expect much, especially on Ukraine. Trump is looking for headlines and perhaps some kind of business deals are possible. Witkoff apparently confused about what Putin told him, or is he confused "like a fox?"

Featured • Is Vladimir Putin Naive in Pursuing a Meeting with Donald Trump?, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 10, 2025

 • US is ‘done’ funding Ukraine – Vance, RT, Aug 10, 2025

Washington is not going to fund Ukraine anymore, US Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News on Sunday. Ukraine’s European backers can buy weapons from American producers if they want to continue supporting Kiev, and the US will be “okay with that,” Vance added. “But we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore,” he said. The interview was published after Vance met with several Western European and Ukrainian officials in London, including UK Foreign Minister David Lammy. According to media reports, Vance’s trip was intended to pave the way for a summit between the Russian and US presidents in Alaska on Friday, where resolving the conflict between Kiev and Moscow is expected to be at the top of the agenda. Vance suggested that Kiev’s European backers should play a bigger role providing funding if they “care so much about this conflict.”

“Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars, to this particular conflict. But if the Europeans want to step up and buy the weapons from American producers, we’re okay with that. But we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore,” he said. The US president had said earlier that the ideas under discussion include “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” sides, adding that Vladimir Zelensky would need to find a way to approve such a deal under Ukrainian law. Zelensky has rejected any such agreement, claiming that “nobody can or will” make concessions on the issue. “The Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupiers,” he proclaimed. Moscow’s senior negotiator Kirill Dmitriev has warned that countries trying to prolong the Ukraine conflict will likely go to great lengths to derail the planned meeting between Putin and Trump.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has not been invited to attend next week’s summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump in the US, the Washington Post has reported, citing an official briefed on the negotiations. On Friday, Trump announced he would meet Putin on August 15 in Alaska. In the hours after the announcement, several outlets reported that Zelensky might take part in some form, with a senior White House official telling CBS News the planning was “still fluid” and that Zelensky could be involved. However, the Washington Post has reported that no invitation has been extended to Zelensky so far. Reuters has also said, citing sources, that the White House is still considering inviting him, but is currently focused on organizing a bilateral meeting, at Russia’s request.

While Washington has recently moved toward fixing relations with Moscow, celebrations would be premature, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said. The diplomat added that Russia had earlier this month stopped abiding by a self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles to “cool hotheads in certain NATO capitals.” While the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between Moscow and Washington collapsed in 2019, Russia had nonetheless continued observing the restrictions. During his first term in office, President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the accord, citing supposed Russian violations – a claim the Kremlin has denied.

In an interview with broadcaster Rossiya-1 on Sunday, Ryabkov observed that “some sprouts of common sense are appearing in the dialogue with the US, which have been sorely lacking in recent months and years.” However, the use of the term “detente” would be wholly unwarranted at this point, the deputy minister stressed. Speaking of Russia’s decision to lift a self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, Ryabkov argued that Moscow had no other choice in light of what the “Americans and their allies, especially the European warmongers, are undertaking.” The Russian Foreign Ministry cited the “disappearance of conditions for maintaining the unilateral moratorium” in explaining the decision earlier this month.

The statement said the West was creating a “direct threat” to Russian security, with the recent Talisman Sabre exercise in Australia being an example. The drills in mid-July featured the US Typhon mobile ground-based launcher, designed for firing Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range up to 1,800km, and SM-6 multipurpose missiles, with a range up to 500km.vKremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated around the same time that Moscow reserves the right to deploy its own intermediate-range missiles “when deemed necessary,” and would not announce it. Speaking last month, Trump hinted that he would like to resume negotiations with Russia to maintain the existing restrictions on nuclear weapons.

Members of the so-called “Coalition of the Willing,” comprised of Kiev’s European backers, will not be sending troops to Ukraine despite previously floating the idea, The Sunday Times has claimed, citing an anonymous source. Back in March, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that London was prepared to deploy “boots on the ground and planes in the air, together with others.” Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron had made a similar statement. The hypothetical contingent would be acting in a “peacekeeping” capacity if and when Kiev and Moscow agree to a ceasefire. However, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Italy have all expressed reluctance or refusal to commit troops for the potential mission.

Russia has strongly opposed the stationing of NATO military personnel in the neighboring country under any pretext. In an article on Saturday, the Sunday Times predicted that should the upcoming meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, result in a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, Kiev would likely want to see “international monitors on the ground.” However, according to the British newspaper, “it is unlikely that the answer here will be the ‘coalition of the willing’.” The publication quoted an unnamed UK defense official as acknowledging that “no one wants to send their troops to die in Ukraine.”

A coalition of European leaders released a joint statement on Aug. 9 welcoming the news of President Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and stressing the need to ensure that European and Ukrainian interests are protected as the two leaders talk about ending the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet in Alaska on Aug. 15. The joint statement included French, Italian, German, Polish, British, and Finnish leaders, as well as the president of the European Commission. “We share the conviction that a diplomatic solution must protect Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests,” the leaders said, adding that they “agree that these vital interests include the need for robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

They also expressed support for the principle that “international borders must not be changed by force.” “The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” the statement said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement on Aug. 9 that “the Ukrainian people deserve peace.” “But all partners must understand what a dignified peace is,” he said, adding that Ukraine “will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated.” On Aug. 10, Zelenskyy said he “values and fully supports” the joint statement by the European leaders. “The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today for the sake of peace in Ukraine, which is defending the vital security interests of our European nations,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.

The location of the Putin-Trump summit represents the “closest proximity” of the United States to Russia, argues Earl Rasmussen, a retired lieutenant colonel with over 20 years in the US Army who is currently an international consultant. “This makes it a very symbolic area. Furthermore, the Arctic is a key region for development, offering economic opportunities and presenting certain security considerations,” he tells Sputnik. “While the choice was surprising, considering the cultural and economic potential, Alaska may indeed be an appropriate place for this meeting.” While the Ukrainian conflict and “broader European security” are going to be discussed at the meeting, “a key area of focus is expected to be economic and trade development, along with its potential.”

“Russia possesses the longest Arctic coastline, which will be relevant in discussions. Canada also has significant Arctic exposure. Consequently, these factors will play a role from both security and economic perspectives, encompassing economic development and trade,” Rasmussen notes. While there is potential for a breakthrough – in the Ukrainian conflict, in trade and in overall US-Russia relations – there are powers in Europe (Britain in particular) who could “disrupt any agreements,” Rasmussen warns.

The fact that Putin and Trump are meeting in person is a positive development, and “the potential for Trump to visit Russia later also bodes well.” “Continuous dialogue, regardless of disagreements or resolutions, is positive, unlike the previous administration’s approach of attempting to isolate Russia, which proved ineffective,” Rasmussen remarks. “Facing major future economic challenges, especially for Europeans, and an ongoing global trade war, any positive developments from this meeting could be beneficial, not only for peace but also for economic and trade relations, and global security.”

Aug 10, 2025

 • Has Putin Learned the Lessons of the Battle of Debaltseve and Minsk II?, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 9, 2025
Larry Johnson has earned our respect and his views must be strongly considered. Let us hope he is correct here. If Putin gives up too much, the stability of his government and indeed of the Russian Federation will be threatened. A "peace" that results in the collapse of Russia -- the fervent hope of most influential parties in the Western political sphere -- would be very dangerous indeed. One has the sense that the Russians basically have to handle the reckless, aggressive West as they would a monkey with a hand grenade. Where and how do grownups intervene?

 • Alaska Summit Announced: Is the End Finally Near?, Simplicius, Aug 9, 2025
If you like to read tea leaves, here are plenty. The point being, trust nothing being said right now about this summit, especially from Western media. This is a good survey of the confusion and conniving going on, the latter now at a feverish pace. As to the content of the summit, it will be historic -- in one way or another. Oversimplifying but not by much, one path leads to peace, the other to war.

Aug 9, 2025

Featured • While Trump Talks Peace, is the US Setting the Stage for More War?, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 8, 2025
Debunks reports in Sy Hersh's recent piece on this, adds a rumor about Armenia and Azerbaijan possibly joining NATO.

 • Zelensky trashes Trump’s peace terms, RT, Aug 9, 2025

Vladimir Zelensky has rejected US President Donald Trump’s call for territorial concessions to Russia, claiming no such agreement would be accepted by the Ukrainian people.

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow this week and reportedly made significant progress toward a compromise aimed at ending the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The US president said the proposal includes “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” sides and that Zelensky would need to find a way to approve such a deal under Ukrainian law.

US President Donald Trump has said that he will meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska next Friday. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov confirmed immediately afterward that Moscow and Washington will be working on making the Alaska summit happen. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday. According to the Kremlin, the upcoming meeting will revolve around reaching a longstanding peace in the Ukraine conflict.

Moscow expects that the two leaders’ next meeting after this will take place in Russia, the presidential aide said. Trump has officially been sent an invitation, he added. The US president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Wednesday for a meeting with Putin that Trump later called “highly productive.” The US leader has expressed his growing impatience with the pace of peace talks dedicated to resolving the Ukraine conflict, and has threatened to impose further secondary sanctions on Russian trade partners. According to the Kremlin, Moscow had received an “acceptable” offer from the US during Witkoff’s visit.

Russia had long said that it was interested in a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict, but has insisted on one that brings about a permanent and stable peace. Russia and Ukraine have held three rounds of direct talks in Istanbul: in May, June, and late July. While the sides have failed to reach a breakthrough, they agreed to exchange prisoners of war and the bodies of fallen soldiers. Russia insists that a sustainable peace deal must include Ukraine’s commitment to stay out of NATO, demilitarization, and the recognition of the new territorial reality on the ground. Kiev has rejected these terms.

Ahead of the anticipated summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, Moscow and Washington – like so many times before in the realm of diplomacy – appear to be chasing fundamentally different goals. The United States seeks to maintain the current status quo but also needs a result it can spin as “progress” on Ukraine. That could mean anything from a partial ceasefire to a full cessation of hostilities. Russia, by contrast, is looking for long-term, legally binding agreements. These would cover the full scope of Russia-US and Russia-Ukraine relations and include built-in enforcement mechanisms to prevent sabotage or unilateral withdrawal. With today’s US-Russia relations still steeped in Cold War-style hostility, the upcoming summit recalls another tense era. One might liken the two delegations to the intelligence officers who used to meet at Glienicke Bridge – the famous ‘Bridge of Spies’ – to exchange captured agents.

Like those secretive, high-stakes handoffs, diplomacy in 2025 still demands that both sides inch toward the middle to make any exchange possible. The very fact that this summit is happening suggests that the gap between Moscow and Washington has narrowed, at least tactically. Russia took the first step by hosting US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow. In the quiet language of diplomacy, the country that initiates the visit is often the more eager to make a deal. Russia’s openness to holding the summit quickly signals a willingness to negotiate. And truthfully, it’s Washington that appears more anxious to move things forward. Time, at this point, seems to favor Moscow. President Putin made that clear during his recent meeting with Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko in Valaam. Trump, on the other hand, urgently needs a foreign policy win. The White House is under fire on multiple fronts – from the looming Epstein files scandal to mass protests erupting in Democrat-controlled states over immigration policy.

Aug 8, 2025

Featured • Donald Trump’s nuclear war threat – only a storm in a teacup?, Peter Haenseler, SONAR21, Aug 8, 2025
Excellent review.

Featured • Negotiations Fever Strikes Again as Trump's "Deadline" Hits Midnight, Simplicius, Aug 7, 2025
Pro-Russian but a good review nonetheless.

Featured • Poll: 69% of Ukrainians Want Negotiated End to War as Soon as Possible, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, Aug 7, 2025

Gallup released a new poll on Thursday that found 69% of Ukrainians favor a negotiated end to the war with Russia as soon as possible, while just 24% want to keep fighting until “victory,” a near complete reversal of public opinion from when Russia invaded more than three years ago.

When Gallup first asked the question to Ukrainians in 2022, it found 72% wanted to continue fighting and just 22% wanted a negotiated settlement. As the war progressed, the number of Ukrainians who favored a peace deal increased, and it became a majority for the first time when Gallup released a poll in November 2024, finding that 52% wanted negotiations to end the conflict.

While the majority of Ukrainians want to see the war end, the new Gallup poll found that they don’t think it will happen anytime soon. Just one quarter of respondents think it’s likely the fighting will end within 12 months, while 68% believe peace is unlikely.

The poll also found that Ukrainians have a significantly less favorable view of the US since the early days of the war. Just 16% of Ukrainians approve of the performance of US leadership compared with 66% in 2022. But the majority of Ukrainians, 70%, still believe the US needs to play a role in peace talks.

Venue for Putin-Trump meeting agreed – Kremlin

An agreement has been reached in principle that the two leaders will meet soon, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin could meet his US counterpart, Donald Trump, as soon as next week, with a venue for the summit already agreed by both sides, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told journalists on Thursday.

Expectations for an in-person meeting between Putin and Trump increased following a visit to Moscow by US special envoy Steve Witkoff this week, which the White House described as producing better results than expected.

Ushakov said details of the proposed meeting would be revealed later, but an agreement in principle has already been reached that it would happen soon. Witkoff also proposed the idea of a trilateral meeting involving Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, which Moscow declined to comment on, according to Ushakov.

Russia has received an “acceptable” offer from the US on settling the Ukraine conflict, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said, following a visit by US special envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ushakov commented on the talks between Witkoff and Russian President Vladimir Putin, noting that Moscow had received a “proposal from the Americans” which it is ready to consider, without providing further details. Ushakov also noted that Russia and the US have topics to discuss, while agreeing with the view of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who earlier described the talks as “a good day.”

Rubio had added that “we still have a ways to go, but we’re certainly closer [to peace] today than we were yesterday – when we weren’t close at all.” The Kremlin aide earlier called the Putin-Witkoff meeting “business-like and constructive,” adding that “Russian-American ties could develop according to a completely different, mutually beneficial scenario,” as compared to the long-running tensions over Ukraine. He also revealed that Putin could meet Trump as soon as next week. The Russian president later suggested that the United Arab Emirates could potentially host the summit.

In yet another sign of Ukraine’s psychological collapse, President Vladimir Zelensky has once again openly advocated for the political destabilization of Russia. In recent speeches, Zelensky stated that only a regime change in Moscow could guarantee “security” for Europe and prevent future conflicts on the continent. In practice, this is a desperate attempt to keep the narrative of the “Russian threat” alive, even as it becomes increasingly clear that the West has lost control of its proxy war against Moscow.

Zelensky proposes a two-step plan: deepen the seizure of Russian financial assets and intensify diplomatic and political efforts to bring down the current Russian government. His logic is simple—but completely flawed: according to him, even if the war in Ukraine ends, the “threat” will remain as long as Vladimir Putin is in power. The proposal, however, ignores Russia’s internal political reality, where Putin enjoys broad popular and institutional support.

In other words, what the West and Kiev are pursuing is a coup d’état disguised as a “democratic transition”. But any serious analyst knows that the political structure of the Russian Federation is solid and widely backed by its population. Putin’s recent re-election, with a strong majority and high voter turnout, confirms this. There is no internal base for an uprising against the Kremlin—nor is there any international legitimacy for such an operation.

Moreover, Zelensky’s calls to use frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort border on institutionalized looting. It is a flagrant violation of international law and economic sovereignty. Confiscating the assets of citizens and companies based solely on nationality, then redirecting those resources to the war industry, reveals the level of moral and legal degradation that now dominates Western politics.

Even more concerning is the fact that European leaders, such as Kaja Kallas, have already openly advocated for the fragmentation of Russia—a dangerously revanchist discourse reminiscent of the Cold War, which undermines any possibility of multilateral dialogue. The idea of breaking up the Russian Federation into dozens or even hundreds of “microstates” reflects an imperialist fantasy rooted in the darkest moments of European colonialism—and echoes remnants of the Nazi-fascist ideology that presupposes the creation of ethno-states.

Nonetheless, the obsession with “containing” Russia ignores a fundamental fact: there is no concrete evidence that Moscow intends to invade other European countries. The special military operation in Ukraine did not stem from any expansionist ambition, but from the need to protect the Russian population in Donbass and to curb NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s borders. After years of Western provocation and the genocide of ethnic Russians in what was then eastern Ukraine, Moscow chose to act.

The Western rhetoric of “defending Europe” is a smokescreen used to justify the militarization of the continent and the artificial prolongation of the conflict. In reality, Europeans are already feeling the economic and social consequences of this suicidal policy: inflation, an energy crisis, the erosion of civil liberties, and growing public dissatisfaction—manifested most recently in electoral results favoring illiberal candidates and parties, which were shamefully censored by European governments.

The most rational path for Europe would be to distance itself from Kiev’s pro-war madness and adopt a foreign policy based on stability, sovereignty, and mutual respect. Unfortunately, European leaders appear fully aligned with a Russophobic agenda—even if it means plunging the continent into yet another decade of chaos.

Zelensky does not speak for himself; he is merely the loudest voice of a failed project that insists on attacking Russia while Ukraine itself collapses economically, militarily, and politically.

It appears the Wednesday Witkoff-Putin meeting in Moscow has led to a breakthrough of sorts, coming right down to the wire of threatened fresh US anti-Russia sanctions set to be imposed Friday. Presidents Trump and Putin plan to meet in person as soon as next week, the NY Times is reporting. A meeting with Ukraine’s leader would then follow. “President Trump intends to meet in person with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as soon as next week, and he plans to follow up shortly afterward with a meeting between himself, Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the plan,” the breaking report says.

There’s as yet been no indicators from the Russian or Ukrainian sides of the plan, or even that Moscow is aware of an ‘agreement’ to proceed with a meeting. According to more details: Mr. Trump disclosed his plans in a call with European leaders on Wednesday, the people said. The meetings would include only those three men, and would not include any European counterparts. The European leaders, who have tried to play a coordinating role on meetings to end the violence between Russia and Ukraine while supporting their European neighbor, appeared to accept what Mr. Trump said, one of the people familiar with the call said.

Anti-Moscow critics have said that the Kremlin is just buying more time with Washington while its military operations in Ukraine proceed at full pace. Will a breakthrough actually come of this? Trump has said of a fresh call with European leaders that they agreed with him that “the war must end” – but that it must be “an honest end”. There must be something substantial cooking if both sides agree to a meeting, which would be the first such face-to-face interaction between Trump and Putin of the US president’s second term.

Aug 6, 2025

Featured • Putin Subtly Puts the US on Notice… Russia is Locked and Loaded, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 5, 2025

Featured • PATRICK LAWRENCE: How to Read the Durham Appendix, Consortium News, Aug 4, 2025

Not that we needed more evidence to dismantle the extravagant tower of lies and disinformation known as Russiagate: This was accomplished years ago.

But with the release last week of a previously classified Appendix to a flawed but minorly useful investigation concluded two years ago, the method of those who built this edifice grows clearer and the list of their names longer.

Altogether good. The more hard evidence the better. Publication of the 29–page annex to the May 2023 report John Durham, a special counsel named in the final months of the first Trump administration, will give the historians yet more to work with. And it falls to the historians, I reluctantly conclude, to get this long, destructive episode properly into the record.

The Russiagate hoax — Donald Trump’s term is good enough — lies like rubble all around us, but as I contended in this space seven years ago this month, “We live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality.” The headline atop that piece was “Too Big to Fail,” and so it remains.

Durham’s Appendix, until now withheld from the public record, lands us back in the familiar dynamic of disclosure followed by denial — the disclosures damning and the denials hopelessly flimsy but advanced via our corporate media with a power it is no use denying.

Disclosure and denial has been inevitable since what we came to call Russiagate began to take shape in mid–2016.

That was when Donald Trump, then launching his presidential campaign, started proposing a new détente with Russia, ending America’s wars of adventure and the decommissioning of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — you know, crazy things, things that threatened the very pillars of our beloved imperium.

Those opposed to these madman ideas elaborated a regime of falsehoods and subterfuge to sink Trump as he ran for office and, as it turned out, after he assumed it.

....Russiagate has done untold damage if we measure it by the global instability it has precipitated, the dangers of a third world war and other such matters. Let us not miss the extent to which it succeeded in befuddling the majority of Americans, so leaving them incapable of understanding and judging events and altogether the world in which they live.

I wondered all along how those who so foolishly invested in the Russiagate hoax would escape their predicament when it all came undone. This is how. The conjurors of all the lies propose again to plunge us ever deeper into what I came to call the Republic of Pretend.

Vigilance, readers. It is the resort of those who have not been stupefied these past nine years. Vigilance and the bearing of witness. The historians with the integrity to write of our time honestly will appreciate this when they sit with the records and begin their work.

Aug 5, 2025

Featured • The Secondary Sanctions Squeeze, Moon of Alabama, Aug 5, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump is now largely following his predecessors hostile policy towards Russia.

If the war in Ukraine continues on its current path Russia will end it with an outright victory. The U.S. and its European vassals are trying to impose a ceasefire to prevent that. It would give time to rebuild the Ukrainian army and to restart the war at a more convenient time. But Russia won't budge until its war aims are met.

A hoped for countermeasure is to pressure Russia's oil customers, to thereby decrease its income and prevent it from finishing the war in its favor.

...China has successfully rejected U.S. pressure. In response to tariff threads it withheld minerals the U.S. needs. Trump had to pull back.

India is Trump's new target.

...The attempt to fight Russia by secondary sanctions against its customers is likely to fail.

We can thus expect more attacks on Russia related shipping.

Aug 4, 2025

Featured • Nearly 400,000 have deserted Ukrainian army – MP, RT, Aug 4, 2025

Almost 400,000 Ukrainian servicemen have abandoned their units without authorization, and many – including volunteers – have no plans to return due to abysmal treatment from superiors, Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod has said.

In an interview with Ukrainian media on Sunday, the lawmaker said that while the figure does not represent irretrievable losses, as many of those going AWOL eventually return, this is not always the case.

“Many will never return, because it is principled… You can’t treat like animals those who volunteered, fought for three years without seeing family,” she said.

According to Skorokhod, these people “deserve the right to return home to their families, to their children, wives, to get back to an ordinary life. […] But they are being told ‘you will return only after victory’ – which only exacerbates the situation,” she said, stressing that this kind of treatment from the leadership is the key reason for soldiers going off the radar.

Ukrainian Journalist Vladimir Boiko reported last month that the authorities had filed more than 107,000 criminal cases on desertions and AWOLs in the first half of 2025. He said the total number of cases had exceeded 230,000 since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, with the real number of incidents possibly even higher.

Trump’s initial instinct that nothing in Ukraine is essential to America’s security or economic interests was correct. So too was his initial conclusion that Zelensky is a corrupt, authoritarian parasite about to lead his country to a disastrous defeat at Russia’s hands. Abandoning those correct insights and belatedly embracing the conventional, erroneous view about Ukraine and its leader is what makes Trump’s policy change so frustrating and disappointing. Ukraine is akin to the Titanic as it was about to slip beneath the waves. Yet Trump has chosen this moment to climb aboard the doomed vessel instead of escaping in one of the last life boats.

Whichever advisers persuaded him to change course and revert to the policy that Biden bequeathed him are not doing either the president or the American people any favors. Indeed, they are creating a scenario for yet another U.S. foreign policy debacle.

So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.

Aug 3, 2025

Featured • SITREP 8/3/25: Trump's Sub Scare Can't Eclipse Ukraine's Pokrovsk Collapse, Simplicius, Aug 2, 2025
Very good detailed update.

 • Russophrenia: the West’s favourite delusion about Russia, Brian McDonald, Aug 2, 2025

Meanwhile, most coverage of Russia isn’t even produced from inside Russia anymore. It’s written from Riga, or Warsaw, or Zoom calls with the same four exiled pundits. The actual country is missing. And with it, any chance of nuance.

Of course, Russia’s no tidy postcard. It sprawls out like it means to confuse you. One minute it’s throwing you a smile over breakfast, and by tea it’s broken your heart.

...So here’s my prescription: less punditry, more plane tickets. Less projection, more proximity. And above all, less fear.

You don’t have to toast the place or take its side. Just stop seeing ghosts. Wipe your lens, look again. That’s where recovery begins.

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it.

This week, Washington was rocked by new releases in the declassification of material related to the origins of the Russian investigation. The material shows further evidence of a secret plan by the Clinton campaign to use the FBI and media to spread a false claim that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. With this material, the public is finally seeing how officials and reporters set into motion what may be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in American politics. There never was a Russian collusion conspiracy. This is the emerging story of the real Russian conspiracy to manufacture a false narrative that succeeded in devouring much of the first term of the Trump Administration.

What is emerging in these documents is a political illusion carefully constructed by government officials and a willing media. The brilliance of the trick was getting reporters to buy into the illusion; to own it like members of an audience called to the stage by an illusionist.

Aug 2, 2025

Featured • Trump Escalates Nuclear Threat to Russia… Taking the World to the Brink of Nuclear War, Larry C. Johnson, SONAR21, Aug 1, 2025

 • Ukrainian Long-Range Drones Hit Multiple Russian Refineries, Factories Overnight, ZeroHedge, Aug 2, 2025

 • Scott Ritter : Trump deploys Nuclear Subs to Russia over Social Media Rift, Judge Napolitano, Aug 1, 2025

 • Ukrainian Front Collapsing With Fortresses Falling One By One, South Front, Aug 1, 2025
A little one-sided but not wrong either, IMO.

Aug 1, 2025

Featured • Trump and Medvedev's Dangerous Exchange of Words, Scott Ritter, X Jul 31, 2025

As the rhetoric heats up, we must remain cognizant of the consequences. The sharp exchange of words between President Trump and former President Medvedev underscores just how dangerous the deteriorating relations between the US and Russia have become. The threats being promulgated are not idle ones. President Trump has become enthralled with the Israeli “Nasrallah” solution—leadership decapitation and middle management disruption designed to bring about the rapid collapse of a government/system. It was tried—and failed—in Iran. But Trump is being advised by Russophobes who believe that the US can successfully implement such a plan against Russia. This plan begins with sanctions, as all such plans do. It ends with a decapitation strike on Moscow.

Trump’s imagined conversation with Putin, where he threatened to “bomb the sh*t out of Moscow”, is indicative of the President’s thinking in this regard. The preferred decapitation strike is done using B-52 bombers launching cruise missiles, accompanied by Trident missiles launched from Ohio-class submarines operating off the coast of Russia, allowing for a flatter trajectory flight and shorter flight time. Medvedev’s comment about the “Dead Hand” indicates that Russia is well aware of Trump’s plans. The “Dead Hand”, or Perimeter system, is a long-standing fail-safe mechanism/plan which guarantees a full-scale nuclear retaliation in case any nation is foolish enough to try a decapitation strike. It dates back to Soviet times, when a special regiment of SS-20 missiles was equipped with radio transmission devices instead of warheads.

These missiles would be launched, broadcasting launch codes that would send all strategic nuclear force weapons to their targets, even if Moscow was taken out. This wasn’t theoretical—in my book Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, I write about how the Soviets transitioned this capability to the SS-25 system once the SS-20 was eliminated under the INF treaty. Today this mission is being handled by special regiment of SS-27 missiles. There are other components of the “Dead Hand”. Medvedev’s mentioning of it is a not-to-gentle reminder to Trump and his planners that it is suicide to think of a preemptive decapitation strike against Russia. Hopefully this message gets through. Otherwise, the “Walking Dead” allusion made by Medvedev will be the future of the United States and the world.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has called on Kiev’s Western backers to push for regime change in Moscow in order to “defend” themselves from alleged “Russian aggression.” The Ukrainian leader delivered his remarks during a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, which emphasized equal and indivisible security for all. In an article published for the same occasion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued that the West’s betrayal of those core principles was a key factor that led to the ongoing conflict. “I believe Russia can be pushed to stop this war… But if the world doesn’t aim to change the regime in Russia, that means even after the war ends, Moscow will still try to destabilize neighboring countries,” Zelensky said in his virtual address.

“It’s time to confiscate Russian assets, not just freeze them,” he added, urging Kiev’s sponsors to “put every frozen Russian asset… to work defending against Russian aggression.” Moscow has repeatedly dismissed speculation that Russia plans to attack the EU and NATO as “nonsense.” Lavrov said the EU is sliding into what he described as a “Fourth Reich,” marked by a surge in Russophobia and aggressive militarization, while President Vladimir Putin has accused Western states of deceiving their populations to justify inflated military budgets and cover up economic failures.

By now, it must be kind of obvious that Mr. Putin of Russia was staged-up into a demon for the convenience of Hillary Clinton — resulting in a decade of deformed US foreign relations that has dragged us to the edge of a third world war. Nice work, Democratic Party!

I will proffer a harsh truth to you: the best outcome in Ukraine would be for Russia to win the war as expeditiously as possible, neutralize and disarm the place, change-out its illegitimate government, and let it revert to being the frontier backwater it was for eight decades previous, when it was not a problem for the other nations of the region.

...For the moment, realize that we are in the middle of a maelstrom. Arrests and prosecutions are coming, and Mr. Trump’s clock is ticking on the Ukraine war. Upping the ante on the war is the last thing our country needs. The RussiaGate disclosures afford the president an out on his strong-arm tactics with Mr. Putin and his support of the Zelenskyy regime.

The most dangerous thing about Western Europe today is not just its decline, but its refusal to recognize it. The half-continent continues to posture, continues to lecture, and continues to imagine itself as a pillar of global order. But it has lost the internal resources that once sustained that illusion. What remains is a hollow echo of power, wrapped in a language of values that even those same Western Europeans no longer seem to believe. The region’s failure is most visible in its inability to make peace. Time and again, it chooses confrontation – with Russia, with China, with reality itself. Devoid of meaningful autonomy, it now functions as a permanent appendage of the US. It is no longer an actor on the world stage, but a supporting cast member, often unwelcome and increasingly irrelevant.

...Can the region still pose a threat? Possibly. But not because it has the strength. Rather, because it has the recklessness. Its politicians lack vision, competence, or restraint. They cannot imagine peace. And so they default to confrontation – especially with Russia. The danger is not that Western Europe is ready to fight. Its people enjoy lives too comfortable to risk. Its defense industry is in disrepair. But wars can begin through stupidity as well as strength. EU elites, betting on regime change in Moscow, continue to pour weapons into Ukraine. Some dream of extending the conflict into the Baltics. Others talk of arming mercenaries to fight Russia directly.

The Americans won’t die for Europe. That much is clear. But the EU may yet drag the world into catastrophe, simply by being incapable of restraint.

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 • ‘The Real Purpose In Making The Bomb Was To Subdue The Soviets.’ Now It’s Happening Again, On A Vast Scale. Why? – July 22 At Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 19, 2023

 • Bulletin 330: "'The real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets.'* Now it's happening again, on a vast scale. WHY?" A conversation with acclaimed historian Peter Kuznick and Greg Mello in Los Alamos, July 22, Jul 7, 2023

 • Ukraine War Makes it Harder to be a Nuclear ‘Dove’ | Our Land, Laura Paskus, New Mexico in Focus, Jun 30, 2023

 • Bulletin 329: Russia rules out nuclear disarmament negotiations; second week of Ukrainian offenses fail; what will US and NATO do? Build 60 projects in LANL's Pajarito Corridor?, Jun 17, 2023

 • Ukraine; Biden's Manicheism; the U.S. cannot even conduct a nuclear arms race, let alone win one, LASG friends ltr, Mar 16, 2023

 • Ukraine protest and updates, pit production delays and cost increases in NNSA's new budget, LASG friends ltr, Mar 14, 2023

 • Antiwar rally 2 pm Saturday in Albuquerque; LANL pits delayed, endorse the "Call for Sanity"; Ukraine update; the Nordstream investigation (and likely impeachment) "imperative" LASG friends ltr, Mar 11, 2023
 • Ukraine losses mount toward critical point; ANSWER rally against the war is now 2 pm (not 1 pm), March 18, Albuquerque; nearly half U.S. citizens believe WWIII is near, LASG friends ltr, Mar 7, 2023

 • Ukraine news and views; antiwar rally March 18; pending guest editorial; pit production precis, LASG friends ltr, Mar 3, 2023

 • Bulletin 325: Understanding the Nordstream sabotage and punishing those responsible, Feb 18, 2023

 • Ukraine news with comments and excerpts; bookmark for future reference if desired,LASG friends ltr, Feb 8, 2023

 • Bulletin 324: Opposition to Ukraine war gains visibility in New Mexico and via our web site, more broadly, Feb 6, 2023

 • Anti-nuclear activist opposes helping Ukraine, encourages peace, Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb 5, 2023

 • Bulletin 323: "Nuclear Hotseat" interview / Ukraine war updates, Feb 4, 2023

 • Bulletin 322: Right and Left To Join in D.C. Protest: ‘Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine’ / Bulletin of Atomic Scientists resets clock, blames Russia, Jan 25, 2023

 • $10 Trillion for Nuclear War: Racing to the Nuclear Cliff, The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, Jan 10, 2023

 • Bulletin 321: Last day for 2022 donations! / A few quick updates, Dec 31, 2022

 • Bulletin 320: Neocon humiliation -- or nuclear exchange / The centrality of war resistance in moral politics / 3 days left for 1:1 donation match!, Dec 29, 2022

 • Bulletin 319: Ukraine; NDAA: omnibus appropriations bill; fundraising --thank you; some matching funds still available, Dec 21, 2022

 • Stop the war now, Jean Nichols, The Taos News, Dec 19, 2022

 • Bulletin 318: Speak out now against further U.S. escalation in Ukraine; daily updates for your use, Dec 14, 2022

 • Agenda for tonight's emergency Ukraine meeting in Albuquerque, and by Zoom, Nov 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 314: Reminder re next week's antiwar, disarmament, & nuclear safety events: come if you can or tune in, outreach needed; pit interview on KNME tonight 7 pm; fundraising drive continues; erratum, Nov 11, 2022

 • Bulletin 313: Important meeting about Ukraine next week; DNFSB hearing in Santa Fe; more, Nov 7, 2022

 • Biden Administration releases aggressive nuclear strategy envisioning "first use" of nuclear weapons in wars like Ukraine, press release, Oct 27, 2022

 • Bulletin 310: Speak up! We urge you to take up the call for peace in Ukraine, Sep 25, 2022

 • Pope Francis: "World War III has been declared." We agree. Stop LANL's pit factory; Stop the U.S. war against Russia, presentation, Jun 15, 2022

 • Bulletin 301: Oppose the war! Demand and create accountability for lawmakers who fund and promote more war in Ukraine, May 16, 2022

 • Grave dangers loom in Ukraine war votes and escalations; opportunities open for journalists and citizens; We urge news media to widen debate, pose questions, create accountability, press release, May 16, 2022

 • LASG friends ltr: Thursday evening public discussion in Albuquerque: Ukraine, propaganda, progressives supporting Nazis and war, May 10, 2022

 • Escalation in Ukraine: The Nuclear War Danger is Real, Brian Becker & Greg Mello discuss the U.S. policy of waging proxy war on Russia, BreakThrough News, May 4, 2022

 • Bulletin 299: Emergency call to action: stop Biden's proposed $33 billion war escalation, Apr 28, 2022

 • Bulletin 298: Talk on pits & renewed U.S. nuclear weapons production Tuesday evening 4/26/22; antiwar billboard; what you can do, Apr 25, 2022

 • The core debate, Searchlight New Mexico, Mar 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 294: Please consider forwarding this fine statement from UNAC re Ukraine, Mar 23, 2022

 • Nuclear expert speaks on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Website, Mar 15, 2022

 • A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War, Consortium News, Greg Mello, Mar 7, 2022

 • Bulletin 293: Ukraine conflict: If you want a ceasefire (as we do), stop firing, Mar 5, 2022

 • Bulletin 292: Statement on the Ukraine conflict and war with Russia, Mar 1, 2022

 • "What can we in New Mexico do?," LASG letter, Feb 23, 2022

 • Bulletin 288: US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change, Dec 7, 2021 (see discussion of US, NATO, and Russia)

 • Nuclear experts speak on the dangers of war between the US and Russia, World Socialist Web Site, Apr 15, 2017

 • US Leaders Reject “Nuclear Winter” Studies, Ignore Existential Danger of Nuclear War. Turn a Blind Eye towards Armageddon, Steven Starr, Global Research, Nov 1, 2016

 • The Ukraine Conflict: What's Behind It? Why Is It Important?, Sep 26, 2015

 • Bulletin 200: Warhead budget bloat; U.S.-caused Ukraine catastrophe at the brink; hello peak oil, Feb 8, 2015