Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.

Jeffrey D. Sachs & Sybil Fares | July 21, 2026 | Common Dreams

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-proxy-war-in-ukraine

Copyright © 2026 Sonia Sachs, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this because you have expressed interest.

My mailing address is:

Sonia Sachs

61 Claremont Ave

New York, NY 10027

Add us to your address book

Did you receive this from a friend and want to sign up?
Sign up for future mailings here.

View the last 20 articles here.
Visit JeffSachs.org for an archive of articles, chapters, books and videos.

This reveals a significant concern among readers which must be addressed, not overlooked. Reading about the difficult geopolitical situation causes stress and discomfort in readers, often causing cognitive dissonance between their learned experiences and a newly-revealed path to solutions to these matters. As well, it is also stressful for the writers!

Several deep issues must be addressed which deeply conflict with what people have been taught and moreover, what has become the socially-acceptable narrative in their society. These run as deep as “America the Good” and NATO as a bastion against Evil. So I’ll break that glassware right off the top, then deal with the pieces.

America is NOT “The Good” - it works via every possible level to ensure permanent “full-spectrum dominance” of every other nation. NATO is an evil in this world (and I’ve lost subscribers for saying that) - NATO was set up to do an end-run around the United Nations and allow the U.S. to not be hampered by any other nation’s veto. It is not a consensus-based organization. The world is now divided into two camps: UN supporters such as Russia and China, and NATO supporters, vassals actually, since to participate they have yielded some amount of sovereignty.

So the world is divided into these two biggest camps, which represent on the one side “The West,” being the NATOists, the Atlanticists, who imagine themselves worrying about the declining “rules-based international order.” Well, they are conflating two meanings of “order.” They are implying “order” as in a political system or the way things used to be done, as well as, in effect, a religious order, since it requires faith in something unseen - they are conflating these meanings with an instruction by an entity of authority. In reality, it was America’s rules, and you (the vassals) were ordered to obey them - thus, the “rules-based international order.” And these “rules’ were often at odds with the UN Charter.

So there, that glassware is broken. Now what?

According to polls, a large percentage of Americans “support Ukraine.” In order to do so they must be absolutely blind to the entire backstory, the entire history, and the insidious goals of The West in its “Grand Chessboard” approach to conquering ALL of Asia. They fall into the “poor little Ukraine” camp and bemoan “Russia’s full-scale invasion.” But you must read through that “Grand Chessboard” link and realize that for peace in this world, the growing US/isar3l (USrael) Empire must absolutely, totally end and be permanently disabled from doing ANY dominance, let alone “full-spectrum dominance.” Otherwise, it will carry on trying to conquer all of Asia - using Ukraine as a proxy to conquer Russia and using Iran to break China’s energy supply and trading network for the final grand war against China. To break this USrael Empire’s chokehold on the world, these other countries, China, Iran and Russia must win!

Since we of the West have started this battle, and will not back down, that means it actually is war, we’re on the wrong team this time, and those other guys must win. Yes, it’s sad for Ukrainians to be caught in the battlefield of WW-III, but for their neo-nazi government, this war could stop any minute of any day. Just become an actually-neutral country, as per their separation agreement from Russia. No, this “de-nazification” theme from Russia is not propaganda, this Ukrainian government is disinterring its Nazi “heroes” and re-burying them in places of honour. The Russians, via their SMO (Special Military Operation or “SVO” - Specialnaya Voennaya Operatsia) hope to abolish these far-right Nazi elements since they are not interested in re-fighting WW-II, and, since NATO/Ukraine keeps fighting and refuses to not push NATO offensive forces right up to Russia’s borders, they will create a zone of security along their borders. NATO has flipped from being a “defensive” to an offensive alliance. There has been warning after warning since 2008, that pushing NATO up to Russia’s borders, with offensive missile installations, is a “red line” - meaning a declaration of war if pursued.

An article reported today in Don Hank’s Substack, which he found in Tsargrad, tells about Germany’s preparations for war on Russia:

Germany is preparing tanks for a march on Moscow.

The Japanese publication Shueisha has stated that a “Fourth Reich” is emerging in Germany, and it is quite capable of leading to a global nuclear war. Previously, Berlin used Ukraine to fuel a global conflagration, but now, the authors note, it is moving toward a direct confrontation with Russia.

The “democratic vaccine” has worn off in Europe. Now countries are beginning to reveal their true nature. For example, Germany is prone to the concept of its own superiority. The Germans are handing over their unprofitable automobile production to China.

They are channeling the freed-up resources into the military-industrial complex, switching to tank production.

The “Fourth German Reich” has sold its unprofitable and virtually destroyed automobile industry to China, and is itself switching to tank production, screaming, “Russia is our enemy!” the publication states.

Berlin is ready to enter a losing battle. Germany has never won a protracted war. But the current German leadership doesn’t care – like its predecessors, it is complacent and pompous. They elevate ideology to absolutes, not common sense.

Europe is falling into line with this nonsense of attacking Russia, supposedly enriching their economy by building war machines. If the human species is to survive, these impulses of stupidity must cease.

Col. Larry Wilkerson: Iran Strikes U.S.-Escorted Tankers in Hormuz; 2 Hit, 4 Forced to Retreat | Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid | July 31, 2026

LARRY- Let me just belabor Ukraine right now for a minute.

The Russians have been very circumspect about the direction from which they come at Ukraine to produce the most pain, the most drama, the most disaster for Kiev and at the same time not take any more civilian and other even military lives than they have to. Now you might call that the sort of Liddell Hart indirect approach if you want. Now waking up to the fact or having always known it but not wanted to exploit it to the extent they are now that Odessa, is key, absolutely key, to any future that even a rump state of Ukraine would have. They are now blockading the ports around and the port of Odessa. That means there is no lifeline whatsoever for Ukraine because I have it on fairly good authority that other countries around Ukraine are fed up with this war. Poland, most prominent of all, Poland is shifting even as I speak in terms of its political structure, its attitude towards Moscow and its attitude towards Ukraine as a result of that. And there’s no conduit going to develop anywhere for Ukraine outside of that seaborne one out of Odessa. So that means Ukraine is not just a basket case from what Russia is doing to its military, which is deserting now at enormously rapid rates. If they come anywhere near a Russian unit, they throw their hands up in the air and say, “Take me prisoner, please. It’s dwindling completely.” And Zelensky has done nothing to help that. Firing the general, firing the defense minister. I mean, getting rid of these people at this very critical juncture in Ukraine’s defense, I think that’s going to come apart. It’s going to come apart much faster than some people thought. That doesn’t mean there’s going to be peace and an end to the partisan warfare and other things like that. But it does mean Ukraine is finished, done, and as an element to bolster NATO which was the purpose, we put Ukraine into this proxy war to give NATO more strength against Moscow - is gone, utterly disappeared and what has happened instead of that is Russia has been strengthened and strengthened in a way that Sergey Lavrov’s and Putin’s remarks of late have indicated they might be willing to go a little further than originally, say back in February of ’22, they are willing to go a little bit further and exploit it. What that means I don’t know but I do think it means that we are stuck in both theaters of war. The one in the heart of Europe and the one in southwest Asia. We are stuck with three things. A terrible defeated strategy on both fronts. Two, nuclear powers on both fronts and I don’t just mean Israel and there’s no idea whatsoever how to deal with this. And then I want to come back to the original purpose for our doing this really - the deep state, I’m going to call it that, the deep state, I mean Robert Mercer I mean Elon Musk I mean Peter Thiel I mean Charles Koch I mean the oligarchs behind the Trump administration who are directing Donald Trump like he was a puppet and he’s a great puppet. Every now and then he does something stupid even in that regard but mostly he’s a puppet. They are now realizing that this effort to get at China through these different proxy wars, to stop China’s inexorable movement, inexorable gain of power to the point where they are very soon if not already, the most powerful economic entity in the world, which is what counts in this world.

Their effort has failed. It has failed categorically on both active fronts, the one in Central Europe and the one in Southwest Asia. It’s failed for different reasons in both places, but it has failed. What the hell do they do now? Because they’re going to become increasingly desperate. They have allied themselves in many respects with BiBi Netanyahu and his Greater Israel effort. What does it mean for that? Particularly what does it mean when for example Erdogan gets off his dead ass and finally picks a side and there’s no question in my mind what that side is going to be. It’s going to be the side opposed to Israel and opposed to the empire and it’s going to be traumatic, and it’s going to be decisive in that particular region of the world. But what does all of that mean? I think it means that we’re looking very, very, straightforwardly, those of us who understand what’s happening, into a global conflict. We’re looking at the opening days of a global conflict. We’re looking at the stupid lead-headed idiotic leaders like we looked at in 1914, or pick your occasion.

We’re looking at these people having brought us into this conflict with the ultimate goal, the ulterior motive of defeating China or at least stopping her in her tracks with her incredible initiative to shift commerce basically from the maritime regime to the continental or the land regime or at least significantly enough to benefit China majorly. And her partners and allies and to the detriment of those people in the world opposing it and who have the navies to oppose it and that’s Europe and the United States, mostly the United States. I don’t know where that incidentally, I’m still trying to figure out where South America turns out in that and to a certain extent Canada too because they’re not with us fully in this effort to do what we’re doing. Maybe Argentina is, but I don’t see any other South American state that’s fully with us. I don’t even see one whose leadership understands what I’m talking about. So, here we are on the verge of a global conflict that has every indication it could go nuclear at any moment and at many different points. We’re losing. They’re winning. They being principally China, but China has probably 60% of the world on its side, at least figuratively, if not actually, but I think it’s increasingly becoming actually.

And the world is sitting here staring at it and not even understanding what the dimensions of this coming conflict are and how much it is going to affect their lives, how detrimental it’s going to be to their lives. It’s going to make the Morocco issue that you were just talking about insignificant and many of these other issues insignificant too, because this is going to be a titanic struggle and one in which I don’t think we have a prayer in hell of triumphing in. So what do you do when you’re licked and you have to go home with your tail between your legs and you’re one of the leading nuclear powers in the world? This is what worries me. This is what concerns me, and it should concern every citizen of the world but particularly of the American empire and all the states that still are hooked to it like Japan, Korea, and so forth. I know that’s a very dismal projection, but I think we’re missing in many respects, we’re missing the forest for the trees and the forest is ablaze.

NIMA- I think bringing the two the conflicts, how the conflict is expanding itself in the West Asia. Look at Saudi Arabia attacking Yemen, attacking Iraq. And you have Zelensky and Netanyahu going to, you know, going to Washington, talking with Donald Trump. Both of them, their survival is at risk right now. They want to stay in their position and the continuation of the war going to benefit them. Both of them. For the case of Zelensky, it seems I don’t know if you saw his latest interview on Fox News. He basically says he’s willing to merge the two wars. {Yeah - Larry}. You know, coming into the war with Iran. I would say Benjamin Netanyahu would be more than happy if Zelensky does that and the United States somehow accepting the plan on the part of Ukrainians because that means that Israel [is] going to stay aside and the war going to be, you know, the United States and Ukraine against Iran and Russia somehow. It seems that in their mind going to be this way because they’re not gonna, they’re so comfortable with what’s going on. The United States…

LARRY- Yeah, you’re making my point. You’re making my point graphically. This is going to be the maritime powers versus the continental powers, and the continental powers are going to crush the maritime powers. I mean, that’s too simplistic, but that’s essentially what we’re looking at. We’re looking at the continental powers now encompassing not just Russia alone or China alone.

Good lord, that’s enough. Russia’s the biggest country in the world and China comes close. So, I’m not talking about population. I’m talking about geography. I’m talking about extent, you know. And now we’ve got Iran in there, which is not small potatoes either, big as Western Europe, diverse, lots of resources. If it were well taken care of, it could be a very, very powerful country. Now they’re all together. All together. And Turkey is going to throw its lot in, Nima. I’m telling you, it’s going to throw its lot in. And it’s going to be with that group and not with the maritime group. Now, friends at Naval War College in Newport probably detest me because I’m saying that, you know, the world of Athens is going away. The world of Sparta is on the rise. It’s not a very good analogy or metaphor because very different societies and such, but it is an apt analogy if you want to look at sea power versus land power. And you know people forget, you know, who was one of the greatest sea powers in the world at the time we are looking at in the Mediterranean - Persia.

You know the Persians tried - storms and winds and a really rough sea the Mediterranean Sea and Greek opposition stopped them but nonetheless they had quite a bit of sea power too. It just got thwarted in the particular circumstances in which it was used. It could have gone the other way. But this is a colossal battle between those led by the United States who’ve grown accustomed to this maritime environment for so long and China who’ve decided, and our allies who’ve decided to change it. And strangely, Russia’s in both environments. Look at what they’re doing to blockade Odessa. They’re using their naval forces. And people who tell me Russia doesn’t have any naval experience or sea experience or blue water experience, they say that about China, too, are just smoking something. I mean, they have plenty of experience. China has the largest deep sea fishing fleet in the world, over 6,000 vessels, huge vessels that stay at sea sometimes for two years and keep everything in refrigeration and then come back and offload it. As a matter of fact, they’re disrupting the fish species and krill and shrimp and other things around the world considerably. But that said, they have lots of blue ocean experience. So it’s not like they aren’t with a maritime element, both Russia and China. And for that matter, Iran, though, Donald Trump keeps saying over and over again, “I’ve sunk their navy. I’ve sunk their navy. I’ve sunk their navy.” I see a lot of ships floating around Iran right now that belong to Iran. Nonetheless, this is a battle, a historic battle between maritime power and land power, and land power is winning.

NIMA- The economy of the new data shows that the economy of Saudi Arabia has shrunk by 4.8%. You know, it’s huge. Even it didn’t happen during the COVID 19 and during those difficult days, but right now that’s happening. And you see the attacks, the way they’re expanding their conflict, two fronts right now. And they’re talking about land invasion of Yemen. They want to do something, you know, Yemen to defeat them.

LARRY- They tried that before. They got rebuffed. I mean, Saudi Arabia is in a real pickle right now. I just did an interview for the BBC. Interestingly, they taught me quite a bit during that interview. They were interviewing me because I was sort of in the government at the period of time they were looking at and the period of time they were looking at was 9/11 and they were looking at Saudi complicity in 9/11. One of the statements I made in that interview was that yes, the Saudi royals were involved in 9/11. I also said Saudi Arabia is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the face of the earth. Not Iran, Saudi Arabia. Well, I learned a lot from that interview because the young lady who was in charge of the documentary they were making had done her research and she revealed to me some of the things about what Saudi Arabia had done during and before 9/11.

So my attitude towards Saudi Arabia was still one of some disgust if not thinking of one of the most despicable countries in the world. Are they getting their comeuppance now finally? Because it is very, very, clear to me that they have still operated on the same sheet of music they were operating on with regard to the Mujahidin and Taliban and with regard to al-Qaeda and blessing it and funding it and with regard to other terrorist groups around the world. So, it’s about time Saudi Arabia got its comeuppance.

And I think I’m looking at that comeuppance being delivered right now. First of all, by the Houthis, but also by the texture and design of this U.S. campaign against Iran. It’s aiding and abetting the destruction of not only the GCC states on the Gulf, but also that one that is most removed from it, that’s squeezed in, if you will, between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don’t think BiBi Netanyahu’s idea that this is all going to survive and that the Abraham Accords and everything’s going to be all wonderful and Israel will be the tool in the middle that engineers all that. I think that’s a farce right now. I think it’s all a wash in what Trump has done ostensibly for Israel, but he is expediting, speeding up, accelerating, the destruction of the Jewish state in the Levant. Now that’s not the big thing that’s happening. The big thing is the struggle, the struggle between the East and the West, if you will. But it’s all part of the same fabric right now. And as I’ve said, the danger here and I think just to get back to Saudi Arabia for a minute, I think it’s gone. I think just like Israel is gone, I think Saudi Arabia is gone. At least it’s gone as the state that it’s been for the last well, since FDR and the king met. And Israel’s gone as a Jewish state. So, we’re changing lots with this incredibly incompetent leader we have in Washington. But he’s being forced into some of the defeat by these inexorable forces that are clashing right now on the world scene. And they’re clashing on a front, Nima, that runs all the way, as I’ve said many times, it’s almost 8,000 kilometers from the Arctic Circle all the way down to where we have our ships, a thousand nautical miles, I’ve told, still, our carriers, our capital ships in the Indian Ocean. And that’s another indicator that this is not a maritime world anymore because these carriers are afraid to go any closer because they’ll be sunk. They’ll be destroyed.

That’s a real comment because this is the instrument most noted in the world of the American Empire’s ability to bring military power into your backyard tomorrow morning. This instrument, this instrument that was made, you know, famous around the world by these little wars we’ve conducted from their platforms, is gone. It is no longer a symbol of American power worth chump change. It just remains for a couple of them to be sunk to prove that dramatically and decisively.

But that is an indicator of how the American Empire has walked itself into a defeat that is not just like Afghanistan and Iraq and Somalia and Libya and a host of other little wars were. This is fundamental. This is a defeat of the empire. A massive defeat of the empire.

And these symbols are going to go with that defeat.

And we’re seeing it right now and we’re going to see it even further. And I’m really worried as I said before that we’re going to see some mushroom clouds in the process, too. Not least am I worried about that because when the empire understands and Trump never will, but there are people around Trump who will understand, that we are going down as it were, literally and figuratively.

Then we will resort to nuclear weapons use.

You know, there are people already talking about it in the group that runs around in between Trump and these oligarchs. They’re already talking about why aren’t we using them on Iran?

NIMA- Do you think, Larry, if do you see any possibility of Israel getting involved before the election happening in Israel?

LARRY- It’ll all depend on how Netanyahu assesses his chances. I think his last ditch effort if he thinks he’s going to be defeated will be to search for that decisive victory over his principal enemy and he’ll do anything to bring that about including dragging the United States in, in combination for a joint attack, but it won’t happen until you’ll see the precursor, I think Nima, will be what he does that is violative of all the agreements but very much designed to keep Hezbollah from entering the conflict once it commences in Lebanon. Watch his actions in Lebanon.

NIMA- And I’ve got a feeling everyone is watching that, too. What is your assessment of Donald Trump’s position? Donald Trump sort of strategy with this rate. You detect a strategy?

LARRY- [laughter] No, I don’t see that. I detect back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That’s all he knows what to do. And the shame of it is the military, at least as far as I can detect. Now I understand General Kaine has made some real objections, solid objections because the other commanders and chief in the different AOS: Europe, Africa, Pacific are coming in and telling him, “What do you mean allowing all these stores to be shot? What do you mean dwindling the Patriot list down so far? The THAD list down so far? What do you mean using all these munitions that we might need because they’re in our war plans in case we have to execute them?” So they’re putting a lot of pressure on Kaine, but they’re not getting much headway in terms of Trump’s and Hegseth. So they keep doing it.

But do you feel that does that mean that they’re going to continue with this tit for tat or because in my opinion with the blockade it comes to a moment that we’re going to see a heavy sort of fight happening between the two sides. It’s not going to continue the same way that we we’ve been witnessing before because two days ago we had a statement from the IRGC. They say the blockade is a declaration of war against us. It’s not going to be any sort of pause or ceasefire anything of that. There is no negotiations happening. We know that and the mediators, it seems that they’re trying to do their best. Pakistan, Qatar and the only real negotiations that are happening is happening between Iran and Oman with the case of the trade of almost nothing between Iran and the United States.

If Bradley Cooper, Admiral Bradley Cooper, the commander-in-chief of Central Command, if he is scared to bring his carriers inside a thousand nautical miles, then how do we bring any kind of real naval power, which is what it’s going to take, to do what Trump has intimated he might do with regard to this Strait of Hormuz, is open it by force. How would you do that? I don’t see any way to do that. You bring in that symbol of American power and it is at least in one instance, that’s all it’ll take, destroyed.

Destroyed probably in less time than you and I have talked so far. How do you explain that? And how do you explain it to the American people? And how do you deal with it in terms of the war?

That would be traumatic. That would and that’s the only way you’re only going to fight a conflict in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz with a reasonable chance even for a moment or two. I don’t say over the long term, but for a moment or two, gaining superiority, gaining superiority that you could then claim has opened the Strait of Hormuz and it is now moving traffic again and doing it safely because these two carriers, three carriers, whatever, are sitting off Chabahar, you know, and protecting everything with their air power. Um, my first question would be, how much does that air power have left? My second question would be, when are you going to do that, Bradley?

When are those carriers going to come into range where your air power could actually mean something without having to be tanked to the extent that is meaningless?

That move would indicate just how serious we are about combat power close enough to the Strait of Hormuz to even temporarily say we had control over.

And I think the Iranians know that. I think they know that. And I think they’re fully prepared to take out at least one if not two of those carriers.

NIMA- There are two suspicious attacks. The latest one on Saudi Arabia Yamu refinery which was attacked by drones. Nobody was taking responsibility of that attack.

LARRY- No.

NIMA- And some people said maybe Saudi Arabia is faking, you know, somehow is trying to put some false information out. That’s one of the, you know, one of the rhetorics right now. The other one is someone hit them and they’re going to hit back and finally they have decided to attack together with the United States, attack Iraq, part of the Iraqi army by the way, not part of the resistance that are not, you know, this was a huge step on the part of Saudi Arabia. The other point was yesterday the drone attack on American ships in Egypt.

LARRY- Egypt, yeah this was somehow New York Times came out in a new article saying Iran is behind that attack then Iran Iranian foreign minister came out said no we didn’t do that, we consider them as a friendly country we don’t need to go that far. Why - what is in it for us to attack Egypt, then Egypt said we are investigating the case, later on they said it wasn’t Iran, it was not Iran. Egyptian government said it was not Iran.

NIMA- That’s what I heard too, yeah.

LARRY- Yeah so what it is you’re describing, what I’m talking about, you’re talking about it at a tactical level, but nonetheless a tactical level that has the opportunity, the potential to go operational strategically off overnight. It’s like, you know, this is what we used to call the CNN effect. A single soldier in Mogadishu, for example, and his death on television on CNN could be a strategic event where you’re talking about the same thing right now.

This these two wars are both pregnant with the possibility of a little tactical event suddenly blooming into being a strategic event.

And this is a case in point. And here’s the problem, Nima. The antagonist and the people behind the antagonist, even more so the people behind what’s happening in Spain for example with Morocco, they know that. And so they do these things, their intelligence services, their street secret services I’ll call them. They do these things in order to take advantage of that opportunity to make a tiny little event become a strategic event. And that’s the dangers of having such a wide array of conflict going on right now. You got a lot of players. You got a lot of people that can and lot of intelligence agencies that can play in it, spoiling for something to do to impact what they think is their future budget and their future existence. They all want to do things and these opportunities come up and you got someone like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and Ratcliffe and others who don’t know their butt from a hole in the ground. And so every - they give these orders, do anything you can to help what we’re doing and they go out and they do it. And I’m not saying that’s what happened, but I’m saying that this is a possibility and it’s an environment that’s just pregnant with these possibilities. Look at the false flags I think that have occurred associated with Ukraine. Many of them have been discounted, but they’ve nonetheless have done the damage that they’ve done, particularly to Russia.

It’s to Putin’s credit and the Russian military general staff’s credit that they have not acted on some of these things that they clearly believe and maybe their intelligence services confirmed for them were false flag.

Who knows who struck the ship in Egypt?

That’s the question. And for what purpose? And who knows what happened in the Red Sea and for what purpose. But we do know what is happening on a strategic basis in a general sense. And that is that Saudi Arabia is being isolated and it is probably going to find it very difficult to continue on its present path and in its association with the empire.

It’s going to find that increasingly untenable. As have Kuwait, as has Qatar, as has the UAE, despite their claims to the contrary, as has even Oman, and certainly Bahrain, which I’m told now is pretty much a basket case of a country, if it ever was a country. So you’ve got this entire fabric unraveling in the Gulf. All of which consequentially is going to force us out of the Gulf, going to force us out of the southwest Asia. I think the Saudis are going to be left holding the bag and they think they’re holding a bag that includes the nuclear agreement that will allow them to do whatever they want to do in the future with their nuclear program and so forth and so on. And even Trump has negated that in a sense by saying, “No, it’s only if you agree to sign up to the Abraham Accords.” And they’re not going to do that as long as they’re holding forth that a viable route to a Palestinian state is a necessity first and foremost before they do that. Do they back off that? And what happens to their street if they back off that? Who knows? This is all full of variables that all point at one, the United States being kicked out of the region. Two, the Gulf Cooperation Countries not being a shadow even of their former self. Three, Saudi Arabia having to think hard about its existence and its relationship with the empire. And four, as I’ve said before, global conflict, all aided and embedded by the little characters messing around in these two seminal conflicts in Central Europe and Southwest Asia. The one a war of choice, the one in Southwest Asia by a stupid ignorant idiot of a president and the other a war of choice by proxy by a stupid idiot president called Joe Biden. Lay the blame at the feet of Washington, if you will. But Europe has been very helpful, especially London, Paris, and Berlin.

NIMA- Larry, you’ve mentioned Bahrain and Kuwait and it seems that the ongoing war is turning them in my opinion as if they decide to continue this war, they’re going to be turned into a desert in these two countries.

LARRY- Bahrain already is, I think. I mean, I’ve seen some pictures of the destruction there. I mean, and look at what it did to us. I mean, in Jordan it took about all, if not all, of our early warning capacity away. We no longer have any early warning capacity to say, “Oh, wow. You know, they’re doing that. That missile’s coming towards Jordan or that missile’s coming towards Bahrain or it’s gone. We don’t have any early warning capacity anymore.”

NIMA- Do you think the leadership in Saudi Arabia understands that they’re on the path of becoming Ukraine 2.0 in my opinion? Because Ukraine, you know how Ukraine was before this war started. The war between Russia and Ukraine started. Look at Ukraine today. Nothing left. Yeah. I don’t know if we can call it Ukraine anymore.

LARRY- No, I don’t either. I don’t. And if Odessa really, really, goes as it were and the ports around her, Odessa being the most important one, it’s not just a rump state, it’s a basket case. It’s a basket case because it has no way of interfacing with the world. [laughter] Can’t sell its products. It can’t export its products. It, you know, I mean, it can do it illicitly through various sundry ways. Odessa always has been a gang of thieves, and I’m sure there are some gangs of thieves there that would continue to operate with Kiev, but it’ll be on a very small scale, and it’s not on a national scale that would be capable of keeping Ukraine as it is a rump state, alive. So, where does it go?

What does it do? Whom does it consult? Who does it turn to for succor? The Pols are developing, I think, a very negative attitude towards Ukraine. And that that’s the most likely place. And then possibly Germany. I don’t see either of those states with the political complexion that’s going to change dramatically over the next 12 to 18 months being anywhere interested in Ukraine other than maybe being covetous of some of that territory.

I don’t know if you saw Macgregor. Macgregor was on with Glenn Diesen and I listened to it this morning about 5:00 a.m. in the morning. It just it had just happened I think. I’m listening to it and I really respect Doug’s education and knowledge of the history of Europe and especially that region in Europe. And he was going on about the history of that area and how many times these sorts of convolutions, these sorts of evolutions, these sorts of bitter rivalries and so forth had happened and marred the whole face of that region from time to time. And that you know the implication of course it’s going on again. [laughter] It’s happening again. And I saw this, one of the things he demonstrated with his own vignette. I saw this when an American colonel was talking to a Serbian colonel equivalent. And the Serbian colonel was showing the American colonel a monument. And the Americans said, “What is that to?” You know, and the guy explained it to him. And it was 1115. I think the event the monument commemorated was 1115 and the America was like, “Are you kidding me? You’re you are paying all this respect and obeisance to an event that happened in 1115.” Yeah. Now you know the difference between Europe and America, particularly Eastern Europe. Never forget. Oh, I remember when my uncle’s, uncle’s, uncle’s, uncle’s, uncle was bloodied by this Serb and I’m going to get vengeance.

NIMA- It’s, do you see the same sort of, in my opinion, if something of that sort happens in the West Asia to for example Saudi Arabia it’s not going to be that difficult just destroying the oil facilities, what does that mean Saudi Arabia, what does Saudi Arabia mean anymore if they destroy the oil facilities you know ARAMCO you know the pipeline the for and...

LARRY- I’m convinced I’m convinced that those last very valuable, very, very, very much valuable not just to Saudi Arabia but to world commerce and to, you know, truck traffic in the United States, if you will, is on Iran’s target list if it gets to that point if they have to attack significant economic infrastructure in Saudi Arabia they will.

We don’t want to go there. I hope we know that. We understand that and we will shy away from giving Iran an excuse to do that. But it doesn’t look that way right now. It doesn’t look that way. It looks like Donald Trump is operating on a sheet of music which he wrote and which makes no sense whatsoever. Except in the sense of Donald Trump’s character, you know, a real estate guy.

Yeah. He doesn’t even under, He doesn’t even seem to understand who, was it this morning, was lecturing a European audience. Not lecturing as in, you know, didactic, but he was giving them the information. Uh jeez, I can’t remember his name now, but he’s a, he’s an economist, and he was pointing out how Trump doesn’t even understand what it means to have a deficit. And what it means to have been responsible yourself for creating that deficit. And so why would you put a tariff for example, on a country because it has given you the deficit? Because it did not give you the deficit. You gave yourself the deficit in your trade relations with that country. Oh, how about that? All across the globe, you created the deficit, not that country. And you know it’s like Trump can’t understand that because he’s a real estate guy. It doesn’t apply to the kind of real estate deals that he was so accustomed to bringing into grifting existence. But it does apply to world commerce. You aren’t the creator of the deficit if you are China selling your product to the United States. The United States is the creator of the deficit.

NIMA- Larry, Russia yesterday attacked a factory if we can call it a Russian missile destroyed US firms, you know, in Kiev, the drone factory in Kiev, which was I don’t know how many people US forces were there, but they attack and destroyed that facility right there. This is the new phase of war. We have…

LARRY- We knew they were going to do that. I mean, Lavrov and Putin both had been very direct about we’re going to hit the war making potential of Ukraine no matter where it is inside Ukraine. So far inside Ukraine.

NIMA- It’s some sort of warning for Europeans as well.

LARRY- Yeah, absolutely. I’m surprised that they haven’t picked a small country that is a NATO member.

They know positively that this is going on in that country and that it is directly supporting the war Ukraine is waging in against Russia and struck it and dared us to implement Article 5 and dared us to come into the war as an alliance against Russia, because they know Nima, Putin knows, the Russian general staff knows, they are at war with NATO. They know that they’re at war with NATO. It’s covert. It ain’t very covert, but it’s indirect, if you will, but it’s becoming less than indirect when you start saying things like, “Mr. Zelensky, we’re going to give you a Patriot making capacity inside Ukraine.” when Russia knows exactly whom and what that Patriot making capacity is designed to attack or take care of. Now they also know that it would be three to five years before it could ever stand up. I’m quite sure they know now what Ted Postol has made apparent to everyone that, Patriot is about as effective as, you know, I think I would give it maybe a 20 to 25% effectiveness factor for that amount of money? I’m not sure I’d want to buy a Patriot. I’m not so sure I’d want Look at what we’ve done.

We’ve sold it to all these allies, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and other people.

And now this war has proven, I think substantially proven, that it doesn’t work very well. So what are these allies thinking right now? We paid a fortune for these systems. and Lockheed Martin and RTX and the rest of the death merchants of the world that make these things guaranteed us that these things were reasonably successful and that they would aid in the defense of South Korea or of Japan or whatever. Now they know that we sold them a pig and a poke, which is to say we sold them something that is vastly inferior to what we said it was. Think about the F-35 for a moment. 27, 28% operational ready rate and we sold it to all our allies at enormous expense to them. What are they thinking about us now in terms of that? They can’t be thinking too highly of us.

NIMA- Today, Donald Trump announced that the Board of Peace reached a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting peace and security. And later on, we’ve learned from Hamas pointing out that, you know, disarmament is not going to happen unless Israel withdraws totally from Gaza. I’m just talking about the heavy weapons, not about, you know, the heavy weapons going to be. It seems to me that they’re thinking Hamas understanding is that they want Israel to withdraw from Gaza.

The other point is that they want to merge into something new, a security force, the same people with this new name, a security force for Gaza. What is your understanding of that?

LARRY- Well, Haaretz this morning, the newspaper that I, as I said, I read, pretty much blew that out of the water. And they blew it out of the water on two or three different angles. One was just like what you said, Hamas has not agreed to any of that.

Two, the angle that Bibi Netanyahu is still and is not going to stop because it would hurt his political chances if he did, killing Gazans inside Gaza. And then cited the air strike that they just had. You imagine conducting an air strike on what’s left of Gaza right now.

I that’s utterly heinous. And yet they did that. They’re still killing them. It’s it even the article even cited the number they killed yesterday. I think it was 12 or something like that. So that’s still going on and he’s not going to stop that. And as long as he’s doing that, Hamas is not going to agree to anything. Nor is the Palestinian Authority in my view going to agree to it. And then the third thing is the farce that this humanitarian organization or whatever they’re calling it now that has taken over the potential eventual future of Gaza is a farce too. It’s not working. The efforts being expended within it are minuscule at best and it isn’t going to work because one, BiBi doesn’t want it to work and he’s going to do everything he can to keep it from working. You can’t kill Palestinians fast enough if it works in any way, fashion or form. So, he’s not going to let it work. It’s a farce. It’s a farce. And Haaretz almost came out and said that, didn’t quite go that far, but it it’s a farce.

And as long as Netanyahu is the man in charge, and I don’t see any of those perspective people who might replace him being any different, it’s going to continue to be a farce.

NIMA- Here are the important points, Larry, in this statement, full statement by Hamas, it says multiple points, by the way. Here is: Israel fully ends the war, withdraws from Gaza, completes the first ceasefires phase, allow reconstruction and international protection forces, dismantles Israel-backed militias in Gaza, guarantees Palestine self-determination and statehood.

LARRY- And none of that is the Trump administration allowing to get into its media. They’re just saying everything’s working.

NIMA- It reminds me of the so-called [MoU] between Iran and the United States.

LARRY- Yeah. Especially what was it? Paragraph five or section five that essentially was surrender.

NIMA- Yeah. Israel is not going to accept this. They’re not going to withdraw. They didn’t do that with Lebanon.

LARRY- No. This business of Auon (Pres. of Lebanon) and the United States having an agreement that both sides can live with and everything is totally a farce. It’s totally a farce. It’s a sellout by and the government of Lebanon such as it is. And they know that Israel is not going to be stopped, that Israel will keep on going, that it’ll keep on killing Lebanese whenever and wherever it wants to, just as soon as it is propitious with regard to Iran to do that, they will do that. They’re doing it slowly and surely. I read yesterday again in Haaratz what has happened to that swath of land that really runs from the citadel I can’t remember the name of that place now I just it just left my head but the age old fort there you know what the one I’m talking about that runs from there all the way over to the extreme eastern section of where the Israeli forces are deployed. They’ve still killing Lebanese, not Hezbollah, Lebanese in that area. And the guy is quoted in Haaretz,

NIMA- you mean that fortress, Larry, in Lebanon? [Beaufort Castle] Qalʿat al-Shaqīf fortress.

LARRY- Yeah. And the other point they brought out was that the IDF commanders were bragging about it about how many people they’d killed and how many homes they’d burned, how many homes they’d bulldozed, how nothing would ever come up there again as far as they were concerned. It reminded me of the two refugee camps that had so many people massacred in them as the Israelis withdrew in 1982. I guess it was ‘82 or ‘83 when they withdrew when we forced them out of Lebanon. Only this is forward-looking. This isn’t anger in retreat and killing people needlessly.

This is forward-looking. They’re looking to make sure no Lebanese can ever come back into that area. Certainly not the ones they drove out of their homes, burned their homes, raised them to the ground, destroyed the foundations even with their bulldozers. I mean, it looks a lot like some of the things they’ve done in Gaza, but in Lebanon.

We’re not putting any of that in our press. We’re not talking about it. We’re not alerting the American people to the fact that Netanyahu is doing that to the Lebanese. Um, no.

NIMA- Larry, do you in your opinion, I don’t know if before coming to this live, we talk about it and we’re going to talk about it with Professor Ted Postol later on at 4:00 pm Eastern time. And the new understanding of Professor Postol is that Iran has used one of its missiles which when it comes to the ground hitting the targets it goes with a velocity equal to 4 kilometers per second which is somehow greater than the velocity that Oreshnik had.

LARRY- Yeah. Yeah. Close to it if not beyond it. Yeah.

NIMA- Yeah. He said that the Oreshnik it was 3.5 and this missile hit the target at four kilometers per second. This is what is your understanding of the way that the two sides, these escalations or these are some sort of signs sending to each other, both sides.

LARRY- Yeah, I think Iran has got surprises still. I think it has got some things it is not used yet. It is husbanding them until it is the moment of decisive action against Israel. And I do believe they’re keeping them for Israel.

That doesn’t mean they won’t use them on Jordan or, you know, Kuwait or someplace else if they need to, but the big ones that are going to be a real surprise, they’re saving for Israel.

And I can understand that. Because as the Omani foreign minister has said twice, the real problem in the Gulf is not Iran, it’s Israel. And if you say that, then you’re also saying, but the Omani foreign minister is not dumb enough to say this. [laughter] He’s smart. He’s not going to say this. You’re also saying the number one problem in the region is guess who? The United States of America. Because without the United States of America, Israel would be the pipsqueak it is. So Oman is saying categorically the problem in the Gulf is not Iran. The problem is Israel, United States. And he’s right. He’s absolutely right.

It’s taken Oman a long time to come out and say that diplomatically, but nonetheless, the second time he said it. And the best friend really that we had in the Gulf, no questions asked, not Israel, not BiBi Netanyahu, not any Israeli leader. The best friend we had in the Gulf was the Sultan of Oman and his team. And now we have screwed them.

I don’t think they even trust us anymore. I’m not sure they ever trusted us completely, but they certainly now look at us probably as an enemy.

Can’t say that publicly, but uh that’s probably the way they look at it. Would they be happy if we were forced out of the region? I think the answer to that is yes.

NIMA- The problem for Russia and Iran is that this sort of animosity is not, you know, dependent on Republicans or Democrats. All these two parties, it’s bipartisan in United States. The both parties have the same policies with different sort of tactics.

LARRY- Yeah, the strategy is the same. The tactics are different. You know, the Democrats saying something, you know, not going toward pursuing some sort of other elements to go against them. And here comes what the reason that I’m mentioning this because CNN published a video of Lindsey Graham talking to Jake Solomon. Yeah. Before the attack on Iran happening. And here is what Lindsey Graham said. Lindsay Graham- “to deliver. Oh, to be honest with you, I think about 3 to 4 weeks we should have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities. And what we’re trying to do is just get a few cities to fall in the next month, get the Arabs more openly involved tomorrow or by the end of the week and just have almost irreversible momentum.”

NIMA- He basically put out the strategy what was in their mind before the war started. {Yeah.-Larry} And we’re witnessing what’s going on right now.

LARRY- I have, as you know well, I think I have absolutely zero respect for Lindsey Graham. I think he was a Cretan. I have almost the same disdain for Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, really. And my disdain for them grew dramatically when I realized that they had been during Obama’s administration and Biden’s vice presidency opposed to the JCPOA, and everything they could do to screw it, to make sure it didn’t go through. To Obama’s credit, he got it, he got it through barely, but he got it through. And then in their position with Biden, when Biden became president, and I have to say my despicable definition goes to Biden too in this regard, they wouldn’t resurrect it. They wouldn’t do anything significant to resurrect it after Trump had killed it in his first term. So Blinken and Sullivan are just a more sophisticated Jewish-oriented Zionist Lindsey Graham. They just don’t speak with that southern accent like Lindsay does. [laughter]

NIMA- What he said about Arab states, Larry. Oh, it was…

LARRY- What’s he saying now in hell about the destruction [laughter] of all these Arab states? I mean, ticked them off.

Kuwait is virtually gone. Bahrain, I think, is gone. The others are probably going to follow in some way or another, or they’ll be a shadow of their former self, if they are even their former self. And we aren’t done yet. The stupidity and idiocy of Bradley Cooper and Donald Trump are not done yet. Wait until they put land forces in there. I’m really, really scared that they might do that. Scared because I feel for those boys and girls.

And the comments like were made the other day. I forget the guy who made them, but he’s a big supporter of Israel, about how these people signed up. They signed up. They’re volunteers. That’s, you know, we hear that at the all-volunteer force forum. We hear that all the time. Well, these people, if they get killed, they volunteered for it.

That’s supposed to justify what’s happening right now. And what would happen were they to conduct a land operation. That’s supposed to justify it because they signed up.

They’re not citizens anymore. They’re mercenaries. That’s what they’re saying. That’s essentially what they’re saying. They’re getting paid to die. So don’t complain. Don’t. That’s the reason we created you all-volunteer force, was so we could say you’re getting paid to die. Shut up. Oh, and your families shut up, too. When you come home in a pine box, tell your families to shut up because we paid you. Oh, we’ll go to Dover and bow our heads and everything, but we paid you. You are a paid mercenary. Therefore, don’t be saying anything about, you know, the wars that we conduct. We’ll conduct all the wars we want to and you’ll fight in them cuz you signed. That’s disgusting, especially for a country with the history that we had for our first three quarters of our existence. But since World War II, we have been a freaking empire and worse and worse empire every day that went by.

NIMA- It’s, it’s unbelievable, Larry. Whenever I think of ground invasion, I see the bloodshed happening and people could basically, Iranians and Americans being killed because of Israel and Israeli ambitions and whatever they have in their mind and they’re just sitting aside and just watching these two nations killing each other and it’s unbelievable.

LARRY- Well, you know, I said to someone yesterday, you ever read Jeremiah? What do you mean Jeremiah? I said Jeremiah, the book in the in the Bible, have you ever read Jeremiah? Do you know what Jeremiah was saying over and over and over again about the Israelites?

He was saying that they were abandoning God. They were abandoning the covenant. They were becoming totally secular. They were worshiping the golden calf. They were doing all these things and so forth. You know what Nebuchadnezzar eventually did and Jeremiah had prophesized?

Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple, raised it to the ground, put the Israelites into bondage. They stayed there for quite a while, made slaves of them. I said, “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying. The Israelites and the Israelis are the same people.” Yeah. I’m afraid though, you know, I’m afraid that they might take a lot of the rest of us with them, just as I’m afraid Zelensky might too. Yeah.

NIMA- Zelensky doesn’t care about anybody. He destroyed a country. More than two and a half million soldiers were killed, slaughtered during the war. Yeah. He the guy.

LARRY- I go back to some of those little smuggled out tapes I’ve seen of him in his comedy his comedy routine in Moscow I think it was and I think about those tapes and I say man, that guy was as disgusting as some of his jokes [laughter] is as disgusting as some of his jokes and the fact that he speaks Russian and understands Russia, I think a little bit at least might even have some ultimately, some empathy for Russia, is even more unconscionable. I mean I could say that about a lot of people though. I do not understand on one plane on another plane maybe I do as an academic and a student of history the hatred we have and the hatred we developed post-George HW Bush and Collen Powell and Jim Baker and that whole crew for Russia. I just do not understand it. I don’t understand the hatred that Biden had. Clearly, he did not like Russia. He hated Russians. Where did that come from? I understand what Powell was talking about in 1989. [He said:] “You let Kohl and Mitterrand and Major and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Baker and Chevroni and all these people disappear from the scene, you’re going to have real problems in Europe because no one will be alive who remembers the past. No one. And you’ll have chaos in Europe within a decade or two.” Well, that’s pretty much come true. But at the same time, I wanted to say, how does a divorce from reality happen so swiftly, you know, and I’ve read some people since then who’ve pretty much said the same thing Powell said, and they describe everything from a generation that built, became a generation that did nothing but take, and that became a generation now that doesn’t understand any reality about Europe or about their lives or about how they got where they are. And so they think they take everything for granted and they elect these leaders who do the same thing. I think it’s more complex than that. But certainly what Powell predicted in 1989 at Fort McPherson has come true that when those leaders were gone, he put it this way. “When the leaders who have their feet, even their baby feet in World War II are gone, Europe will convulse again.” And he’s right. He was right. Yeah.

NIMA- Thank you, Larry. Thank you so much for being with us today. Great pleasure as always despite what we’re talking about, but it’s great pleasure to talk with you and I’m sure that our audience enjoy whenever we talk about the geopolitical and dark issues that…

LARRY- I don’t know. I don’t know if they enjoy it, but I wish some people in my country at least, and particularly in Europe, too, because I have a lot of fondness for Europe. I wish they’d start waking up. I really do.

Maybe they are. Maybe they are. I hope it’s not too late. I hope they throw Merz out and Macron out. And even this new guy in London seems to be just the same kind of person Starmer was. He just hides it a little more. [laughter]

NIMA- Exactly. Exactly. Take care. Take care, Larry.

(one hour, 16 minutes)

Bessent BEGS Japan and Europe to Stop Selling US Bonds - Caught on Camera | House of El | Aug 1, 2026

Here is a transcript of this video, very important information - it can’t be summarized, so I have to print the whole piece:

“This is not financial advice, but this might be the most consequential financial story this channel has ever covered. And there is a reasonable chance you will not see it discussed on most mainstream outlets because it requires understanding four interconnected systems simultaneously to grasp why it matters. The United States is in serious trouble. The situation is very convoluted. But what we’re about to witness is a house of cards in the early stages of collapse. I’m going to walk through it step by step. Take your time with this one.

On Friday morning, during a cabinet meeting at Camp David, Reuters photographer Daniel Hoyer captured a photograph over Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s shoulder. On the notepad in front of him, positioned directly beneath his name card with nothing else written on the page were the words “To do: Buy Japanese yen 5 to10 billion.” Hours later, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sold euros to buy yen on behalf of the US Treasury. The yen surged. The intervention was confirmed. And the United States government did something it has not done since 2011 when a magnitude of 9.0 earthquake and a nuclear meltdown at Fukushima devastated Japan and the G7 coordinated emergency currency support to prevent the country’s financial system from collapsing. There is no earthquake this time. Thankfully, there is no tsunami.

There is no nuclear disaster. The disaster is the US bond market. And Bessent just told the world that the United States is now spending billions of dollars to prop up another country’s currency because the alternative is watching its own borrowing cost spiral out of control. Now, feelings aside, this kind of breach is unprecedented for a sitting Treasury Secretary. Generally, in central banking and treasury circles, operational security is not really a preference. It is a foundational principle. Markets move on information and a photograph to-do list containing the size and direction of a currency intervention is the kind of leak that in any other context would trigger an internal investigation, possibly a resignation as well. And I need to explain why the US Treasury buying Japanese yen is actually about protecting the US Treasury bond market. Because that connection is the reason this story matters more than almost anything else happening in the global economy right now. And I need to explain it simply first because it’s deeply consequential. And second, because the mechanics are not actually that complicated. They’re just kind of hidden.

Let’s start with Japan. The yen hit 163.99 to the dollar last week. That’s the weakest level since December 1986, a 40-year low. Japanese companies are going bankrupt at the highest rate in 12 years, over 5,000 in the first half of 2026 alone, with 45 specifically citing the weak yen as the cause of their collapse. At this point, starting a business in Tokyo carries roughly the same financial risk profile as opening an underwater fireworks store. Import costs for food, fuel, and raw materials have surged. Wholesale inflation is running above 6% and the Bank of Japan is a bit trapped. It hiked rates to 1% in June, the highest since 1995.

But the yen kept falling because the gap between Japanese rates at 1% and American rates at nearly 4% is still enormous. Money flows to wherever the yield is higher. And the yield right now is higher in the USA. That flow weakens the yen and strengthens the dollar, which sounds like it should be good for the United States. It is good for the United States in the exact same way that eating 5 lbs of free cotton candy is good for your short-term blood sugar.

It’s not. And understanding why is the key to understanding everything that happened on Friday. When Japanese institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, banks send money to the United States to buy Treasury bonds, they are lending the US government money. Japan holds $1.14 trillion in US Treasuries. It is the single largest foreign holder of American government debt. But when the yen collapses, those institutions face a growing problem. The value of their American investments denominated in dollars stays the same in dollar terms, but the cost of converting those dollars back into yen to pay Japanese retirees, Japanese policy holders, and Japanese depositors, becomes progressively more expensive with every move in the exchange rate. At some point, the currency loss eats the yield advantage entirely. And when that happens, the rational decision, or rather the only decision, is to sell the American bonds, bring the money back home, and just buy Japanese government bonds that now yield nearly 4% on the 30-year, which is enough to meet domestic obligations without the currency risk that is destroying returns on the American side. That is exactly what has been happening. We covered a bit of this on this channel as well.

Japanese holdings of US Treasuries have fallen from 1.22 trillion to $1.14 trillion. $66 billion gone in a matter of months. The selling accelerated sharply in the first quarter of 2026 when the Japanese investors dumped $29.6 billion in a single quarter, which is the largest selloff since 2022. And every dollar Japan sells puts upward pressure on US bond yields. Because when a major buyer exits, the remaining buyers on this planet demand higher returns to compensate for the reduced demand. The 30-year US Treasury yield has been above 5% for over a month now, which is the longest stretch since 2007, the year before the great financial crisis.

The interest bill on America’s national debt now exceeds the combined budgets of the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, Education, the EPA, and the Small Business Administration. All of these combined, the government borrows $155 billion every single month. $24 billion a week goes to interest alone. That is not a national budget. That is the global equivalent of lighting a brand new superyacht on fire every 6 hours just to keep the Oval Office warm. And Bessent needs to borrow 900 billion more by October to fund the deficit. So now you see the full chain. The yen falls.

Japanese institutions sell treasuries to bring money home. Treasury selling pushes US yields higher. Higher yields make the deficit more expensive. And more expensive deficit requires more borrowing. More borrowing at 5% requires more buyers. But the biggest buyer is the one who is actually selling. And that is why the United States just spent 5 to 10 billion buying yen. Bessent is not saving Japan. He is saving his own bond market. The yen is just the mechanism. The treasuries are the target and the notepad was just the announcement.

The coordination was broader than just the United States and Japan, however. On Thursday, Japan and South Korea both intervened simultaneously, selling dollars and buying their own currencies in what Reuters described as a rare coordinated intervention. The yen jumped more than 3% in a single session, which is its biggest one-day gain in nearly two years. South Korean authorities confirmed they were acting in coordination with Tokyo. And then on Friday, Japan’s top currency diplomat, Atsushi Mimura, said something very extraordinary. We are receiving support from the United States that goes beyond psychological support and I’m constantly in contact with relevant authorities. So that phrase “beyond psychological support” is essentially in my view, diplomatic language for America is putting its own money on the table. It’s not advice. It’s not statements. Money, literal money.

Here comes the most important part in the story. The Financial Times reported that the New York Fed sold euros to buy yen on the Treasury’s behalf. I want you to hear that again because it contains the structural detail that connects this story to every European sovereignty video this channel has ever made. This is why this story is so consequential. The Federal Reserve sold European currency to buy Japanese currency to prevent the US bond market from destabilizing further. Europe’s currency was used as the funding mechanism for an intervention designed to protect America’s fiscal position.

The European Central Bank was not consulted. European central bankers were not asked. Europe essentially woke up this morning to find America had taken their corporate credit card, bought 10 billion worth of Japanese foreign exchange and left the tab on the kitchen counter with a little thanks post-it note. The euro was simply sold, weakening it at the margin, to fund an operation that benefits the United States and Japan at Europe’s expense.

And this is happening in the same month that the ECB, the European Central Bank, published data showing the euro is becoming a safe haven currency, that Amazon and Alphabet are borrowing in euros at record scale, and that euro- denominated bond issuance hit an all-time high. Europe is building the euro into a reserve currency alternative. The United States is selling it to prop up the yen. The contradiction could not be any sharper and the timing could not be worse for Scott Bessent, because the ECB is expected to hike rates again before the end of the year. Eurozone inflation remains above target 2.9% in July and rising again after briefly easing in June driven by renewed fighting in the Middle East, pushing energy costs higher. Christine Lagarde has already hiked once in June and described the decision as robust across all scenarios. If the ECB hikes again, the euro strengthens further. A stronger euro means the dollar Bessent sold to buy yen funded by selling euros become more expensive to replace. It also means European bonds become more attractive relative to American ones pulling capital towards Frankfurt and away from Washington again at precisely the moment Bessent needs that capital flowing in the opposite direction. They’re shooting themselves in the foot again.

The intervention used the euro as fuel. The ECB is about to raise the price of that fuel, basically. And every basis point the ECB adds makes the structural case for holding euros instead of dollars more compelling, which is exactly what the ECB’s own annual report documented this year when it showed euro bond issuance at an all-time high. American companies are borrowing in euros at record scale and the euro behaving as a safe haven during every major crisis since 2025.

Bessent sold euros to buy time. The European Central Bank is about to make that time a lot more expensive. This intervention worked for about 12 hours, which gives this multi-billion dollar global economic maneuver roughly the same shelf life as a fresh pint of draft beer on a very hot summer afternoon, of which we’ve had so many in Europe, haven’t we? On Thursday evening, the yen surged to 157.8 from its 163.9 low. By Friday morning, it had already weakened again, backed above 160. The Bank of Japan held rates steady on Friday, unable to hike further because of 6% yields. Japan’s entire tax revenue would go to servicing its own national debt. The structural problem which is a 400 basis point interest rate gap between the US and Japan remains completely unresolved despite these interventions and every previous intervention has produced a shorter lasting effect than the one before it.

Japan spent $70 billion on intervention in April and May of this year. The yen fell to a new 40-year low anyway. Japan spent $62 billion in 2024. The yen fell to a 38-year low anyway. The interventions buy hours or maybe days, the structural forces by months and years, and the structural forces right now are all pointing in the exact same direction. Japanese money coming home, US yields going up, and Bessent running out of tools to stop this. And here’s the detail that raw story, Forex.com, and several market analysts all noted independently. Bessent’s notepad appeared to be deliberately exposed. There was nothing else written on the page. His name card was positioned directly above it. The photograph was taken during an on-the-record portion of the cabinet meeting, meaning cameras were allowed and expected. Last time a Bessent notepad was photographed during a White House briefing in May, it said resilience written three times. When asked about it the next day by a Daily Mail reporter, Bessent laughed and said, I’m quoting “so people could look over my shoulder, photograph them, and think they got a scoop.” He is telling you how the game is working. In my personal view, it does not appear that the notepad is an accident. It appears to be a signal designed to move markets without the Treasury having to issue a formal statement that would commit it to a specific policy. By telling a photograph capture “buy Japanese yen 5 to 10 billion dollars,” Bessent, in my view, achieved the same market impact as an official announcement while retaining the ability to deny, modify or abandon the position at any time. It is monetary policy by post-it note. We have officially reached the era where global reserve currency dynamics are managed by using the exact same operational strategy as reminding your roommate to buy toilet paper. And the fact that the most powerful financial official in the world is communicating through staged notepad photographs tells us a little bit about how precarious the situation has become, because when you have strong options, you use them. When you have weak options, you perform them. The broader context makes Friday’s intervention even more alarming in my view.

The US has not intervened in the yen market since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. That intervention was a genuine humanitarian and economic emergency. A 9.0 earthquake followed by nuclear meltdown. Unfortunately, that was a horrible time. The G7 all coordinated because Japan’s entire financial system was at risk of collapse. That was the right thing to do at that time. Friday’s intervention happened because yields are too high and the yen is too weak. There is no natural disaster. There is no nuclear accident. Thankfully, there is just a bond market that is slowly repricing the fiscal reality of a country that borrows $2 trillion a year during peace time, that is fighting a war it cannot afford, that has tariffed 60 countries simultaneously, that has alienated every major ally, and whose strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level since 1983.

The emergency that triggered intervention is not external. It is the accumulated consequence of every policy decision this channel has been documenting since February. And the fact that the response is a staged notepad photograph and a $10 billion currency purchase tells you that the Treasury knows the situation is fragile and that the tools available to address it are performative rather than structural. Once again, this is not financial advice and these are just my own personal views. But let me take a shot at what might happen again in the future. My prediction is that the yen intervention probably does not hold beyond the first week of August. The structural interest rate gap between the US and Japan remains in my view too wide for any amount of intervention to close permanently. Japanese institutional selling of US Treasuries will likely resume as the intervention effect fades because the underlying incentive to bring money home has not really structurally changed. The 30-year US yield will likely retest 5.2% before the end of August. Bessent will probably need to intervene again or find another way to signal support before the September Treasury refunding announcement, which will be the largest quarterly borrowing program in American history. The Bank of Japan will likely be forced to hike rates again before the end of the year, not because it wants to, but because the yen will leave it no choice. And that hike will accelerate the carry trade unwind and the Treasury selling that the intervention was designed to prevent. And Europe, whose currency was sold without consultation to fund an intervention designed to protect America’s bond market, will note that the United States used the euro as a tool without asking permission exactly as it uses European data, European airspace, European spectrum, and European regulatory compliance as tools whenever it suits American interests.

The pattern always appears to be the same. The only thing that appears to change is which European asset gets spent without being asked. But while Bessent writes “by Japanese yen” on a notepad at Camp David, Europe is building the euro into the currency the world runs to when things go wrong. I made a separate video analysis on how Amazon and Alphabet are borrowing in euros at record scale. The European Central Bank made euro liquidity permanently available worldwide. And the euro is now appreciating during crisis instead of depreciating. That’s the video that I would watch.” {End}

§

Comment: Japan’s fossil-fuel requirements must be imported, they don’t have their own supply. This is a constant drain on their currency reserves, which have been depleted greatly this year in trying to prop up the yen. With declining currency reserves, they turn to selling bonds - meaning U.S. Treasuries (bonds) to fund their economy. Japan has been America’s largest creditor, propping up the extravagant consumption (and military) of the U.S. So in effect, by selling Treasuries, they are calling in their loans to the U.S.

On one hand, the future of humanity rests in defeating the USrael (US + isra3l) Empire - the bad news is the world’s central banks finding their supposed reserves being a pile of almost worthless paper (Treasuries).

Japan could have had a future as a growing industrial powerhouse, but lacking a cheap energy supply, it is in a bind, as is Europe. Then consider what is supposed to be an intelligent (almost-)country, Canada, selling off its energy supply AT A DISCOUNT, for quick cash to prop up its low-productivity economy. And wanting to build yet another pipeline to ship off a doubling of oil production for export cash. All the easy oil is long gone, leaving Ontario and Alberta as a pin-cushion of abandoned wells. Most oil production now comes from fracking or the environmentally-destructive tar sands, at high production costs, plus the cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains. Contrast these high production costs with Venezuelan Merey 16 crude, which will start arriving Chevron-Mississippi at a delivered price of about US$10/bbl.

These large articles are source files, from interviews by people who were there, digital, searchable files for your reference. This one, plus the Jack Matlock interview and the Dr. Jan Øberg interview, you could save in a folder with a name such as “Reference,” then you can search individual files, or search the whole folder, for whatever your question is. Yes, you could buy Benoît Paré’s books or request them at your library, but unless they have a good index or you keep excellent notes while reading, they are not naturally searchable. Here in this interview, you have a good presentation of him describing the themes of his new book, in digital, searchable form. How to save these files? From the line in your inbox, right-click, select save-as, select file type HTML and save to you folder. Or, for more manageable file size, find this file from my web page a few days after this posting, at https://mccroskey.ca/limitstoprogress.htm

Revealed: EX-OSCE Observer DESTROYS Ukraine War Lies | Benoît Paré | Neutrality Studies | July 27, 2026

Former OSCE observer Benoît Paré returns to discuss his second book, Ukraine: The Great Manipulation. He explains why western mainstream media reporting on Mariupol, Bucha, Kramatorsk, Nord Stream, and the 2022 Istanbul talks left out key facts. Benoît and Pascal discuss war propaganda, calls for independent investigations, and the risks of media narratives driving further escalation.

PASCAL- I’m glad having you again because you actually published a second book. Your first book, of course, is the one that we see to your left, “What I saw in Ukraine,” where you report about your time as an observer for the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], who had to work in various capacities detailing all of the explosions and so on and the breaches of ceasefire that that were evident at the time in the Donbas.

And now you came out with a book called “Ukraine - the Great Manipulation” on the right side behind you in French but it’s also out in English - The Great Manipulation. Benoît tell us a little bit about it. Why did you write a second book and what is the focus of The Great Manipulation?

BENOÎT- Yes, thank you for that introduction. Indeed, after I finished my contract with the OSCE which was at the end of May 2022, I had a chance actually to work as a journalist officially hired by a French online media called France PN used to be a big newspaper back in the ‘50s and ‘60s but know with time it just evolved into a website but you know the name is quite famous in France.

Now so when I started to work for this online newspaper under {absin ?} because I was not willing yet to speak openly because I had not yet made the decision to actually stop any activity linked to my previous life working for governments basically or international organizations.

I proposed to my new boss to make a series of articles about the allegations of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine since the start of what the Russians call the Special Military Operation, right? And what the West calls the “invasion of Ukraine.” And this I worked upon pretty fast during the summer. And the thing is by then I wanted to focus on a series of events starting with the bombing of the maternity in Mariupol, you know, which happened on March 9th 2022.

And then we had the bombing of the theater in Mariupol just like a week later. And furthermore, we had, you know, the big thing, the Bucha events, the so-called Bucha massacre which was a turning point in the war, in the new war in Ukraine. Because we know from then on you know the negotiations that were being held in Istanbul were basically stopped. I will come back to that. And parallel to that there was another hot topic which were the allegations of mass rapes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.

It went somehow parallel to the Bucha narrative and it lasted for months.

And very close to the Bucha event, there was another dramatic event which has more or less been forgotten by now because strangely enough it has been little talked about ever since. It was the bombing of a Kramatorsk train station which occurred on April the 8th, 2022.

And lastly to finish this sequence I actually focused on the so-called mass graves in EU which occurred actually a bit later in September 2022.

Now so this six articles that I wrote are what I consider to be the most important part of my book because it basically constructed the narrative of Russian hate, which was key in convincing the audiences around the world and especially in the west that Russia was a barbaric country guilty of a series of war crimes and with which you could not morally negotiate. Right? So this was built in a way, the narrative was built in a way to prevent any will of negotiation to end the conflict. This is my conclusion.

And beyond these six articles about these allegations of war crimes, I also published other articles on a day-to-day basis about, you know, the events that were unfolding in Ukraine in those days. Some of which you know many people have forgotten even myself. And when I read all these articles for the purpose of the book, I realized oh, it’s true this and this happened as well. I had forgotten about it. And each time actually there were like different stories making headlines about the war in Ukraine. You realize that there’s always the same recipe at work which is always like as soon as something happens maximalist accusations against the Russians systematically [appear] without any investigation being done. And when you start to dig into the matter, then you realize, well, it’s not exactly as what the western or Ukrainian press would describe, you know, you systematically find out, but there is more to it that is carefully hidden from public view. So I was doing systematically this work of offering summarizing [of] the western view of every event and then trying to find out what is the Russian viewpoint about the same events. And for this you had to dig into social networks usually like Telegram or Twitter in those days because in most of the cases the Russian viewpoint was like ignored, right, so you had to search for it. And I thought, you know, if this is a basic work of a journalist or a researcher when anything happened you have to offer different versions of events because you know that in in times of war the first thing that dies is truth. Truth is the first victim of every conflict and I’ve been, you know, working in this field for long enough to know how true this is. I discovered this reality since I was like a young observer in Bosnia {has ?} a governor during just after the civil war there.

Actually, we were more than observers when I was working there. We were like actors. But yeah, I know this reality, you know, I’ve known this reality for the last 30 years. And this reality has been pushed to its extreme logic in the case of a war in Ukraine, which is so obvious to me when you start to work at digging [up] information about it.

And last but not least, I also published at least one article which was one of the most important articles I ever wrote. It was called How Ukraine Became an American Pawn. That was a reference to you know this famous book by Brzeziński the great of the Grand Chessboard which he wrote in 1997 and when you read this book you actually understand the logic the rationale of the American deep state and the long-term objectives they had since in the ‘90s to actually prevent the resumption of any rival power and you know after the fall of the USSR they thought that America was in a position of hegemony that was unrivaled and the priority of the strategic thinkers was to make sure it would stay that way that they wouldn’t have to face at some point a resumption of a rebirth of a Russian hegemony so they had to kill that before it could happen and beyond that the best way in his view to do so was to separate Ukraine from Russia. That was the plan and everything the US administrations did from then on including under the Republicans or under they know of the Democrats the same. It’s always the same logic. It’s the uni-party basically unfolding its own agenda regardless of who is in power.

And so during like the orange revolution for instance in 2004 it was the Bush administration but the goal was to actually control Ukraine. So they supported as much as they could their pro-western candidate Yushchenko at that time who actually whose wife was actually a US diplomat, amazingly, right. So they had the means to control what was going on in Ukraine through the wife of a president. That was so obvious. She had worked for the US government all her life and some even some people say even suspect her having worked for the CIA.

Anyways, that was one of the episodes.

PASCAL- Yeah.

BENOÎT- And then afterwards there was Maidan of course as we know and there was one actor that you see all the time during those years is Victoria Nuland you know she was actually working under the Bush administration and then she worked under the Obama administration and then under the Biden administration and she was the key actually the key person under all US administrations to actually define US policy towards Ukraine, and you know that she’s married to Robert Kagan which she’s a famous neoconservative and know she has an extremist ideology and basically was pushing the agenda as much as she could very successfully, you know, as a matter of fact, so I was explaining all this story about the background of the war in this article how {Meritka} [Viktor?] became a US pawn which so in some ways I was like trying to focus on the day-to-day today news coming from the front showing how much manipulation there was and at the same time I was recalling why they do that. They do that because they have strategic objectives which is to weaken Russia and to separate it from Ukraine. And beyond that the objective was to prevent any rapprochement between Russia and Germany or Russia and the European Union because they knew that the actual cooperation of the two could be a threat to American and Germany. So this has to be prevented at any cost. So the logic of separating Ukraine from Russia ended up also being a logic of separating the European Union from Russia. And this is very obvious notably when you think about the Nord Stream pipeline which you know not only Obama but also President Trump during his first term said that they it was a strategic objective to make sure this pipeline would never work and they managed to achieve that objective. And yet at the same time going back to manipulation they managed to spread the message in the mainstream media that this was actually the Russians who did it which is, you know, incredible and showing you know that they were not afraid of coming up with the narrative. You know we have a saying in French which is the bigger the lie the more people will believe it.

PASCAL- Yeah.

BENOÎT- Which is like, you know, sounds like counterintuitive but reality shows that it is efficient. I even had a former German colleague whom I thought was an intelligent man working with me in Donbas and when we discussed the issue of Nord Stream once he actually believed that it was the Russians who did it and I said well how can you believe that?

Yeah. And he said, “Haven’t you heard about Seymour Hersh investigation?” And he had never heard about it. He didn’t know who Seymour Hersh was. He didn’t know he had made this article on Substack, which basically was a much more convincing scenario to explain what had happened that was basically a secret operation organized by the CIA.

And he had never heard about it. And in the end, he said, “Well, you know what? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because we should not buy gas from Russia, period.” And then I realized that there was another thing he was convinced of. It was that Russians were barbarians. And this goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning of my interview here.

The all these allegations of war crimes against the Russians had an immense impact on people.

He convinced even intelligent people who should have known better that Russians were so barbaric that it should have been impossible for Europeans to trade, even trade with them even if that ended up with the economical suicide of Europe because right now Europe - I mean it still buys gas from Russia in spite of, you know, the narrative and the statements that, you know, Russia is bad and we should not trade with them but European economy still needs gas from Russia. So, you know, behind, I mean not under the spotlight, you know this continues but according to EU sanctions they should stop by next year I think by next year, EU regulation should make it impossible for the EU to buy Russian gas. So by then we would actually feel the full impact if it doesn’t change of the suicidal policy of Europe. And once again this they managed to convince the audience that this sacrifice was necessary, that it was they had no choice because of a moral perspective which was fabricated by lies and manipulations.

Now going back to these events which basically helped to construct the narrative, it started with as I said Mariupol maternity hospital, the thing is since I’ve been working in Mariupol for two years and four months I’m quite familiar with the city and then I could collect some information and some of which was available [in] actually mainstream media at that time. There were two important elements about the maternity hospital story. One was a statement of a woman from Donbas who had actually seen her picture taken by the journalist Ukrainian journalist from {Mosettic?} press. And you know, you see her face with, you know, a bit of blood on her face, you know her hair [is a] bit messy and behind her you see destruction and she became the face of Russian barbarism against the population of Donbas, civilian population of Donbas. Her picture was used around the world in the western press to show how barbaric Russians were. And that woman actually later on basically explained that the maternity hospital where she had just delivered her baby was actually partially occupied by Ukrainian forces which, you know, when you are familiar with humanitarian law actually like I was, because I was trained about it when I was deployed in Ukraine. I was trained about it about it by the ICRC, you know, the International Committee of the Red Cross, a special, actually lessons about it and, you know, normally a hospital or a school is a protected object under humanitarian law. However, when this object becomes occupied by a military force, it loses its status as a protected object. So in this case you can argue that actually from the moment the Ukrainian military started to occupy these premises it became a legitimate target for the Russians, unfortunately.

And now why did the Ukrainian military decided to occupy the premises?

Because in those days, you know, there was no more electricity in the city.

But the hospital had solar panels on the roof which made it a very strategic building to occupy.

Right. So according to that witness they basically, the Ukraine military basically reorganized, you know, everything inside the maternity hospital. They decided to occupy some floors and they relocated the women in a different branch and the husbands also were relocated in a different branch in the basement as I recall. But still they were occupying a part of it.

Now when the bombing occurs, nobody told you that the building was partially occupied by the military. Now then there was another testimony by {U} policeman who was also interviewed by Associated Press in those days and then I did some research and I found further interviews from this guy in different media and he actually explained that when he arrived on the spot there were already soldiers at the maternity hospital and more policemen and he doesn’t explain why they were here, before here, right, and then in a subsequent interview he says that when, actually the Russian military version, foot soldiers actually arrived on location two days later the people who were fighting from inside the maternity hospital were soldiers from Azov, right, so showing that they were again using the premises for military purposes two days afterwards so it’s not difficult to make the links here so it somehow would confirm that they were already there two days before, all right, so it all makes sense. But that part of the story was of course carefully avoided by the mainstream media. They never covered it. And at the in the meantime, the documentary made by the Associated Press became an Oscar winning film that was shown worldwide to show how barbaric Russians were. So this is how it all started. Now, it’s important also to mention that at this stage, I don’t think the Ukrainian side actually wanted to organize a false flag operation. From the elements I gathered, I do believe there was, I mean there there’s a huge crater, like 50 meters away from the maternity hospital. So, something exploded there and most likely it was a real bomb because artillery doesn’t make craters so big, from experience. And I’ve seen so many craters. None of them creates something so big. Anyways, but this I think this gave them some idea. Oh, see how we can use information for our information war against Russia to gather supports in the west. And one week later, about one week later, we had another explosion in the theater. Now I’m very familiar with this theater. I then went there myself to see a concert when I was working there. It was like the nicest building in Mariupol.

It was an iconic building. And it was known that it was used as a place for displaced person requesting before they were evacuated.

Now it made no sense for Russians to destroy this building. Yet we were told to believe that they did so and we were even told to believe that not only they did so but they actually killed, the first figure was given, 300 civilians who had taken refuge inside and second information was 600 and where does that come from? 300 civilian casualties came from the mayor of the city who was exiled in Zaporizhia at that moment. So he had no clue, you know, he just gave a figure, you know, based on his own assessment which was not based on observation. And then the figure of 600 was again given by the same journalist from associated press based on interviews he had made about displaced persons from Mariupol who had arrived in Kiev by then. So he talked to them in {cave} and they told him, oh you know in the building there were, you know, so many people and so he based his evaluation of how many victims there were based on the testimonies by the people and these figures 3,600 were shared worldwide to show look basically Russians the Russian military is killing civilians by the hundreds for no reason just because they want to kill them, right? That was like the narrative that was spread worldwide.

But actually afterwards there was an investigation done by Amnesty International about this and the fact that I wrote four months after the facts actually helped to have a different point of view about what happened because this report by Amnesty International came out as I recall in July three months afterwards and I read it entirely. Now it’s very interesting this reporting for various reasons but it also it has to be said that again they did not have a chance to be on the spot. So they had also to make an evaluation from a distance, again by interviewing people who allegedly were on the spot when the event occurred like Associated Press did.

And according to Amnesty International, even though like they interviewed about 20 people, only a couple of them, two or three mentioned that they heard or saw a Russian jet, fighter jet actually bomb the theater. Only a couple out of the 20 people they interviewed from recollection.

And by then it would be really interesting actually to talk to these witnesses. And back then I was a journalist as I mentioned, officially from, you know, that was not so popular in my days but the name at least you know is famous. So I wrote an email officially with my email address from France because I had one asking whether it would be possible to interview these witnesses of course making sure they would remain anonymous, you know, not betraying their security or whatever it’s kind of thing I would do when I was working for {AC} for instance. You know you are used to that like, you know, it’s very important to respect the ‘do no harm’ principle when you talk to witnesses so, you know, I try to give them, you know, maximum amount of how can I say arguments to show that I would not endanger the witnesses and I never had any answer about that. Now okay, you may wonder they decided not to answer because already the newspaper I was working for had an image of a, you know, conspiracy theorist newspaper because of the line it had followed during the COVID period.

So they may have decided, oh it’s not worth to talk to these people. Who cares? We only talk to mainstream press. That’s one possibility. Or the other possibility is that actually, well that’s the hypothesis I had. Maybe these people lied or they don’t exist, you know, because if we can’t access them, then no, I can have a legitimate doubt about whether these people exist.

So and we haven’t seen their pictures, you know. So are they real?

You know, so you wonder. So I was left in a bit of limbo about this specific issue about whether these testimonies were real. And one month later, something very interesting happened because Amnesty International released another report about the fact that actually the Ukrainian military was occupying schools on a massive scales when it was fighting its war, which as I said earlier, occupying school is supposed to be sort of a war crime, you know, because it’s supposed to be a protected object. But actually they were doing that before during the war in Donbas. We actually, in with the OSCE mission in Ukraine, we were monitoring the situation and I can confirm you there were maybe a dozen schools occupied in those days by mainly by the Ukrainian forces. A couple were occupied also by the separatists but most of them were occupied by the Ukrainian military but you know nobody cared in those days. And now it was Amnesty International revealing it and then this made a scandal in in Ukraine but not only in Ukraine also in the western world because it was the first time that an NGO that a western NGO actually dared to criticize even, you know, in a limit in a limited way the Ukraine military, back then had the status of heroic warriors. And the argument was that how dare you criticize heroic warriors who defend democracy against barbarism. and even the head of Amnesty International in Ukraine actually challenged that report from her own NGO and to the point that she actually resigned publicly and she published a letter of resignation on her Facebook page and according to her all the staff from Amnesty International Ukraine resigned a as a sign of protest not because they challenge the facts but because they say as Ukrainians we cannot accept that our organization criticizes the our military. You cannot accept that because you don’t know what it is to fight for survival or whatever. This is kind of line of defense. But okay, I understand that emotion emotionally it was challenging for them. But it doesn’t mean it was factually wrong. Right? And it showed that when people are too emotionally involved in a conflict, they are not able to have an objective description of what’s going on.

And then I thought, well, who actually interviewed the alleged witnesses about the Mariupol Theater?

Most probably the same people like Amnesty International Ukraine, same people who say that you’re not allowed to report facts that actually put the Ukrainian military under a bad light.

So, and then the idea came to my mind, well, how can we trust these people about what they wrote about the Mariupol theater?

And then this actually, in my view, emphasized the suspicions that I had about whether the witnesses they quoted in their report about the Mariupol theater whether these people were real or not or whether the testimonies were properly actually reported. You know you have legitimate doubt in my view about it and as long as they never answer to my question these doubts remain. And now the other explanation to explain what happened with the theater was that okay, if it’s not the Russians who had absolutely no interest in doing so, again even from a separatist point of view, it would be like you know the French military deciding to bomb the Eiffel Tower when Paris was liberated in 1944 to blame it on the Germans. I mean, why would you bomb the most iconic building in your city just to blame the opponent?

You know, it’s nobody would do such a sacrifice. And anyways, we were told to believe it was the case that the Russians did it when it didn’t make any sense for them. And then we found out talking about the figures that when the prosecutor of the Donetsk People’s Republic actually published their reports about the investigation about the Mariupol theater once they had actually claimed the location they said they found 14 bodies below the rubble and actually 14 bodies is close to the number of civil casualties identified by Amnesty International. Amnesty International will only identify 12 victims. They said there’s probably more, but they only could identify 12 victims. So far away from 300 or 600, right? And Amnesty International explained that that’s one actually honest part in their report. They explained that the building had actually been evacuated two days before massively because by that moment, two days before both Ukrainian and Russians had agreed to open green corridors for that the people could evacuate in massive numbers. So there were only a few dozen people remaining in the building maybe less. And so that’s, you know, just to correct the figures about the facts but nobody in the western press ever from my knowledge ever actually brought up this information put forward by Amnesty International that they could only identify 12 victims. No, we prefer to the people to believe that 600 people died because that actually helps the narrative that Russians are barbarians.

And last point, so if it’s not the Russian, who else? Well, then comes the option of a false flag operation. So, it is the actually the option that the people in the people’s republic of Donetsk think is the most likely explanation. that is the statement for instance of the woman who was in charge of the of the ombudsperson for the people’s republic who actually also saw all the issues with the victims of war, actually confessed that [to] her it is an intimate conviction that this was an operation done by the Ukrainian side and most probably by Azov who was you know as we know occupying many buildings in the city as a start a massive propaganda campaign against the Russians. That’s the story that nobody actually has explained to us which I actually wrote down in details in my book. And this is how the whole propaganda machine started against the Russians, and then next step was Bucha.

Now Bucha is a bit more complex because it’s not a single event.

We’re basically talking about civilian casualties that occurred about over a period of about three weeks, almost a month. People who died under different circumstances in difficult part of the cities and, you know, evidence suggests that some of them at least some of them were probably killed by the Russian military.

Whether that was a war crime or not is subject to discussion. There’s a famous video for instance when you see Russian armored vehicle actually firing at one guy who’s actually just riding a bicycle.

Yeah, and he just happens to appear at the corner and at that moment you know that the Russian military is just like on the very front line and they are probably thinking that everything that moves is a potential threat and in those cases what militaries all around the world tend to do is that when they perceive a potential threat they shoot first. The Americans military does that systematically and I know it for fact because I work with them in Afghanistan. As soon as the US military perceives a threat, they have authorization to shoot before checking whether it’s a legitimate threat or not, you know, and so the Russians did the same, but when the Russians do it, immediately they accuse the war crimes.

Anyways this is complex what happened in Bucha because then there are the events at some point, there’s a video that was like publicized worldwide including by the New York Times are actually pictures of like eight guys, eight men dressed in civilian clothes that are escorted by the Russian military and then it seems that you see the same people shot dead behind the building that we’re told was occupied by the Russian military. So it looks like these people were executed. We’re also told they were actually not only civilians, but they were members of a territorial defense and the territorial defense was a unit actually organized by Ukrainian authorities in the just a few weeks before the start of a special operation. Now, I was familiar with it because I had interviewed [a] Ukrainian colonial who was in charge of this territorial defense organization for the southern region, the five oblasts in the south.

And I interviewed him like one week before the start of the Special Military Operation and I knew how they were operating and he said they were in the process of recruiting hundreds, thousands of people but they had not yet had time to recruit them nor to give them equipment. And then what happened?

We see these people without military clothes. They just had time to give them weapons. So for an invading force they could probably be like an ambiguity as like who are these people dressed with civilian clothes who have weapons.

Anyways, that’s one aspect. Then there are other aspects. I believe most people died because of shelling, artillery shelling and both sides shelled the city, you know, all these armed vehicles that were seen and lined up in the street. This famous video that was seen worldwide showing all the bodies, dead bodies in the street near these actually armed, I mean armed vehicles. These armed vehicles belong to the Russians. It was the Ukrainian military that destroyed them because they were shot heavily. So then you could, you know, imagine that some of the victims may be collateral victims done by Ukrainian shelling but nobody would tell you that right? No. You were told to believe that all the victims are done by the Russians.

And then there are so many stories. I may not be able to cover every single detail about this whole narrative about Bucha because it’s so many different little stories but I’ll try to supply the main events like it was seen. I could check on pictures like at least four people had a warm white armband, civilians whose bodies were in the street and it was known that the warm ornament was a sign of recognition that the Russian military was using. The Ukrainian military was using yellow or blue ornaments because that was the only way for them to differentiate each other because they more or less had the same type of uniform otherwise. And so civilians who would walk around carrying white arm bands would be like a sign that they were friendly to Russian forces and didn’t want to be shot at by them, you know. And then when we see the images spread worldwide again, at least four of them had white armbands. I never saw any comment about that in the mainstream press, but you would only see in the alternative press the idea that this was very strange because it looked like it was pro-Russian people killed. So why would the Russians kill pro-Russian people? You know, doesn’t make sense. There’s even one more story that makes even less sense. There was the only victim identified by name as far as I can tell, during this, among these 400 victims identified by name and whose name was released publicly at least. This was a former member of the Ukrainian parliament living in Bucha who was known to be pro-Russian and actually the Russian side even as I recall published information about the fact that they had less with him and that when before retreating they had proposed him to come with them because they were afraid of reprisals against him and so the Russian side says we proposed him to come with [us] because he cooperated with us openly and most likely he would be in trouble, you know, if he wouldn’t leave and that person was found dead according to the Ukrainian version of events he was killed by the Russian soldiers before they left because they were drugged and then that goes back with the idea now that the narrative constructed against Russian was so like a catholic crunch and so absurd. They said, “Oh, no. Russians, you know, drink all the time.” So, it’s normal that Russian soldiers get drunk and fire anyone at will just because they are drank, including their closest allies. And they try to sell this story to the public. And people who hate Russians, they want to believe it. Of course, you know, Russians are such subhuman people. They would do such things and they wouldn’t look beyond.

But actually this is part of a story so absurd that I haven’t seen it much covered in western press mostly for western, the Ukrainian audience, when I saw this development being used. Anyways what we know which is very important to know about Bucha beyond that, is that on 31st of March that’s a fact the mayor of a city filmed himself in the street with a big smile on his face saying Russian soldiers have left now we are free. and actually from what we know Russians military left on March 30th and based on a decision put taken on March 29th by President Putin which was meant to be a sign of goodwill towards the Ukrainian side in the framework of the negotiations that were being held in Istanbul because in those days this we learned, you know, months afterwards we didn’t know at that {time]. But the negotiations in Istanbul actually had reached a point when the Russians were ready to actually withdraw from all the positions they had taken since the start of a special military operation with the possible exception of Donbas where it was said it would be treated separately and the status of Donbas would be dealt with, you know, years later same as Crimea.

So they tried to avoid like settling once and for all the status of Donbas and Crimea but they said they were ready to withdraw anywhere else in exchange of Ukraine recognizing, I mean making commitment never to join NATO. This was the number one reason why Russia went to war, you know, and every serious person who knows a thing or two about this war knows this fact. It has had been known for decades before that.

Even myself when I was working at the French Ministry of Defense in 2007, I knew that this was a fact that Ukraine joining NATO would be a red line for Moscow and red line in diplomatic language means ready to go to war for [in] 2007. I knew that for a fact. It was written by the French ambassador in Moscow. I read the telegram because of my functions at that time. So I knew this but you know then it was somehow put on the side and ignored as if this never happened and that the attack came out of the blue just because Russia wanted to conquer more territory. Anyways, so accords were almost ready to be signed. was just one piece that they had not agreed upon which was like what the size of a Ukraine military should be and according to what we read afterwards this was supposed to be, this last bit was supposed to be discussed at the level of a president between Zelensky and Putin directly, but otherwise and this was confirmed by the way about, Aristovich and Arakhamya who were both like senior strategic advisers to Zelensky and the head of the servant of the people’s caucus in the Ukrainian parliament which is basic Zelensky’s party, both confirmed that this was the state of negotiations back then so you know it’s not like conspiracy theory or false information to make these claims so in this context because the this promise was so unbelievable even from an outside observers like does really put in minute when he says who are ready to withdraw our forces. So he said, “Okay, well I’m going to show you.” And he decided to withdraw all the forces from the north on Ukraine, not only from Bucha, but all the way back to the border. It’s as a sign of goodwill.

And they use that in my opinion as a way actually to build a narrative against Russia. So what was meant as a goodwill from their side ended being an opportunity to build a narrative showing them as even more barbaric as before, you know, it was like one more layer of accusations after the Mariupol events and this one was meant to be a turning point that’s I believe what happened how it happened as I said March 21st the mayor says Russian troops are gone he doesn’t mention any actually existence of dead bodies in the street.

PASCAL- And if I remember correctly, he was actually in that street, right? That was later claimed where these bodies were laying or he was very near to this place.

BENOÎT- Well, I remember himself filming himself like kind of close up, so I don’t remember exactly where he was. So that would need to be double checked. But I’m not entirely sure about that. So that would need to be checked. Okay.

But anyways, the following day, April 1st, you have officials from the Bucha municipality one of them wearing a uniform who actually mentioned that they actually want people not to go out because there will be clearing operations done by the Ukrainian security forces looking for Ukrainian saboteurs left behind. It’s and initially for my book I had used for the article which I use in the book I had used a video statement that when I checked this video statement was no more available, it was gone. So I made some further research and I found out that the same statement could be found on the Ukrainian online newspaper and even with the name of the two people who spoke on April 1st. So it’s a fact. Ukrainian officials warned that there would be cleaning operations done by Ukrainian security forces from April 1st and then April 2nd you see a video it was published in the evening according to the source, video of a man called actually I forgot his real name but his nickname war name was Botsman. And this Botsman guy according to Ukrainian sources themselves was a neo-Nazi with a criminal background accused of having executed people but somehow never sentenced because he always managed to, you know, escape and all the people around him were basically neo-Nazis following the same ideology, criminals and neo-Nazis and this person filmed, I mean actually published a video from his own. How do you call these cameras that I forgot how they called you know the helmet camera like a body cam I forgot there’s a special brand for it but okay he has a body cam and he published a video from his body cam which basically shows what he sees and you can hear his voice on top of it and you actually recognize that he actually walks in this very street with the destroyed armed vehicles and he doesn’t say anything about dead bodies.

But you hear a voice in the background and this was confirmed by several sources. One of the guys, we assume it’s one of his guys, one of his soldiers who says, “Hey, if we see a guy without who doesn’t wear the blue or yellow armband, do we have permission to shoot?” And he answers is, hell yeah. And okay. And he publishes that probably as a kind of a warning, you know, and probably also to say, okay, well, for people intelligent enough, you know, this is what we did, right? But of course, this video was completely made invisible by Western media. Once I found actually on the alternative media there was a guy who claimed to work for a western intelligence service but he testified anonymously because he said I cannot testify publicly and he mentioned the existence of this video but he said but, you know, I know it exists because I’ve seen it but nobody mentions it so please no report about it but only alternative media did so and I saw the same video so I knew this guy was telling the truth that is the Swiss totally ignored this fact. So this is detailed in my book once again. And actually in the latest edition actually I managed to add the link to the Ukrainian newspaper that announces that there will be a clearing of saboteurs for April 1, lead saboteurs. So of course if I saw somebody with a white armband according to the video we saw they would have shot without asking questions and then these are the bodies you see on the pictures and nobody asked why are they wearing white armbands, right, so this shows the extent of the manipulation and then on the whole story breaks out on April 3rd worldwide with I remember seeing a video shot in this famous street showing all the destroyed vehicles and then bodies littered, you know, across the street.

And there was one French guy, Adrien Bocquet, who claimed of having accompanied the first Ukrainian troops entering Bucha. And according to him, they actually pulled bodies to basically put them in the street according to his statement. But okay, that’s what he says. I have no proof what he says is right, but that’s what he said.

But we have many actual elements of information that allow us to think it’s probably what happened. Now it’s not to say that none of these victims were killed by Russians in the first place, but it’s very hard to tell who killed whom with hindsight and later on there was even a police investigation done by France.

Actually it was a Jean Marie investigation. the French government decided to send French on to investigate, you know, victims in Bucha and the thing is I talked to Eric D a guy who was I would say assassinated even though it was portrayed as suicide but for me it’s an assassination, this guy was assassination afterwards 5 days after he talked to me and he told me. I talked to a senior {Jean Dar} general who told me he was aware of the results of the French investigation in Bucha and he said well, we could not confirm that victims were killed by Russians. There was no way to confirm it. And among other reasons, because many, most victims were killed by shrapnel from artillery and both militaries use this, used the same weapons in those days. You know they use Soviet style weapons. So it was the same model of artillery. So God knows who killed whom in this context and beyond that, a few people were probably executed. I don’t exclude but maybe some might have been executed by Russians but I haven’t seen like hard evidence that it was the case and you can also suspect that others were actually executed by Ukrainians as I mentioned.

Now I’ve seen also another video which came out on April 2nd very recently because when I did a conference about my book in Paris, somebody mentioned that video to me and then I did some research and I found it. That video is about a police unit of the Ukrainian government that also entered Bucha on 2nd of April. And you see them, it’s a seven minutes video still available online.

You see them interview people, several people in the street. I asked one of my friends who is like a Russian and Ukrainian speaker. I ask him, “Can you confirm to me what they say? Are they talking about bodies in the street?” And he said, “No, none of them. They just say irrelevant stuff about where the Russian military was sleeping or where they were based, but that’s it. No mention about people being killed or executed, nothing.” And this was video came out on April 2nd and that police unit called Safari published a video the following day. No mention of dead bodies, no images of dead bodies. So again another very suspicious fact. And last but not least I also followed in those days when I was doing my own research, different accounts on Twitter back then and not only Twitter but what’s the other one? Uh, Telegram of course and I saw actually an account very interesting, done by actually the guy was called Adam Lawson from memory, I guess he’s American and this guy actually made his own investigation about the event collecting everything he could find over a month period about what happened there and he found at some point a picture of two Russian soldiers whose bodies actually lie on a railway track and you see their positions. It’s very characteristic and you recognize military uniform and the picture when it was published the legend below on that was published by Ukrainian journalists as I recall. The legend was that it was bodies of Russian dead soldiers, dead Russian soldiers, right? And then you see a message which was put forward on X by a vice prime minister of Ukraine. I forgot his name because there were so many of them, but it’s in my book and also I made a print of his post and I just also made a print of the original picture of the same two guys so that people can see with their own eyes that it’s the same bodies we’re talking about and you can { } what in the message sent by the Ukrainian vice prime minister what he says is that the bodies that you see in the picture are Ukrainian civilians killed by Russians.

Right? So it’s a complete reversal of accusation and this time we actually know for a fact because we have proof that this is a lie. Okay? For many things we don’t have proof but in this case we have proof that this was a lie and this was meant to demonize the Russians when using the bodies of their own soldiers. Now why did you not recognize them? Maybe I forgot to mention that because the bodies had been burnt. The bodies have been burnt so you couldn’t see that they had any, any form anymore. And if you recall among the images that went worldwide when even then {delean ?} showed up with hundreds of journalists from around the world, they showed at some point a pile of five or six bodies that had been burnt to, you know, just to shock the audience and okay, so once you burn the bodies you know it’s a very convenient way to prevent easy identification of these people. Then you need forensics to identify who it is. And actually the Russian side has always complained that the official results of the identification of the victims have never been made public. Never. And they requested this information to the UN OHR, I believe, and OHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights} said no, we don’t release information, such information to protect the victims. I mean once they are dead how does that protect them, right? So it looks like I mean maybe if names were published you could see actually these people who were dead, many were not like pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian. Well pro-Ukrainian, you could actually maybe guess on which side they were standing and then realized that most probably they were killed by Ukrainian side and not Russian side that this information we will never get because it is withheld, right, so that’s a summary to explain how we have enough information to conclude that this was a huge manipulation what happened in Bucha. Last but not least, the role of the British government on, and I verified this afterwards because I saw a statement from Scott Ritter who is famous, you know, former weapons inspector in Iraq, very critical of US policy now. And in one of his statements on his Telegram channel, he said, “Oh, it is MI6 that organized Bucha.” And I wrote back and I said, “Well, how can you claim that? I mean, do you have evidence?”

And actually his assistant answered me and she said, “Well, just look at the statements from the head of MI6 on that very day.” So I should check and it is very unusual of the head of a big intelligence agency to publish a public statement on the very day such an event occurs when there hasn’t been any time to verify the facts. You know normally an intelligence service worthy of its name is supposed to check facts before spreading propaganda. Well, you could say that now they are more at propaganda agencies than anything else. But ideally, they’re not supposed to do propaganda agencies. They are supposed to check facts to inform their governments about what’s going on, the reality on the ground. And before anybody could check anything, he published a statement accusing the Russians, which actually was a reaction to what his own minister of foreign affairs, Lister at that time (Edward Lister (Lord Udny-Lister), was a senior government adviser and former non-executive director at the Foreign Office), had published. Lister was even more radical, immediately from April 3rd, accusing the Russians of war crimes in Bucha again, just when the bodies had been discovered like two hours before immediately she reacted which is again very unusual and which shows that there was an intent to actually use this information as a way to build a narrative to show how the Russians were barbarians and the British press also on the very day of, the following day, actually was as extreme. The titles I collected in my book were extreme accusing the Russians of being worse than Nazis and so forth which for the British audience speaks a lot because of what happened to Bucha.

Immediately there was a massive maximalist campaign of accusations of massive war crimes against the Russians immediately. This is the proof in my view. But this was all coordinated and organized. There’s no other explanation possible because it all happens on the same day at the same time. And the fact that it was so extreme from the UK actually adds fuel to the idea that they had their own hand in it. Now I haven’t seen hard evidence that it was the case but we have enough evidence of what we can see which basically tells us that this is highly probable that they were involved in organizing this whole thing.

And again we know that a few days later Boris Johnson comes to Kiev to convince Zelensky not to negotiate with the Russians, to give up on the Istanbul Accord. It was April the 9th and what happens just before that? That’s my last point. There was the bombing of the Kramatorsk train station on April the 8th.

As if the Bucha narrative was not enough, they added another layer because from when people say on April 5th maybe Zelensky had not yet decided to stop negotiating with the Russians.

But so then there’s another layer. April 8th, 50 people, civilians are killed by a strike on the Kramatorsk train station on the day there was a massive evocations of civilians which had been publicized and of course the Russians are accused.

But you know, I found like the statement of Denis Pushilin who was and still is the head of the public the Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatists. And he said, well, these people who died are our people. Why would we want to kill our own people? We consider these people to be our own people. Why would we want to kill them? And he says for him it was obviously a manipulation by the Ukrainians to again once more demonize the Russians and the separatists. And you know you have to remember that Kramatorsk was one of the first cities that the separatist occupied in in April of 2014 and they had to withdraw under pressure of the Ukrainian military. But they always had the will to come back because they consider it was theirs. And so it didn’t make any sense from them to shell that place was first thing. But actually Scott actually made the point that this, the missile that was used, a Tochka-U, a missile with sub-munitions right, and the way it works is that when it’s in flight at some point the sub-munitions are released and because of the law of physics they end up going further away than the tail of the missile that stays behind. But he says that when you actually draw a line between the explosive charge the and the tail of a missile, if you draw this line, you can draw it all further back to the origin of fire.

Actually, I did exactly as he suggested and I did that on Google Earth and I found out that the land actually ended up exactly in the middle of the city of Dobropilla which is now on the edge of being conquered by Russian troops. But that’s another story. And it was exactly where from the Ukrainian side shelled the place according to the separatists according to Donetsk People’s Republic. He says it was a Ukrainian unit and they even gave the name of that unit. It was artillery brigade, the only one in the Ukrainian military that had the Tochka-U this this specific missile and they said this unit. They were bas and they did it and the forensic analysis that I did thanks to Scott Ritter demonstrated exactly that it could only have been fired from there and this was totally ignored again by western media.

The only attempts to actually debunk this were pathetic. I mean you know as a journalist, I try to systematically find counterarguments. Okay this is one narrative. What about possible counter arguments I haven’t thought about it? And the only thing I found were really pathetic. Like people imagine that maybe the missile deviated by 90%. It’s like absurd from the law of physics. But that was the only way they could actually connect it to somehow the separatist having fired the missile. So it was observed. But I believe that this story was not too much used in propaganda purposes afterwards because there was for anyone who would dig, there was this major flaw in the narrative which was easy to debunk.

But nobody debunked it in the western press because they were old accomplices in the narrative. We have to convince the audiences both in Ukraine and in the west that Russians are barbarians and we cannot negotiate with them. And on April 9th to finish and conclude Boris Johnson comes to see Zelensky and he convinces him don’t negotiate, at least that’s the information we had, and we will help you to win this war militarily. And now down the line, four years down the line, we have, one knows, maybe millions of people died or were at least wounded, amputated. Both countries are heavily damaged. Ukraine will probably never recover from this disaster.

But you know all was decided in this crucial days between March and April 2022. And this is the story of my second book - how we were conditioned to actually believe that Russians were barbarians and [we] could not morally agree accept negotiations with them.

PASCAL- Thank you very much for this very, very, detailed overview of or summary of something that is described at even more detail in your book. The bottom line also is that this the propaganda war, it is at least as important as the actual shooting war. And you know, the whole time you were telling us this story, it went through my mind that until now it is the Russian side that demands independent UN investigation of all of these events. It’s the Russians that keep saying like we want the data, we want the want reports to be drawn up and we want independent teams going there. Yeah, and it’s the other side that is saying like no, we know what happened. It is known because we already put it all out there. So the this is the reason why we’re in this, in our own our bubble here like discussing what actually happened and what the reasons for this war are so frustrated because these things could be investigated and these things you could… We’ve had that in the past many, many, times you know, how with the war in Georgia 2008 the European Union actually asked the Swiss diplomat {i?} to come up with a { } to go and research what happened she came up with report which actually did put blame on basically all sides but it very importantly uncovered that no the first shots were shot by the Saakashvili government period there’s just no way around that and this is a very important piece of information but that’s what, now 20 years later, it’s not possible anymore, you cannot have independent investigations anymore because they have too much influence over public perception and this great manipulation is going on and it is not a conspiracy theory that there are people who want to do that because they even tell us. So NATO talks about and publishes about cognitive warfare and how important it is to control not only the narrative abroad but also the narrative at home.

They officially do. So that’s the insane part about it. But Benoît, just in closing and maybe not more than two or three, but what do you think is your distilled conclusion of how this war has been fought on the propaganda front, on the manipulation front, and what should we be aware of when we listen again to the news coming out about warfare that the West is conducting?

BENOÎT- Yes, interesting question. Just very briefly reacting to what you just said when I was in Mariupol, you know. I had a chance to meet a senior official from OHR, you know, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which basically is the body that oversaw the investigation in Bucha and he told me back then that he said you can’t imagine how much pressure I have on my own government to actually orient our reports in a sense that suits them in a direction that suits them. So he confessed that to me. So I know how it works and I know that now it must be even worse than before. So these people are under extreme pressure for many of them not to report certain facts that don’t actually feed the mainstream narrative.

That’s a fact. Now going back to your question, well from the western perspective we see that there is no space for any alternative narrative in mainstream media there’s only one speech and there so many people, even in my own family that I see, they just believe it, they still believe that Zelensky is the defender of democracy and human rights against barbaric Russians. I even saw an interview from a famous French actor just before we started this interview which basically said exactly that. And because he’s famous then you know that people take his word for it. So, it’s really hard to fight against that. I’m fighting, trying to fight it, because I care for truth with my own little means and thank God you’re here with others to spread the word. But it’s going to be almost impossible to reverse this trend, I’m afraid. But we have to keep trying to maintain this little light of truth in in this darkness because it cannot lead anywhere good. Now, as for the Russians, I think they probably gave up by now, trying to influence us, as Putin said to Tucker Carlson when Tucker Carlson interviewed him maybe one year or two years ago, he said, “Anyways, we cannot control the western media, you know, we cannot control the narrative.” So, because you’re stronger than us in this field. So, I think they’re not even trying. They just do their own war the way they see fit, and trying to keep their objectives in mind. And the problem is that as we see we have the west and especially Europeans right now who try to escalate in terms of warfare. And that is worrying for the future. Thank God so far President Putin, who I believe is a very rational person, has not taken the bait because it looks like he’s been provoked in so many different ways as if the European says, oh please shell us, please attack one of us so that we can afterwards basically declare a state of war throughout Europe and so that we can impose, you know, draconian laws to control free speech and we will go after these last people who dare to counter the narrative and we we’ll be able to go after them once and for all. If you only attack us, please do so. It seems like they are trying their best to make the Russians lose their temper and bomb some factory somewhere in Germany or go God knows where to protest. Then they would have the chance to go into full war mode which appears to be their objective - not necessarily to win the war, but to have a conflict that they can rely upon to maintain a totalitarian control of the populations. It’s a bit of a 1984 scenario when you think about it.

PASCAL- And you know, you don’t even, you don’t even need to assume that these people are evil.

You just need to assume that they feel very safe. They know that if things go wrong, they always have a job somewhere in New York, right? and that the Atlantic is always going to be the big bridge and that you know you can be Churchill, right and the worst thing ‘s worse you’re Churchill who lost the war and is now a government in exile and it’s very, very, sick but if that’s the mode you’re in then you will, you know, you will try whatever you can in order to finally fight the big fight to be the Churchill, to have the opportunity to rise to the occasion because you live in this place in in this fictional world but you do believe that you are on the good side of history and that fighting the Russians not necessarily winning but fighting them is such an important thing and that’s why the good narrative needs to go out that the right things need to be believed and even if Bucha didn’t happen the way that it was narrated that’s how it should have happened and that’s what should be believed because that’s the good thing and in my view this is how the moral view of the world destroys the world, but you’re absolutely right that we need to work on the actual facts in order to stop this kind of nonsense because it’s also a nonsense of the brain of certain people. The very last word goes to you Benoît. Where should people find you to follow your work?

BENOÎT- Well my books are available on Amazon. I would assume for any country as of now. And that’s basically the only place where the English version is available - Amazon.

PASCAL- Good everybody. I will put the Amazon links to both of Benoît’s books into the description box below and we will certainly have him have back. By the way, if you’re listening to this in French, Benoît is now starting to do interviews in French with knowledgeable people and we put that on the on the French channel. So, please stay tuned for more from Benoît Paré. Benoît, thank you so much for your time today.

{One hour, 12 min}

§

Here is a good video of Russian Permanent Representative at the UNSC, Amb. Nebenzia, explaining to the Security Council the problems and misrepresentations of the western narrative about the Bucha “massacre” and wondering why nobody at the UN will investigate Russia’s concerns. Even the Secretary General, António Guterres, so steeped in western propaganda, will not consider the matter, even though he should be taking each nations concerns seriously, instead of with prejudice.

Iran and Russia have come to realize that there can be no peace with the Collective West. Consequently, the conflicts will be fought out on the battlefield and will last a long time. The international legal order is dead, world peace is dead—it is war. World War. Few people are aware of this.

By Peter Hanseler via ForumGeopolitica.com

The purpose of this article is to highlight the major trends I am currently observing—they are intended to stimulate thought. Please forgive me for having created a bit of a monster, given the sheer variety of aspects to be evaluated.

In addition to numerous conflicts in Africa, two major conflicts are currently raging—one in Europe and one in the Middle East. Both have been carefully planned over decades. The Western narrative is showing cracks among the more discerning people in the West, which is leading Western propaganda to become increasingly aggressive in an attempt to turn public opinion around one more time.

One example of how propaganda in Germany, for instance, has succeeded in completely dumbing people down is a report in the “Bild” newspaper on July 13 titled “Putin Is Running Out of Gas—Russians Are Paying Almost 4 Euros for a Liter of Gas.”

Bild-Zeitung, 13.7.2026

And this is despite the fact that the actual prices are clearly visible in the image: for example, 73.11 rubles (0.82 EUR). On July 29, the average price for 95-octane gasoline in Russia was 71.83 rubles (0.79 EUR).

On the other hand, important news stories are being suppressed, such as China’s imposition of sanctions on 14 European companies (Lafert S.p.A., Rheinmetall AG, Tatra Trucks, Vigo Photonics, Cavok UAS, Antraco Chemie-Handelsgesellschaft, and Sindlhauser Materials, among others). These are defense companies or defense contractors. This news is significant and will severely hinder Germany’s military buildup.

These two completely different examples illustrate the nature of the Western media—they convey to their audiences the impression that in the West, “things are going well” and that the enemies are on the verge of collapse. This has an effect: When you talk to people in Europe, the summer heat and the World Cup seem to be the most important things in life. For decades, I’ve wondered how it was possible that the affected populations didn’t notice the looming catastrophes of 1914 and 1939; current events are giving me a glimpse into history with a clarity I’ve never seen before. The media serve to keep people “entertained,” nothing more. The pitch-black clouds gathering over Europe, however, are very real, and the destabilization is evident.

Destabilizing Factors

The Disintegration of the World Due to Many Influences

The catastrophe we are currently facing is the result of numerous factors and influences that very few people recognize for what they are: catalysts for the disintegration of the world as we have known it until now. For some time now, a sense of being overwhelmed has been spreading among analysts. I feel it every day, because the destabilizing factors are numerous and interact with one another.

In addition, Western parties understandably only bring up and highlight those factors that make their position appear stronger. Furthermore, they are acting against one another, meaning they are increasingly pitted against each other in a power struggle. Please forgive me, then, for not being able to cover and describe all—not even all the important—factors and influences.

The Donald Trump Factor

The world champion of distorted reality is apparently Donald Trump, who has already used this strategy to survive several bankruptcies at the expense of his investors, the turmoil of his first term in office, and the Epstein scandal. In his current term, he is pursuing a devastating economic policy with the sole aim of making the richest 1% of the population even richer. To that end, he has instigated numerous wars. That does not, however, prevent him from presenting himself as a peacemaker and friend of the world.

However, it would be a mistake to blame all the prevailing chaos solely on Trump. Rather, after Joe Biden, he had a historic opportunity to get many things right and take some pressure off the geopolitical pressure cooker. He squandered this opportunity because he believed he could once again turn the tide in favor of the US as a hegemon by creating chaos. On top of that, American presidents have little influence over US foreign policy. We have described this fact on several occasions, including with reference to Noam Chomsky, most recently in “War Without Peace—The US Strategy Has Little to Do with Trump,” in the section “American Presidents as Extras—Trump Is No Exception.” Ultimately, Trump is nothing more than a puppet. And as such, given his character and his many skeletons in the closet, he is easily controlled and molded. His counterparts in Europe are no different in this regard.

The Diplomacy Factor

In June 2025, I wrote the article “Diplomacy on Its Deathbed—From Peace President to Warmonger.” What I feared over a year ago has come to pass. In the meantime, the US has invaded Iran for the third time—in June 2025 and in February 2026, jointly with Israel during breaks in diplomatic negotiations—a breach of diplomatic convention of incalculable consequences—and now for the third time this summer. Mind you, this came after the signing of an MOU—a Memorandum of Understanding—that was supposed to serve as the framework for peace; see also “Iran Defeats the US—Reflections.” Israel, as the driving force alongside the US, will only regain diplomatic value once it ceases to exist in its current form; there is nothing more to say about these genocidal psychopaths.

“This means that diplomacy in the Gulf and in Europe is no longer on its deathbed, but has gently passed away.”

Furthermore, the US does not seem to have the slightest interest in reaching an agreement between Russia and Europe. After it seemed in August 2025 that Trump and Putin had reached a “spirit”—a basic understanding between the parties in Anchorage, Trump is now doing everything in his power to fuel a direct war against Russia. His support for Ukraine, which includes providing satellite data to enable attacks on civilian targets deep within Russia, is no longer covert but overt.

Europe, for its part, consists of a dictatorship run by two blondes in Brussels who harbor a pathological hatred of Russia and openly support Israel’s genocide; a pocket-sized Hitler in Berlin who wants to rearm Germany, even though only 0.17% of the population surveyed is willing to perform military service; a battered husband with a French-style “Greater Empire” complex; and the City of London, which has been dreaming of Russia’s downfall for centuries.

Diplomatic channels appear to have been exhausted. Even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, one of the most capable diplomats the world has ever produced, currently sees no possibility for a productive dialogue.

RUSSIA “WILL NO LONGER BELIEVE THE WEST THAT IT WANTS NEGOTIATED SOLUTIONS” BECAUSE “THIS RESERVE OF GOODWILL AND HOPE HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED ENTIRELY.”

Sergei Lawrow, 9. Juli 2026

This means that diplomacy in the Gulf and in Europe is no longer on its deathbed, but has gently passed away.

Financial Markets Factor

I have to admit that—so far—I’ve been wrong about the collapse of the financial markets. My timing is terrible, but that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t getting more dangerous every day. The stock markets are now driven by just a handful of stocks. The five largest U.S. technology companies alone have a combined market capitalization of 17.6 trillion U.S. dollars, which exceeds the combined GDP of Japan, India, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy (17.1 trillion U.S. dollars). It’s madness. Global debt stood at 164 trillion U.S. dollars in 2008 and was identified as the root cause of the financial crisis. Efforts were made to address this problem, but not very successfully: Today, debt stands at 363 trillion U.S. dollars, meaning it has doubled rather than been halved. After all, market valuations—for stocks, bonds, and commodities—are based on the premise that peace prevails; a glance at the world suggests otherwise. In the entire history of financial markets, there has never been so much hot air in the system—a system driven by greed and the stupidity that comes with it. One example that illustrates just how far market valuations are out of step with reality is the published futures prices in the oil sector. The actual prices that must be paid on the spot market are between 20% and 30% higher than the quoted prices would suggest. Trump, who signed the MOU in Versailles, even pointed this out himself, saying, “[…] We’ll run out of reserves in about four weeks”, only to break this agreement a few weeks later and attack Iran again. Things have been quiet again for a few days; the Americans have suspended the attacks once more, again out of fear of an oil shock.

Stanley Druckenmiller said as early as 2018 that the expected collapse would be more catastrophic than the one in 2008. The situation in the Strait of Hormuz—compounded now by the closure of Bab al-Mandab, which—nomen est omen—means “Gate of Tears” in Arabic—could thus be the trigger for the next financial crisis.

The Factor of War Crimes and Genocide

War crimes have always existed—as have acts of genocide. What distinguishes today’s situation from those of the past is the fact that war crimes and genocide are committed in full view of the public, hushed up, and thus tacitly accepted and supported—by both politicians and the mainstream media. As a Swiss citizen, I’m cleaning up my own backyard and have demonstrated on several occasions that the weekly magazine “Weltwoche” ranks first in Switzerland when it comes to promoting genocide. This completely uncritical pro-Israel stance cost the magazine many subscriptions. With its current focus on Russia, featuring numerous interviews, it is attempting to make up for these losses.

Unlike in 1945, the people affected—and the general public as well—will not be able to claim they knew nothing about it. Here is a website dedicated to documenting the genocide in Gaza through images. Anyone who claims the genocide isn’t happening should take a look at it:

https://archivegenocide.com/; sleepless nights are guaranteed.

“STOP CALLING EVERYTHING GENOCIDE.”

Roger Köppel, Dezember 2025

Of course, the West claims that the Russians and Iranians committed war crimes. Bucha was not the West’s only propaganda tool.

However, the timing of the events in Bucha suggests that these crimes were not committed by the Russians. Scott Ritter has published several articles on the subject: “The truth about Bucha is out there, but perhaps too inconvenient to be discovered”; “Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech”; “Bucha, Revisited”.

Another propaganda blunder in this regard was the shelling of a public square in the center of Kramatorsk, which was under Ukrainian control at the time. Ukraine’s responsibility for the attack was proven beyond a doubt by the serial number of the missile used.

The West’s war crimes are countless: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank (genocide); Iran, Kursk, and countless civilian targets in Russia. The list is endless. On top of that, every Russian death is celebrated in the Western media—even the deaths of children, women, and the elderly.

How are people reacting to this unspeakable attitude on the part of politicians and the media? They look the other way—most likely so as not to disturb their own inner peace. This is a phenomenon that could already be observed in Germany 90 years ago. Smartphones, however, are available everywhere, so these crimes are being meticulously documented. The day will come when people in the West will be confronted with the question: Why did you remain silent—just as you did back then? This will have catastrophic consequences for the societies affected, all of which are located in the West.

Is World War III already here?

In the following, I will provide an overview of the course of the war worldwide.

If one assesses the parties based on facts and objectively, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker, 41 countries are at war with Russia or are supporting the fight against Russia in various ways, including Switzerland. Parties involved in the war against Russia include, among others: Ukraine (as a platform), the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Cyprus, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the US.

In the Middle East, the following 11 countries are involved in the war: Israel, the US, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Syria, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

War is currently being waged in the following African countries: Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, and Libya—for a total of 13 countries.

Countries on four continents are involved: 64 countries from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. However, the countries listed above should be considered merely as a rough guide to illustrate the scope of the problem.

It cannot be ruled out that Central and South America might also be drawn into this. On the one hand, the US speaks of the fight against drug cartels on Mexican territory; on the other hand, the Brazilian president stated a few days ago that he considers a U.S. invasion of his country a possibility; added to this are Trump’s intentions to occupy Cuba.

By way of comparison: By the end of 1944, between 45 and 50 countries were involved in World War II; in the final days of the war, that number rose to 61 countries.

I am aware that this list contains inaccuracies and that the involvement of certain countries is open to debate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that World War III is a reality, if one takes the participating countries as a benchmark.

What is evident even to the untrained eye is that NATO member states are involved in virtually all of the conflicts listed. Could it be that the vast majority—perhaps even all—of these conflicts would not exist at all without Western hegemonic policies?Konsequenz: Die Konflikte werden bis zum bitteren Ende ausgefochten

No More Negotiations

In my last article, I quoted statements by President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov: Unlike the Americans and Europeans, the Russians don’t play with words. When they say trust is gone for good, then it’s gone. Following the 2+4 Agreement, Minsk 1 and 2, Istanbul 2022, and the Anchorage format, the Russians are aware that unilaterally preparing a contractual solution would be a complete waste of time. The Russian leadership will, of course, continue to speak with the other parties, but this will amount to nothing more than a diplomatic courtesy.

The Germans are particularly “close to the hearts” of the Russians. The last time, German madness cost the Russians 27 million lives—well over 50% of whom were civilians—slaughtered like cattle, as the Germans sought to “wipe the slate clean” for the Aryans through the General Plan East. René Zittlau has substantiated with facts in “The Manifestation of a Political and Intellectual-Moral Regression” that Friedrich Merz is in no way inferior to Adolf Hitler when it comes to communication and rearmament. The intentions of the two Russophobic, hate-filled blondes in Brussels—endowed with dictatorial power—are obvious, not only against Russia but also against their own people.

The situation is exactly the same with Iran, which is treated as an aggressor by the US and Israel. We are now in the third war, each one instigated by Trump and Netanyahu. The question of whether Trump is controlled by Netanyahu or whether the US controls Israel is a purely academic, American one. The fact is that since 2023, these two countries have jointly committed genocide in Gaza and have attacked Syria, Lebanon, and Iran three times. The latest attack, in violation of the MOU, has made it clear to the Iranians that negotiations are pointless, because any agreement will be broken by the US.

Ukraine

Escalation of the War in Ukraine

Since no agreement can be reached and Russia will finally bring about a lasting solution to the problem on its western border after many wars over the course of centuries, we can expect that Russia will not limit its military control to the four regions that, along with Crimea, already belong to Russia. I expect that the Russian leadership will take over all or a large part of Russian-speaking Ukraine and then let the people decide.

However, that does not necessarily mean that the people in all these Russian-speaking regions want to be part of Russia. Time will tell.

Source: Forum Geopolitica

It is entirely possible that, in this scenario, Poland, Romania, and Hungary will reclaim their former territories. All of these territorial decisions will certainly not be made without Russia’s involvement.

I created the map below based on the current linguistic situation. It is a greatly simplified representation of the nationalities in Ukraine.

Source: Forum Geopolitica

The following map, which shows the ethnic composition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918, serves to illustrate this complexity. The area colored yellow on the map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire roughly corresponds to the western part of present-day Ukraine. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed primarily due to ethnic problems that had become unmanageable. This indicates that a solution for lasting peace in the future can only be achieved by taking ethnic issues into account.

Source: https://kuk-xiv-korps.org/k-u-k-monarchie/

A Complete Change in the Conduct of War

Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, more than twice the size of Germany. The days of massive tank columns advancing 30 kilometers or more per day are definitively over. Just as military technology underwent a complete revolution during the last two major wars, we are now witnessing a total realignment. I am no military expert, but I follow the frontline reports daily and see that, despite their great superiority, the Russian forces can deploy only small groups, and progress is therefore slow but steady. In addition, the Russians are now facing the last major fortifications (Kramatorsk, Slavyansk). Beyond that, there appear to be no major obstacles left on the way to Kyiv, but the terrain is completely flat and offers no cover to either side. It’s hard to say how much longer this war will last, but it could go on for years.

The “experts” in the West either seem to have been caught off guard by the new realities of warfare or are lying to their audience when they interpret the pace of today’s land warfare as a weakness of the Russian armed forces.

Anyone who thinks that the Russians ultimately lack the stamina to achieve their war aims should consult the history books. At the start of the war in 1941, the Soviet Union was in a much weaker position than Russia was in 2022, yet it stood in Berlin in 1945, despite astronomical losses. The Russian leadership has so far pursued a military strategy aimed at minimizing losses on the Russian side, which has resulted in a loss ratio between Russia and Ukraine of up to approximately 1:10.

“A Bolder Approach”

In a speech to the Duma on July 27, 2026, President Putin hinted that the Russian military’s approach in Ukraine would become more assertive. He chose his words carefully and received loud applause for the suggestion:

“OF COURSE I’LL LET YOU IN ON A SECRET—MY COLLEAGUE WON’T HOLD IT AGAINST ME. DURING THE AWARDS CEREMONY, ONE OF THE WINNERS WHISPERED TO ME: ‘WE WILL PREVAIL. BUT WE NEED TO BE BOLDER. I REALLY, REALLY WANT THAT.’ BUT THAT RAISES THE QUESTION: “EVEN BRAVER?” AND JUST AS IN THE BUSINESS WORLD, THIS TOO CARRIES RISKS, THE COST OF WHICH IS LOSSES ON OUR SIDE ON THE BATTLEFIELD. THAT IS WHY WE WILL PROCEED CAUTIOUSLY HERE AS WELL, BUT WE WILL PERSISTENTLY AND CONSISTENTLY PURSUE THE GOALS SET FOR OUR COUNTRY. AND WE WILL ACHIEVE THEM.”

PRESIDENT PUTIN, JULY 27, 2026

His words are being extensively discussed and interpreted in the Russian media; the public appears to approve of this approach.

An Army Chief Is Replaced by a Psychopath—Reminiscent of Himmler

Zelensky dismissed Army Chief Sirsky and appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi as the new Army Chief on July 21, 2026. In keeping with the standard of the Ukrainian leadership, Drapatyi made the following remarks about Russia:

“BY AND LARGE, THIS IS A NATION WHOSE LEADERSHIP HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST. ‘FOR MILLENNIA, THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING CIVILIZED THERE—NEITHER IN ITS MENTALITY NOR IN ITS IMPERIAL AMBITIONS.’”

Mykhailo Drapatyi, July 22, 2026

These are Nazi statements without parallel, and history is repeating itself once again: Immediately after the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, Hitler dismissed General Friedrich Fromm and appointed Himmler as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer). This gave Himmler control over military training, the reserve troops, and some two million soldiers within Germany. Later, around January 25, 1945, Hitler appointed Himmler commander of the newly created Army Group Vistula, whose mission was to halt the Soviet advance on Berlin. Himmler had virtually no experience in commanding conventional armies and was replaced by General Gotthard Heinrici on March 20, 1945.

Himmler was a prime example of a genocidal psychopath and was unsuccessful in his role as army commander. History now seems to be repeating itself in Ukraine, suggesting that the West’s narrative is crumbling in tandem with the Ukrainian front. The change in army leadership is a clear indication of the hopeless military situation Ukraine finds itself in—just as it was back then.

Europe’s Attacks Deep Inside Russia

Europe’s attacks deep inside Russia continue. The Russian government rightly describes these as terrorist attacks, which, while causing civilian casualties, have little impact on the advance of Russian troops in Ukraine. President Putin has so far refrained from responding militarily against Europe, even though he would be justified in doing so. I addressed this in my latest article, “Europe is Teetering on the Brink” Since then, I have not observed any change in President Putin’s policy. In one of his recent appearances on Judge Napolitano, Gilbert Doctorow called for a Russian attack on Europe, arguing that otherwise Russia would lose the war. Doctorow offers no justification whatsoever for why Russia would lose the war in such a scenario. Europe’s open warfare against Russia—which violates every principle of international law—aims to provoke Russia into an attack, just as it did in 2014 and 2022. President Putin has not fallen for such a ploy—at least not yet. Doctorow either fails to recognize this or is playing an unworthy game.

War with Iran

Alongside Russia, Iran is the country most underestimated by the West. With their hypersonic missiles, the Persians are superior to the Israelis and Americans not only in terms of military technology but also mental strength. The American people are divided, and the majority does not support a war against Iran. Various polls show that a clear majority of Americans do not support the war. Recent nationwide polls suggest that only about one-third of the population supports U.S. military action, while about half to two-thirds oppose it (sources: Washington Post, Silver Bulletin, Barron’s); according to the gold standard of US polling, Gallup, only 34% of the US population supports military action against Iran. This poll is dated June 15, and I assume that following the breach of the MOU and the deterioration of the situation in the energy sector—higher gasoline and diesel prices in the US—support has fallen even further.

The Iranians are united; a clear indication that the people stand behind the government was evident simply from the fact that over 15 million people—some sources put the figure as high as 40 million—attended the funeral ceremonies for the assassinated former leader Khamenei. Western propaganda claiming that the government’s support is weak has collapsed. Following Trump’s breach of the MOU, the Iranians are currently unwilling to negotiate. And why should they, with a counterpart that does not honor agreements?

The Americans are facing a huge dilemma. According to Larry Johnson, the Americans are running out not only of air defense missiles but also of offensive ammunition. On top of that, the oil and gas situation has worsened further due to the Houthis’ blockade of Bab al-Mandab. A ground invasion by the US is nothing but Trump’s empty rhetoric and would end in a bloodbath for the Americans. That is likely also the reason why the Americans have halted their attacks against Iran for the past few days. The Saudis provoked a new war with the Houthis a few days ago, and following the blockade of Bab al-Mandab, the oil giant’s oil infrastructure is now being targeted.

The Americans have also failed to succeed in their third attempt—following those in June 2025 and February 2026—in any way whatsoever; they have lost the war, and the prestige of the world’s strongest military has vanished. Furthermore, they have shown the world that they are worthless as negotiating and treaty partners. This will have colossal, long-lasting consequences for the US.

There is reason to fear that the US, Europe, and Africa will face catastrophic energy crises, and that we must expect famines in Africa by next year at the latest. Furthermore, the semiconductor industry will suffer. In addition to the many deaths in Africa, inflation will run rampant in the West—thanks to the US.

Long-Term Effects

Military Consequences

Russia will have no choice but to occupy most of Ukraine in order to permanently resolve the problem on its western border. No one knows how long this will last. Europe and the United States will do everything in their power to prevent this, and it remains to be seen if and when President Putin will conclude that he can only achieve his goal by striking the NATO countries themselves. Given the new realities on the battlefield, which is dominated by drones, it’s reasonable to assume that the pace of the Russian advance will only accelerate once the Ukrainian armed forces collapse. I currently rule out the involvement of official European troops on Ukrainian soil.

There will be no peace in the Middle East as long as Iran’s demands are not met. But Israel will resist this. It is conceivable that, as a result, the State of Israel will not survive in its current form, because Israel in its current form is incapable of peace. It is also conceivable that many countries will enter into bilateral agreements with Iran and the Houthis to alleviate their catastrophic energy crisis.

The Americans and the Israelis have thus succeeded in making Iran the greatest geopolitical power in the Middle East.

Economic Consequences

It is only a matter of time before Western financial markets collapse; the additional pressures from the Middle East could very well be the trigger. It may take five, ten, or more years for stability to return. This is because Western central banks will reliably resort to their “panacea” and keep printing money until fiat currencies collapse completely. History shows that such economic catastrophes lead to military aggression. Since we can already justifiably speak of a world war today, one can only guess what will happen: Perhaps the breakup of the EU and a war within Europe, or a civil war in the US?—Anything is possible.

It is important to realize that these wars, which for now are directed against Russia and Iran, will ultimately target China. The military conflicts in Africa are nothing more than battles between the former colonial powers—which have been exploiting this rich continent for centuries—and the Chinese, who have been investing in Africa for decades. The Chinese are aware of this and have been preparing militarily—for decades.

War Crimes Tribunals Will Be Established

The war will end, and the criminals will not prevail. Humanity will prevail, and that is a good thing. After World War II, various war crimes tribunals were held, the most famous of which took place in Nuremberg. This was nothing more than a publicity stunt designed to make the oppressed peoples believe that the guilty were being brought to justice. A handful ended up on the gallows; most got off scot-free. See my article from November 2023, “The Unpunished Crimes of the Holocaust.”

Donald Trump, for example, demonstrated just a few days ago that he is well aware of his war crimes. When asked by a New York Times reporter, “You’re talking about blowing up civilian power plants and bridges. Much of the civilized world would consider that a war crime. Do you?”, Trump replied that he would not comment on the matter.

His instincts—or perhaps his lawyers and advisors—seem to be mentally preparing themselves for difficult times ahead.

The number and severity of today’s war crimes and genocides are also unique in human history because the body of evidence will be overwhelming. There are millions of videos and photos that have been recorded by millions of people using their smartphones and posted online—the internet never forgets anything.

I assume that war crimes tribunals will be held in the future in a wide variety of locations—likely at the scenes of the crimes themselves: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Tehran, Moscow, Kyiv, Kursk, etc. Professor Mearsheimer said a few days ago that both Netanyahu and Trump would be hanging from the gallows if their conduct were judged according to the Nuremberg Principles. The ladies and gentlemen of the Western media should start making escape plans soon. Even in Nuremberg, they were not spared.

Conclusion

World War is here, economic collapse is coming, and humanity faces a long and horrific period of suffering.

Original post on SONAR21: https://sonar21.com/the-summer-when-peace-died/-This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License

Dr. Jan Øberg is a Swedish peace and conflict researcher, author, and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. Follow Jan’s work: Substack:

TFF • Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg

For a global future that respects the UN norm that peace shall be established by peaceful means. Research-based public education and policy proposals continuously since 1986

By TFF Transnational Foundation

Here is a transcript of this interview:

JAN- Well, I chose a perspective that has not been discussed as part of this rearmament in Europe, which comes as a very unfortunate consequence of the stupid NATO expansion that was responded to in an contra-productive way by Russia invading Ukraine and both parties being happy to use the Ukrainian people for their battle. And that perspective was the economic one.

I was motivated by the fact that you’ve heard secretary generals of NATO, you’ve heard the Danish prime minister, you’ve had a lot of European leaders say that it’s one way to get the wheels running in the European economy, is to invest in the military and switch to a war economy. There’s all, I mean it’s not, I don’t think, the term war economy, has been put into any official document, but that’s what they do from a civilian peacetime economy to converting it to a military, basically like the military should be uplifting the rest of the economy and then I was reminded of the fact that in the ‘70s and ‘80s we were a number of peace researchers and economists who worked with the issue of what was at that time called conversion and that was the idea could you convert the military industry to civilian industry and get a beneficial effect of that. For instance there was the Swedish diplomat or disarmament minister Inga’s big study in the United Nations of this and I sat at the time at the Danish government’s security and disarmament commission and the whole thing about what is the relationship between military investments and civilian investments is something that we should discuss now because I can tell you now at that time and today there does not exist any study, any piece of research, any book, any dissertation that proves that you get more beneficial effects of military investments than you do from similar civilian investments in the economy. So if you want to waste money, go for the military. If you want to waste and get less employment effects, innovative effects, spillovers to the civilian sector, worse hospitals, less cultural life, less welfare for the people, keep on militarizing your economy. It’s there is nobody who has proved the opposite of what I just said.

Interestingly enough, those who say this today are not research institutes. We are the only one here in Sweden, not in the only one in Sweden, we the only one in Europe who have published this analysis saying these things.

No other research institute have done it. Not CRI, not PO, not the other peace research, not those you would expect knowing about economy and military and beneficial or non-beneficial effects of it. It’s the banks and the bank studies you will find if I remember correctly the one is from the Danish National Bank and I think the European Bank too are clearly saying that there are less effects from military investments than there would be from comparable equally large civilian investments. So if you want to, I mean Europe is in deep economic crisis.

Germany is falling apart as everybody knows. Volkswagen is probably going to be taken over by China. You have written you’ve given a lecture in your own program which is excellent about these things which I was happy to repost. Everybody knows that we are in crisis and there are competitors such as China and Russia to a certain extent and the US is giving us all these kinds of problems with Trump and tariffs and God knows what. We’re now choosing European leaders are now choosing something that they must know if they are not ignorant beyond permissible will make the economy less growth oriented, less welfare oriented, less innovative in the civilian sector. And therefore I call the subtitle of my article “are they ignorant or do they lie deliberately” because they cannot, all these leaders, basically everybody has said it, is that state leaders they cannot not know from their experts if they lose any from their banks etc.

They cannot be ignorant about the fact that I’ve just told you there is no study that proves that what they say is true and there has not been one earlier either. So long story short, this is a catastrophic development. And I would like this program and others to begin to discuss why are we ruining the welfare?

Why are we making life a hell for our children and grandchildren by militarizing which one, will not solve the security problems with Russia? And two, will only make us ourselves go down and become you know a peripheral area of the world’s future because nobody’s going to listen to Europe if we’re going to be in an, you know, a stone-age economy that wasted all this money on armament.

So that’s a long answer to your question.

LENA- Right. And you mentioned Germany. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Germany’s factory and industrial investments are being driven by this massive corporate pledge under the made for Germany initiative, which now commits over 800 billion - 800 billion euros through I believe 2028 to spend on military infrastructure and on heavy government infrastructure spending as well. So they’re effectively building roads that would possibly be used for military equipment which I believe now is not structured or designed for military transportation vehicles. So and this particular program consists of 139 firms across the country across Germany. It includes Deutsche Bank and Siemens and other major enterprises. So it does appear that virtually every big business, every CEO is on board with the strategy to militarize and to cut social spending despite an average person, you know, struggling to make ends meet.

JAN- Yeah. That has to do with the fact that if you present it like if we do not do any other investments and we don’t have a long range plan for the civilian infrastructure development of Europe then it is true that if you compare with making no other investments then of course it’s better to invest in the military because it does give some employment. The problem, and I didn’t make that clear in what I said, is that it gives much less employment and much less welfare benefits than in investment in civilian companies, investments in infrastructure, investments in education health etc., and culture. So if of course, if somebody comes to a big company and it’s a CEO and says well we give you billions of contracts if you produce this and that weapon system or parts for it etc. Yeah, of course that will be seen as positive. What I’m talking about is the spin-off effects or the multiplier effects into civilian society and that’s where the lying comes in. This is much less effective as an investment for citizens lives in the future than civilian investments of the same size would be. And that has to do with the fact maybe and we should explain this to make it more clear for people who may not have thought of these things before. First of all, this is a monopsonistic market. It’s a difficult word, monopsonistic market. It means that there’s only one buyer and that’s the state for the weapon systems and that’s why weapon systems can increase any percentage, hundreds of percentages, from they are planned and bought and contracts are written with governments till they are finally there. Take the F-35 for instance - way more expensive, the world’s history’s most expensive project. The other thing is there’s something called opportunity costs. Whenever you spend $100 on a tank, you cannot spend that $100 on welfare or health or infrastructure.

And there’s something called, what would you call that? You probably call it passive or negative capital in this because a weapon system, take a plane, a fighter plane will first of all take more hours to maintain on the ground than it will be in the air. Secondly, most of the time it will be standing on the ground unless you expect it’s functioning in a in a full-scale war and that means it just costs money every day and does nothing useful for the economy and for the civilian development and innovation. Then comes this argument that well, there will be a lot of research and development of new weapons and sometimes that they spin off, you know, positive effects for civilian society such as back in time we would not have had transistors or we would not have had hearing devices or something like that.

Hearing aids - if we had not had the military, excuse me, how stupid do people think we are. If you want hearing aids or you need a new type of technology or something, you go straight and do research on getting that and finding ways to get that. You don’t sit and wait, you know, for decades until perhaps research on a military system will spin off something that could produce the product you need in civil society. I mean, this is bizarre. But the fact is you don’t have media who have the competence to discuss this. As I said, no single research institute in Europe has investigated these things. And I can understand why. I can understand why, but it’s immoral, if you will. And third, it’s not a public discussion.

People believe that, oh, that’s what we must invest because then they protect us and then there will be no war. Excuse me. Think of the trillions of dollars that have been poured into NATO since ‘49 for the three words of the NATO mantra: stability, security, and peace. And where are we today? We’re at the closest distance to warfare. I’m not an alarmist. I’m not a doomsayer. Don’t get me wrong, but the discussion about warfare is now more rampant than it has been for decades.

While NATO was promising us that if we made these investments and paid the price also in civil society, we would avoid war and we will have a peaceful world. There must be somebody who wakes up at some point and say this is all BS.

We know it doesn’t work that way and the economies don’t work that way. The military doesn’t create security or peace because as the saying goes and I’ve said it before, if weapons could create peace we would have at peace a long time ago. It takes something completely different to create peace and certainly investments in the military is now first of all not only making military security and tension bigger.

It is also ravaging and ruining our civilian societies. It’s a double idiocy and that comes on top of the fact that NATO still has a military expenditures which combined are at least 10 times higher than Russia’s. Now do not tell me that somebody who has 10 horses starts a war against somebody who has 100 horses and believes that hello, hello, everything is going to go fine.

It doesn’t it doesn’t make sense.

There’s nothing that is formally set in this sector of European politics that makes any sense. It’s for lunatics or people who can’t think. I’m sorry to be this determined, the words I use. But I spent 50 years understanding these issues and I don’t see any logics anymore. We have stripped the world, the European world from diplomacy. We have stripped it from contacts, confidence building measures, trying the least to understand what the Russians are about whereas the Russians are studying us research wise and otherwise.

And we see enemies everywhere. China is an enemy. Russia is an enemy. Iran is an enemy. And we must, I mean, this is hysteric. And who’s paying the price?

The taxpayers. I would like taxpayer’s boycott.

If you guys in the military want all these, begin to sell cakes and coffee at your meetings and see how much money you can collect for the next war. Because squeezing money out and promising taxpayers security, stability, and peace and not delivering it and then ask for even more, excuse me, I would call that unethical if not lunatic. And that in itself could lead to war. Not Russia invasion of a NATO country. It’s never happened and it won’t happen for a number of reasons. I’ve written a long articles about this and 13, 15, 16, points of why it’s… But the long story short is we might end up making a self-fulfilling prophecy because we believe that military is the only thing that can solve problems. Just pouring money. And that has to do with a very dangerous new tendency in the western world. We don’t talk about what we actually do. We talk about setting off money for it and then we think we’ve solved the problem. You know, we take 5% of the gross national product and then we’ll be much safer. That depends on how you spend that five percent.

But we have converted any serious discussion about what threatens the western world, nature, other conflicts, cultures, environmental decay, poverty, tension, terrorism, all this is eradicated. The only thing now is what threatens us is what we can meet by increasing military expenditures - 5%, of gross national product, that is totally bizarre. I am so far the only scholar in the world who has analyzed this as a bizarre absurd measurement because it substitutes from a serious threat analysis. I know what it takes to make a threat analysis. The Nordic countries made serious threat analysis years ago. Today there’s no talk about anything. Russia is a threat therefore 5% of gross national product. You see what I mean? It has nothing to do with solving problems. It has nothing to do with diagnosis. It has nothing to do with possible new thinking that might be needed. It’s just more money, we’ve solved the problem. More money for hospitals, we’ve created more health. I mean, there’s no links between these things. It’s quantification. It’s market mechanism for everything. And then we think we have solved problems.

We might end up waking up in the war because we’ve done all these stupid things. Not because of what the Russians or the Chinese are doing, but what we have done ourselves such as ruining the welfare states that Western Europe and particularly the Nordic countries where I sit were well known for. People look up to the Nordic countries because we were welfare states. We had equality. We had people’s high schools. We had women’s equality. We had talked about things instead of fighting each other or slapping each other’s face. Now all this is gone. It’s destroyed by stupid people in Stockholm who just joined NATO. I mean it’s amazing what this will cost the taxpayers. Uh, oh.

I’m thinking of my children and my grandchildren, not myself.

LENA- Europe is creating this self-reinforcing cycle where increased military production actually generates political incentives for even greater militarization. And so we see this cycle kind of go on and go on and go on and I think it’s sort of spinning faster and faster because you know first we discuss oh, this is just rhetoric, this is just you know, so and so saying that Russia is going to invade, but we know that’s not true and we sort of brush it off, but then I think a couple years later we see that actually that rhetoric is transforming into policies into security policies and economic policies that affect every single person. So because as you mentioned and as you wrote in your absolutely wonderful Substack post, military spending is economically less productive than civilian investment and because that’s sort of the case and everybody remains silent, everybody sort of observing who are the primary beneficiaries of Europe’s massive re-armament.

JAN- That will only be those companies that actually get the contracts to produce, produces waste.

It’s waste production from a civilian economy. I mean producing a tank or whatever there’s no civilian use.

Those companies which get these billions of dollars in investments will of course benefit.

But the rest of society will not. That is what makes the politics of the European Union and NATO deeply immoral. They couldn’t care less about citizens welfare when they steal your money, tell you that we will deliver something called peace, security, and stability, and they don’t do it. And when they find out that their policies don’t work if they’re reasonably intelligent, which I’m not sure, they ask for more of the same thing instead of asking, hm, what are we doing wrong? What worked in ‘49 or ‘53 or ‘62 or ‘78 doesn’t work today. But there’s one thing that never worked through the whole process and that’s the idea of military investments doing civilian good things. That has not changed. It’s the same mistake over and over again. We are going to live in relative poverty in Europe if these guys are allowed to continue their absolutely self-destructive policies in the name of welfare or development or competition with the rest of the world. Shut down these companies. If you want to compete and be somebody in the future world order, you don’t militarize your economy. That’s the last thing you would do. And you open a relationship to Russia. You start negotiations. You use diplomacy again. You use intelligence.

You use your brains if you have any. And you have a vision about how to solve conflicts and live together peacefully in Europe. The Russians are ready to do that. They’ve always seen themselves as also European.

But the West does not want that relationship with Russia. They want to pump in. They give loans to pump in. They actually help. Now the US does it too in having a full war between Ukraine and Russia.

This is what it leads to is that stability, security and peace that NATO promises and ask us a demand or squeeze money out of us to pay for. I mean, I’m sorry this is a theater of the absurd. It has no relationship to empirical analysis and serious politics.

LENA- Very true. New York Times just published an article on how the US president has made over two billion dollars during his first year alone in office through conflicts of interest relating to crypto business deals and bribes. Now, I will just link that article for anyone interested below. But it seems to me that we’re observing an interesting dynamic where policy and these decisions are being shaped by personal interests and the interest of major campaign donors and not by a politician’s constituency. And I think there is a degree of that in the EU as well, not just the United States. And so that raises a question, does democracy even exist in the United States? And in those European countries where the population is very much opposed to militarism but then a small group of individuals at the very top continue pushing their own agenda that’s disconnected with the will of the people.

JAN- … who often when they were young got Fulbright scholarships and were educated at US universities or journalists who were educated at the American University in Beirut etc. And they all kind of more or less brainwashed. I call it brain-Washington, you know, for a little joke because what comes out of this is you have, and that’s the center periphery, the elite are the same, the elites are the same in different parts of the world and they have more common interest together than they have an interest with their citizens. [galong’s ?] old central-periphery structure which was about imperialism and it also applies is within NATO. The elites within NATO are more loyal with each other and the benefits they get from it than they are with their citizens and their citizens best [interest].

There’s the word for that in wartime, you know, and there’s a word for it in peace time, too. This is “traitor.” You can be a wartime traitor, more loyal with the foreign powers, you can be a peacetime traitor. This the same thing, just the time is different. And of course the crime is bigger if you are traitor during a quisling as it was called in Norway. If you are that in wartime but I would say I have a moral problem with those who are more loyal with Washington than in Stockholm than they are with my security and my families and the Swedish people’s best.

I have a problem with them ethically and morally and they would never dream of talking with me who is a peace researcher about anything. They would talk with people who are Russophobic and confirms only their own views that we must arm [for] war and war. So you have military research centers all over Scandinavia today. You have a cri that does military security studies not peace studies. You have a po in Oslo that has nothing to do with the institute that you and Galton started in the late 50s and you have university departments in Scandinavia which are doing what they are supposed to do because university institutes too are state financed. So you can’t find money today in today’s Sweden, you can’t find money for a study of some kind of peaceful solution, peace research, reconciliation, forgiveness or something like that. We can do it because we are people financed and people appreciate what we do. But you [and] I couldn’t do this. I was a director of a state institute, Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs or International Relations or the Copenhagen International Institute for International Studies or something like that. They all producing basically the same stuff and that’s why they have not made a study of the economic effects of militarism. They know that that would be difficult to sell and get financed. Free research, forget about it.

LENA- Yeah, and of course these policies, militaristic policies don’t exist in a vacuum. And we know that when there is this sort of the idea of creating a monster or an adversary also leads to certain civil liberties and freedoms being then effectively abused by the state because now the state has a reason to say, “Oh well, you don’t get to post this because this means that you’re a foreign agent or something like that or you’re supporting adversary.” And we’ve seen that after 9/11. We saw that during other conflicts and we certainly see that now during the war the proxy war in Ukraine where any dissent is being silenced. But it seems to me that the silencing is actually taking on a more and more aggressive posture in the EU.

Could you speak to that? Could you could you kind of walk us through what you’re observing for those in our audience who are not from the EU, who are in the United States and have no idea what’s going on.

JAN- Well, I’m spontaneously reminded of a German author after the Second World War. I’m sorry I’m forgetting his name, but he said if you sleep in a democracy, you risk waking up at in a dictatorship.

And that comes to, that applies to the intellectual world today too, or the research world. I’m not saying we don’t have intellectuals but they are outside the academic circles so to speak, basically, and that I think that what you’re pointing to is partly motivated by the fact or caused by the fact that the West which is 12% of humanity is going down. We are now the last empire. That empire is getting weaker and weaker, more and more desperate and cannot tolerate that there are different views. I mean the more weak you are, the more intolerant you are, you become with people who say something else.

You know this is, the United States is, a kind of patriarch at the deathbed and the children do not obey around the world. The Chinese do not obey.

Africa does not obey. People are seeking, you know, other finance systems. Now, what we tried to do backfires. Nothing is going really well for the western world at the moment. And so you get more and more intolerant. And those of us who may have blown off a few truths at some point, we are hated and we’re never used. I have no problems with that. I’ve [been] used elsewhere, but I was very much used in the Danish and Swedish and other media in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s. I mean, I can’t imagine myself sitting in a commission for disarmament security in today’s Denmark, which is probably the most militaristic country in Europe with a prime minister who has the guts to say that all Russians are crazy, which he said at the Munich conference last and who has also warned the Danes that we should if we don’t look out, Hamas may come and take Denmark, you know we are that level, right, so what happens is, the weaker you get the more intolerant and the less intellectuality in the field of security. I mean if we if we peel the whole fruit, security politics is enormously interesting philosophically.

How do we treat people? Why do we treat people, some people as enemies? What do we do with enemies? Are we threatened?

How do you make a good serious threat analysis? Civilian threats, military threats, short-term threats, long-term threats, micro threats, macro threats.

You know this is one reason I was stimulated to go into this field in the ‘70s. I was planning to become an architect, it’s intellectually, philosophically so interesting. How do we live together on this earth with our conflicts without killing each other which I think is a reasonably good question. And all this intellectualism is off how - by people who say just give us 5% of the cost that’s not a product and we will solve all the problems. Right. Right.

Now these guys are not serious. They are not intellectuals. They are not even thinkers in any kind of sense of the word. But worse they have a media and a research priesthood. And you know I talk about MIMAC, the military-industrial media academic complex. These elites sell this nonsense and the main tool is to tell we are threatened. Your life is in danger. The future is very dark but if you give us money then we will save you. Now that’s the only, some of these nasty guys is the little boy looking at the emperor saying excuse me, um, why are we then not living in peace at the moment? I’m happy to be that little boy sometimes. I know it’s annoying to some of these people and I think intellectuals should be annoying. One, two, they should be more creative. And I’m happy to say, but it’s sad from a democratic point of view, it is not very difficult to be more creative than our present state leaders and leadership of the military.

I have not in my last 50 years when I’ve studied these things seen a level this low in terms of creativity in terms of ability to evaluate what they are doing changing the horses and doing something new saying something new and I tell you one of the biggest and most important differences between China and the West is if you ask the Chinese where do you want to be in 20, 30, or 40 years from now they have interesting ideas and they have a vibrant discussion about it. It’s not only five year plans. It’s a bit more than that. For instance, within 25 years to eradicate poverty and they did it within 24 years.

If you ask a European leader or an American leader, where do you want your society to be in 20 years from now? How do you want to make your society become better? What, is your message to your grandchildren’s society?

Nothing. Nothing, Lena. Nothing. There’s not one leader who can say anything interesting. Now leaders could in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Willy Brandt could, the go could, [Uncle ?] Jorgensson could, Helmut Kohl could, Schmidt could, [Keon ?] in Finland could, the idea of neutrality, equal distance from Russia, Warsaw pact and NATO. Brilliant idea. Everybody should go neutral in that sense. We would eradicate a neutrality. [?]

So all of this is gone. And maybe I’m just talking about a world that was better before. But I cannot imagine any other basic reason that things are falling so much apart intellectually and morally than the western people, western leaders knowing very well we’re losing it. And then what is classical when you’re losing it? What do you use? You use that type of power in which you still believe you’re relatively strongest and that is a military. You’re not strongest economically anymore. You’re not strongest technologically anymore.

You’re not strongest in terms of culture anymore. I mean, what comes out of our America today compared with the 50s, 60s, and 70s in terms of art and music.

My goodness, what changed? You are not the strongest in terms of legitimacy in the eyes of others and you are very weak when it comes to visions of a better future of a better society, of the good society which we never discussed, by the way. So what do you do? You maximize your weapons capacity because that’s the last thing you can cling to. We’re still strong. 5%, 10% of gross national product and we will survive and - no you won’t you will destroy yourself and that’s the tragedy of the West - we could go down with grace, we could reach out to others, we could demilitarize, talk with those we have problems with instead, but what we do is we don’t destroy China or Russia or Africa or the Middle East or Iran culture 6,000 years back. I mean I’ve been through Iran a couple of time not a couple of times several times and been teaching there and stuff like I mean this is not a society you destroy by bombing. Trump believes these kinds of things, but you destroy yourself. What is going on in the western world now is predominantly self-destructive and the rest of the world will increasingly say okay, these guys do it their way we do it our way and in the long run they will sit and say how stupid that the west whom we loved, looked up to, were inspired by. Go to China, tell me there’s not an inspiration from the west. I mean, lots of things they have done is inspired from the west. Russia is not a socialist, communist, blah, blah, blah, country anymore. It’s a western capitalist country and still we see enemies everywhere.

In a way, we have won, but now we’re losing everything. So it as I said it’s a unique tragedy in western history in my view and that’s what makes me sad. The rest of the world makes me happy. They will survive.

I’m unfortunately not sure that what we call the western world will survive. Yes but we will not be a very nice place in the future. We’ll be a pure free a museum, a funny place that you can go to because that was what it once looked like. And that is very sad. We have tremendous resources in the West if we wanted to redeploy them, convert them to something constructive instead of destructive.

LENA- Many people argue that Europe has become effectively a vassal of the United States especially under the Trump administration. Is the Trump administration, if that’s true, and if you agree with that statement, does the Trump administration deliberately seek to destroy Europe’s, you know, role in in global politics and sort of is destruction the goal or is there another goal that sort of results in Europe’s self-destructive policy?

JAN- And it’s a very mixed, it’s a very mixed bag, Lena.

The US needs Europe, but it does not need a strong Europe. It doesn’t want a strong Europe. It didn’t start with Trump. It started way earlier and you had Biden administration saying we’re going to blow up Nordstream. And that meant economic warfare to say the least.

You now have tariffs. You have a submissive EU that sits and talk about these kinds of things and let Trump get away with more or less crazy terrorist policies.

You have a total military production dependence very strong at least of the US because we’ve always stupidly believed that the US was there for us.

The US is here for the US and the idea with NATO has never been to protect Europe. The project called NATO is a US project to secure that if there is a war it will be in Europe and not on US soil. That’s forward defense. This is the idea of deterrence. This is American nuclear weapons in Europe. It is to have the fight here not in the American mainland if you will. And that’s why we have the ballistic missile defense. This is why we have long range missiles. This is why we have the bases in Greenland. That is why Trump is interested in Greenland, is [to] keep every kind of possible warfare away from the US society. That’s a cynical and the Europeans have been sitting down since ‘49 and believe that this was a beneficial thing to help and assist the survival of the Europeans. I mean this is this is laughable. It belongs to the world of fiction. And of course media and CIA’s influence on media etc. Everybody is paying for the right message you know, media warfare is almost as important as military warfare. The war on your minds and brains and thinking and world views is so strong and the Americans have been formidably good at that for you know for 70 years and believing that there was only a good society and they wanted to do good for us and then sometimes we need to pay a price for it all. So but long story short, this submissiveness is not a new phenomenon. It’s been there all the time. It’s just, let’s say, it’s gotten worse under the so-called leadership of people like von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas and German Chancellor Merz, after basically everybody after Willy Brandt who had the intellect and the background and the knowledge to stand up and say, I’m ruling this place not America. And who was also the man who knelt down in Warsaw and apologized for what the Germans did. How many leaders do we have of that caliber today?

Zero. How many presidents have been to Hiroshima and never, never apologized.

Now you know we’re far down the drain of demoralization also. And that’s very sad to see. I can say that because I have [for] a few years I’ve studied these things.

Maybe somebody who’s 25 think I’m very radical. I’m not very radical given that I studied these things since I was about 20.

LENA- If Europe continues on its current trajectory of rising military budgets through 2035, I believe, what do you think Europe will look like economically and socially, let’s say 5 to 10 years from now?

JAN- It would be elusive politically, economically, culturally.

Everything that a good society needs will be eradicated and will be, you know, subsumed under military needs.

Whether it’s good museums or scholarships for young artists or whatever, there will not be that money for it. If you continue down this road, and I tell you 5% is not the end of it.

They would probably say six or seven at some point because they can’t think of changing policies. They can only change figures. And that’s what somebody who is not very intelligent and has never been an intellectual can do. But if you start thinking in a new way, then you’re an intellectual. I don’t see it that they will change. Unless you have a catastrophe that makes people think a really serious economic breakdown somewhere in Europe that may say, oh my god what happened, I mean Germany’s basically gone like a you know peripheral country or something it doesn’t mean that we cannot be happy. I worked in Somalia and Burundi and in poor societies and people can be happy without that but then the Europeans will have to live without any kind of material benefits and joys and all that and be happy dancing and writing poetry or something like that. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad life. It will be a wakeup call, but it will be a periphery in the world which is roaring out there. High-tech AI, getting together, building cooperation. If you take the Belt and Road Initiative, 150 countries are now involved, the only ones who are not involved in NATO and EU countries. I mean, this is self-isolation. It’s so stupid.

From a visionary point of view, from a future point of view, we’re creating a multi-polar, multi-nodal, multi-cultural world, and it’s extremely fascinating.

That’s why I’m so optimistic about the future. I’m just not optimistic on behalf of those 12% of the world who says that they belong to the western world. You know, Titanic is sailing at dawn.

LENA- Yeah. And then maybe the last question for today, you end your article with a very provocative question. That question is, are European leaders misunderstanding basic economics or are they deliberately presenting an incomplete picture to the public? In other words, are they deliberately lying? So, after years of studying peace and conflict, which explanation do you find more convincing and why?

JAN- I had somebody who wrote back to me and say they are both. I don’t know whether you can be both. But Lena, the main thing is both are very bad. If you’re ignorant about the basics of economics, and I say that to you with somebody who is tremendously knowledgeable about economics, if you were a politician today in the western world not knowing the basics of economics, that’s catastrophic.

And if you know that basics and you then deliberately lie about and say it’ll have great effects for the civilian economy to make huge investments in weapons factories and great spin-offs for society and all that.

I don’t know which is worse. I don’t care which is worse. Both things are beyond believable in a democracy and an enlightened society.

And what makes me perhaps even more pessimistic about the western future is that you have so few scholars in media. You are one of the exceptions. But media who say the same nonsense and never ask questions.

You see, the moment you don’t have that, you don’t have a vibrant society and you don’t have democracy anymore. When research and media explorations, free thinking is disappearing and substituted by, by rhetoric by, you know, peace is war, war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc.

Then it’s gone. I’m sorry, Lena. Then it’s gone - what we were so proud of in Europe and had all reasons to be proud of you know whether Beethoven or [Gagord ?] or whatever will be gone. It would have repercussions much further outside just economic crisis because the moment you take this economic crisis thing and you destroy the economy,

I’m not sure you will have a vibrant culture. You may have it. I’m not saying culture is dependent on welfare and materialism.

But I think there’s a risk that other sectors of society will be drawn down in an economic crisis.

And then you have to make somebody the reason for your economic problems.

And that’s where China will be pointed out as more of an enemy. They were the ones who destroyed the European economy or the Russians were the one who did bad things to us or now the Americans perhaps at some point if Trump is allowed to continue there might be more voices in Europe, the last voice will be we did all the stupid things from NATO’s expansion which we should never have done and promised never to do, onto the war and onto the sanctions and onto the militarization and the conversion to a war economy. We did all the wrong things ourselves. We could have done something else. Now that something else is never discussed and that in my view is the end of democracy and a healthy society. The good society is a vibrant discussing society. It’s a dialoguing society. It is a society in which all views are possible, listened to, taken seriously by the decision makers. People who listen to what is going on in the in the citizenship etc. Now that’s a long time ago since that happened in Europe but particularly in the Nordic countries probably now 30 years ago since we had a serious discussion in Scandinavia about security issues and that’s how NATO membership for Finland and Sweden is possible, how America has built 40-plus bases in Scandinavia in two years, etc. So I can’t tell you whether they are ignorant or they are lying or both or whatever. But it doesn’t matter much to me. They should not, those who lead Europe’s 450 million people, should not behave the way they do. No matter what you and I think will be the actual explanation for it. I think the decline of the West is the main explanation, getting more and more desperate. But it’s not good. It’s not good. It’s not good if you’re ignorant and don’t know the basics of economics, and it’s not good if you’re lying to your people.

LENA- Dr. Jan Øberg, thank you so much for taking the time to join and for such a fascinating and important conversation.

I really do hope that our viewers share it with their network and with their friends and really start looking into these topics themselves and doing the homework to understand what’s going on better. I highly recommend following Jan on Substack, on X, as well as on his website. I will link everything in the description below. Jan, thank you so much for your time. It has been a pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity and what you do, which is so much needed in this crazy times we’re living in. And I hope we can do some more synergy in the future. Thank you very much. [end of interview]

§

Yet wasteful military buildup proceeds apace in all EU/NATO countries, especially in the most NATO-ist of them all, outside of the Baltic States - Canada. The neo-conservative government of Canada, operating as a unitary-executive state by the banker Mark Carney, is planning massive military buildup, in all the wrong ways, starting with increasing the original mistake of buying F-35 attack fighters then increasing that order. Every few days there is another announcement, often tied to their blind support for the failing campaign against Russia via Ukraine.

And as Jan Øberg points out in the above interview, “if you were a politician today in the western world not knowing the basics of economics, that’s catastrophic” - that applies perfectly to the clown Carney - clueless on economic and monetary matters. These Western “leaders” keep pushing national debt forward, they expect it to be someone else’s problem later on. They fail at actual forward planning, as per my comment on Prof. Warwick Powell’s latest article: The Emergence of a Strong Socialist Finance System in China:

In thinking about China in this world, I would say that China sails through these times in a multi-hull ship with layers serving many purposes - reflective, resistant, protectant, absorbent and resilient. Meanwhile the capitalist West sails in a single glass hull composed of, for the “developed” countries, about US$78 Trillion of debt. Thus a different way of realizing Steven J. Newbury’s brittle fracture and resource entropy singularity. This hull of debt is going to fracture, and these fools have no life boats. Thus the greater lesson for China is to ensure that any interest on investment debt accrues to the nation itself rather than to international banking. Otherwise, the economy cannot actually afford interest.

Thus, we are forced into inventing geopolitical threats and allowing military capture of what’s left of an economy.

OTTAWA — The Canadian government has announced a nearly $2 billion investment to procure 190 additional Armoured Combat Support Vehicles (ACSVs) under a new strategic partnership with General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (GDLS-Canada). The four-year program is aimed at modernizing the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) while strengthening Canada’s domestic defence industry and supply chain.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the investment on July 16 in London, Ontario, alongside Defence Minister David McGuinty. The agreement makes GDLS-Canada the first company selected as a Strategic Partner under Canada’s newly introduced Defence Industrial Strategy Strategic Partnership Framework.The procurement will increase the Canadian Armed Forces’ ACSV fleet from 360 to 550 vehicles. The additional vehicles will mainly support training activities at military bases across Canada, helping prepare personnel before operational deployments.

The new vehicles will gradually replace the Canadian Army’s aging LAV II Bison and M113 tracked vehicle fleets. They are built on the Light Armoured Vehicle 6.0 (LAV 6.0) platform, allowing multiple vehicle variants to share the same chassis. Using a common platform simplifies maintenance, reduces training requirements, lowers long-term sustainment costs, and improves fleet availability.

The ACSVs are equipped with advanced armour protection designed to withstand mines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and direct enemy fire while maintaining the mobility needed to operate alongside front-line combat units.

The procurement forms part of Canada’s broader effort to modernize the Canadian Armed Forces and increase defence spending. According to the government, Canada is reaching NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

The ACSV fleet already supports Canadian military operations. Existing vehicles are currently deployed with the Canadian-led NATO Multinational Brigade in Latvia as part of Operation REASSURANCE.

Canada has also provided military assistance to Ukraine through the ACSV program. The government has previously donated 89 Armoured Combat Support Vehicles to Ukraine and announced an additional 35 vehicles during the 2026 NATO Summit in Turkey earlier this month.

And likely these armoured vehicles will be shipped, still in their packing cases, right over to fight in Canada’s war on Russia via Ukraine and the Baltic States, and now Moldova.

From Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson Maria Zakharova in a press conference - Russia on Moldova: “Blame Russia for Everything” Strategy Continues | RU-EN - Freelensia, July 22:

5:54- On June 30th, the Moldovan Ministry of Defense announced the signing of a framework agreement and contract with Estonia’s Centre for Defence Investment to purchase over 100 Canadian-made armored vehicles. What are they planning to do with them? Harvest crops, deliver library books?

The funding, totaling over 50 million euros, will be funneled through the “European Peace Facility” – that very same “peace facility” that funds the slaughter in Ukraine.

Russia is considering a demonstration strike on a NATO country facility operating as a “rear-area” production site for supplying Ukraine with military supplies. What better example to demonstrate reach, invincibility of hypersonic missiles and target accuracy than this armoured vehicle mfg site in Ontario, and they have the address…

§

In other news, on first appearances, the tRump regime hasn’t launched a weekend-strike on Iran, supposedly due to low munitions. However, this may be due to Pakistan with backing of China, making progress in the implementation of the Islamabad MoU. tRump called Pakistani Field Marshall Asim Munir at least three times last week, asking for more negotiations, to which he was told to start respecting the MoU. So start following the clues - first, and end to attacks on Iran. Yes, US military eyes have been blinded by Iran taking out US billion-dollar radar sites, forcing them to rely on AWACS planes. But then, tRump is telling Bibi to withdraw IDF from Lebanon, West Bank, etc. If the money starts moving to Iran, then you know the Pakistan/China imposition of the US surrender is actually in progress. Which unfortunately, brings the world closer to Bibi’s use of his nukes to finish his job on Iran. But then, a new twist in West Asia, the bearded dwarf attacking an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea may be a fatal mistake - Iran’s big missiles can reach Kiev (not Ukr spelling!) and unlike Russia, has no qualms about doing a decapitation strike. Or, is NATO now in on the “Iran War”?

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev addresses Vladimir Putin during their meeting, sharing international signals he says he has received from Europe and the United States regarding the Russia–Ukraine conflict. Tokayev suggests that it may be time to freeze the conflict and return to an updated “Istanbul Formula 2.0” for peace negotiations. He explains why Kazakhstan refuses to act as a mediator while reaffirming its strategic partnership and allied relations with Russia.

This has been previously posted as a segment in a previous post but I need a separate link for other purposes, so you may skip this lecture, or read it again!

We arrive at this point in history not from respect of others but via fear and loathing. European “fear” of Russia, Russophobia, in place for almost two centuries, has under Atlanticist doctrine, morphed into outright hate over the past eighty years. The result is the conviction that Russia should cease to exist and be broken into smaller parts and captured for exploitation as per Hitler’s Lebensraum. If Russia has no right to exist, ergo it has no need for a zone of security - going so far as to say that it cannot object to hostile forces up against its borders. Going back to the reunification of Germany, the 2+4 Treaty, the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany” (Sept 1990) was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. That treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the GDR and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation’s security should come at the expense of another’s.

In her memoirs, Angela Merkel writes that she understood at the time of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia. But she gave in to American pressure, accepting the compromise communiqué that Ukraine and Georgia “will become” NATO members. This directly set in motion the events of 2014 and 2022, by violating the 21 February 2014 agreement in Kyiv signed by Germany, Poland and France, and violating the Minsk II “Declaration of Support” of February 2015, personally negotiated by Chancellor Merkel, with the key provision of autonomy for the Donbas region within a sovereign Ukraine, yet Merkel later acknowledged that this agreement had been used to buy time for Ukraine to rearm. Rearm for what? For the Atlanticist West’s goal of attacking Russia via Ukraine, as spelled out in Zbigniew Brzeziński’s Grand Chessboard program, with the ultimate goal of conquering all of Asia. Note that Ukraine doesn’t sit along the west of Russia like Poland, it lies directly under Moscow. Note that from 2014 to 2022, the Donbas Oblast was continuously bombed and then shelled, its native Russian language and Orthodox religion banned and was never granted the agreed upon autonomy. But most history lies unread, while the unread lie about history.

In a better world, in a better Europe, the nations along Russia’s borders would be genuinely neutral in the manner of Switzerland in former years. Actually, a condition of Ukraine’s separation agreement from Russia was for Ukraine to remain non-aligned, but The West had other plans. That 2014 agreement in Kyiv was violated in the Maidan coup set up under Hilary Clinton and Victoria Nuland which installed the present Ukrainian government, which began attacking the eastern oblasts. To get these attacks stopped and allow the agreed upon autonomy of Donbas, the Russians began their Special Military Operation, mislabeled “All-Out Invasion” by the West. In the following month, April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators converged in Istanbul on the terms of a peace agreement: Ukrainian neutrality outside NATO, multilateral security guarantees, agreed troop limits, and the political resolution of the Donbas and Crimea questions over time. The agreement was within days of signature. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, one of the mediators, has confirmed publicly that the deal was close and that the West — the United States and the United Kingdom in particular — moved to block it. So here we are today, locked into unnecessary escalation by NATO against Russia, which could all end at any minute of any day.

Reference: Jeffrey D. Sachs: An Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz

or local copy

BREAKING: PEPE EXPOSES Trump BEGGED Munir for an Off-Ramp-Then Rejected It HERE’S WHY.

Pakistani Field Marshall Asim Munir - Trump calls him every day, asking for more negotiations, Munir kept saying he has no further information - until now - Munir finally says he has an answer: Iran will allow a 10-day pause, but Trump has to perform on DAY ONE, in other words, follow the previous MoU requirements - pay the funds, release frozen reserves, etc.

But Trump says, no, no, no, we just want to talk. Munir says no more talk. Perform on day one, or full-scale war. This is your only off-ramp.

Yet the Pedophile regime plus isra3l had been planning a full-spectrum assault on all branches of The Resistance: in Iraq, on Hezbollah in Lebanon, on Yemen, and on Iran. So the final off-ramp has been rejected - the swamp creature and the Deep State will never, ever concede anything, especially defeat.

Unfortunately, this drivel represents the full editorial position of this NATO-ist publication as well as the entire foreign policy of this neo-conservative government in Canada. I sent the Globe a reply to that column, with subject line: “Let’s see if you allow balance on your opinion page.” Of course they don’t. And certainly only from “respected opinion-makers.”

Here is that reply:

Peace in Ukraine requires a different Europe

We arrive at this point in history not from respect of others but via fear and loathing. European “fear” of Russia, Russophobia, in place for almost two centuries, has under Atlanticist doctrine, morphed into outright hate over the past eighty years. The result is the conviction that Russia should cease to exist and be broken into smaller parts and captured for exploitation as per Hitler’s Lebensraum. If Russia has no right to exist, ergo it has no need for a zone of security - going so far as to say that it cannot object to hostile forces up against its borders. Going back to the reunification of Germany, the 2+4 Treaty, the “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany” (Sept 1990) was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. That treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the GDR and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation’s security should come at the expense of another’s.

In her memoirs, Angela Merkel writes that she understood at the time of the 2008 Bucharest Summit that inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia. But she gave in to American pressure, accepting the compromise communiqué that Ukraine and Georgia “will become” NATO members. This directly set in motion the events of 2014 and 2022, by violating the 21 February 2014 agreement in Kyiv signed by Germany, Poland and France, and violating the Minsk II “Declaration of Support” of February 2015, personally negotiated by Chancellor Merkel, with the key provision of autonomy for the Donbas region within a sovereign Ukraine, yet Merkel later acknowledged that this agreement had been used to buy time for Ukraine to rearm. Rearm for what? For the Atlanticist West’s goal of attacking Russia via Ukraine, as spelled out in Zbigniew Brzeziński’s Grand Chessboard program, with the ultimate goal of conquering all of Asia. Note that Ukraine doesn’t sit along the west of Russia like Poland, it lies directly under Moscow. Note that from 2014 to 2022, the Donbas Oblast was continuously bombed and then shelled, its native Russian language and Orthodox religion banned and was never granted the agreed upon autonomy. But most history lies unread, while the unread lie about history.

In a better world, in a better Europe, the nations along Russia’s borders would be genuinely neutral in the manner of Switzerland in former years. Actually, a condition of Ukraine’s separation agreement from Russia was for Ukraine to remain non-aligned, but The West had other plans. That 2014 agreement in Kyiv was violated in the Maidan coup set up under Hilary Clinton and Victoria Nuland which installed the present Ukrainian government, which began attacking the eastern oblasts. To get these attacks stopped and allow the agreed upon autonomy of Donbas, the Russians began their Special Military Operation, mislabeled “All-Out Invasion” by the West. In the following month, April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators converged in Istanbul on the terms of a peace agreement: Ukrainian neutrality outside NATO, multilateral security guarantees, agreed troop limits, and the political resolution of the Donbas and Crimea questions over time. The agreement was within days of signature. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, one of the mediators, has confirmed publicly that the deal was close and that the West — the United States and the United Kingdom in particular — moved to block it. So here we are today, locked into unnecessary escalation by NATO against Russia, which could all end at any minute of any day.

Reference: Jeffrey Sachs: An Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz

Here’s a transcript that I’ve copied out from Judge Napolitano’s podcast, with some good background history on U.S. hegemony. It’s a difficult job generating a transcript from a YouTube video - try it sometime. But this one is worth the effort, please read it and you’ll learn 6 or 7 things at least.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is the Greater Israel Project Collapsing? Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom - July 20, 2026

JUDGE: You’ve written something very recently that tantalized me. So before we get to the collapsing [Israel] project and before we get to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s fears of what’s coming his way at election time in Israel, why have the last six US presidents from George HW Bush to Donald Trump, the last of them after promising he would never do it, been using NATO or Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.

SACHS: Yeah, the point is our presidents don’t really determine foreign policy.

Our public opinion, what you and I believe and what the American people believe has very little influence, at least over a period of many years, people are absolutely against the wars that the United States is waging. Trump won an election on that basis, but it didn’t change anything. In fact, he just launched more wars. What the American state, the American government runs just as your opening each segment tells us, undeclared wars, unconstitutional, but based on a system of a deep state guided very heavily by the intelligence agencies because they have the “advantage” that they operate in secret. They’re not accountable to anybody. They do what they want. The presidents by and large are part of this machine. They don’t really change much. And my point in in my writing about this is that from Clinton onward, we’ve been engaged in particular series of nearly perpetual wars that Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II have all pursued. The American people are not really told anything about the true objectives of these wars, but the purposes have been spelled out if you know where to look rather clearly. One of my go-to places is a quite remarkable book, awful in a sense, but remarkable written by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

JUDGE: The major demonstrative word “chessboard” is in the title. Am I right?

SACHS: His book in 1997’s called The Grand Chessboard. And the idea is riffing on the great game that Britain and Russia supposedly played in Central Asia in the 19th century. But the idea is the world’s a game. It’s like a video game. You bomb here, you slap there, you send your drones here. None of these leaders is at risk. They don’t tell the public what all of this is about. They don’t actually ask us to pay any taxes to fund these wars because the public’s completely against them. And so, no one asks. It all goes into the debt. But Brzeziński in 1997, in a kind of didactic textbook, that he says he wrote for his students, explains what this grand chessboard looks like from the point of view of Washington.

And the idea of the book is very simple, little crazy except, you know, if you’re playing a board game, it would make sense, but it’s about American primacy. So the idea is that the United States has to be the biggest and baddest and toughest and can beat anybody in the world anywhere. And that’s the idea that there should be no resistance to American demands anywhere and that the United States should basically be intervening everywhere in order to prevent any other countries from getting powerful enough or aligning so that they can resist American demands. America as number one bully of the world. And Brzeziński lays out how this should be done. Remember in the 1990s the Soviet Union had just collapsed and the idea was everywhere in Clinton’s mouth and in Madeline Albright, Secretary of State’s words that the US is the indispensable nation that looks farther than any other nation in the world. And we had the project for the New American Century which is basically will beat the &#@% out of anyone that opposes the United States. We had it called the “end of history.” We had it called the unipolar moment. And what Brzeziński explains is how we’re going to play this chessboard, this worldwide chessboard. And the most fascinating aspect of Brzeziński’s analysis is he’s like a chess teacher explaining how to move the pieces and he has a concept which is very important for everybody to understand how crazy our government is and the concept is a geopolitical pivot state. What is a geopolitical pivot state? Brzeziński tells us it’s a place we don’t care about except that it can annoy the hell out of another major power. In other words, it’s a place we can use.

And Brzeziński’s core idea in this book is the United States needs to achieve its primacy and maintain its primacy being the biggest and the baddest in Eurasia, the great land mass of Europe and Asia that it joins together into really one super continent, where about 70% of the world’s population lives and about 70% of the world economy and of course it includes China it includes Russia it includes India and includes Europe and the United States needs to dominate all of this and Brzeziński nicely tells us that Europe, well they’re vassal states, we’re the empire they’re vassals they’ll do what we say - pretty much true and then there are the pivot states - the geopolitical pivots.

Number one geopolitical pivot, he tells us in 1997, is Ukraine. If we control Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a major power because Russia’s blocked from its entry into the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia can’t project its power. And so Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot state. And in 1997 in this book and in another article, Brzeziński writes [what’s] called a grand strategy for Eurasia for foreign affairs. And Brzeziński is not just some run-of-the-mill guy. He’s one of the major strategists of our country telling us how it works and how Washington thinks. He says we need to control Ukraine. So we need to push NATO to Ukraine and push American power to the Russian border.

Incidentally, Mark Rutte, who is the Secretary General of NATO, and a really despicable character, by the way, and maybe that just goes with the turf of being Secretary General of NATO, said a few days ago that NATO’s purpose, is it’s not defense against the Soviet Union. It’s the projection of American power, basically or I should say exactly what Brzeziński was telling us in 1997 and what Brzeziński says is we need to take Ukraine, we need to take the other geopolitical pivots. Ah, what’s number two on his list? Iran. Oh, fancy that. What a coincidence.

We need to bother China in East Asia by bulking up the military in Korea where we have been for 80 years, for God’s sake. 80 years stationed there since the Korean War and bulking up the military in Japan and bothering China in every other possible way because these are the geopolitical pivots. We need to use these places to annoy, to weaken, to divide, to subvert, maybe even to overthrow the governments of our big adversaries. And Brzeziński writes it all out in a long tome. And basically everything he says is wrong except that it explains everything that we have done and continue to do until now. Because until today, whether it’s Clinton or Bush or Obama or Trump I or Biden or Trump II, doesn’t matter. The name of the game in Washington is we’re number one.

The military-industrial-complex will be fed fully gluttonously to the maximum extent to keep that dominant power, that primacy, and will fight anyone, will subvert any government will use any geopolitical pivot to do that and we get all these countries into horrific trouble. We prove the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, his famous quip, which is a tragic truth, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. And so in Ukraine, we pushed, we pushed, we backed a coup that would bring in a government that didn’t want neutrality, but agreed with the American idea of NATO membership because Ukraine was deeply divided. The president back in 2010 to 2014, Victor Yanukovich, said, “We should be neutral. This is very dangerous. Look where we are geographically. We’re right next to Russia. We’re between Russia and Europe. We got the United States meddling. We just want to be neutral.”

But of course, the United States doesn’t believe in that. This is a geopolitical pivot. We need to take Ukraine. So, we sent all of these minions, my current colleague Victoria Nuland at Columbia University, to hand out cookies in the demonstrations, but she handed out vast sums of money to the Ukrainian backers of a coup which took place on February 22nd, 2014.

And the idea is we, okay, we’re going to bring Ukraine into the American power projection.

That’s what Brzeziński tells us. And he tells us that Russia can’t resist this. America’s all powerful. We have the technological dominance. No one can resist us. We have the biggest economy in the world. We have the biggest financial system in the world. We are so powerful that Russia will have no choice but to give in to these American demands. He writes that in a whole chapter. And what he also says is we’re going to annoy the hell out of Russia, out of Iran, out of China, but no American is going to be, no American president, no American government’s going to be so stupid to allow those three to get together. Okay, Brzeziński was wrong on every single thing he wrote. Of course, Russia has resisted and it resisted to the extent of war. Same with Iran. It doesn’t just give in in one day because the United States bombs it and kills its leadership.

And China did not collapse and succumb to all the trade wars of Trump I and Biden and now Trump II and all the threats and so many things that were on a checklist that was written 10 years ago by another former colleague of mine, Robert Blackwell, in an article also for the Council on Foreign Relations who explained, “Here’s how we bother China, how we weaken China, how we contain China.” Well, none of it has worked. But in the process, of course, the United States has created enemies everywhere and none of it’s going to work. But what is the point that I’m making is that this is so deeply seated.

Our government is so corrupt top to bottom. the money making from the wars, the involvement of big tech Palantir and all the rest in all of the drone warfare of Ukraine and in Gaza and the AI systems that Silicon Valley is selling to the Pentagon and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent in our name that we have no say about and that’s adding to this massive debt. This is all continuing. Doesn’t really matter who is president.

Every president I’ve said, in the last decades, God, they’re the worst. And then the next one along, they’re the worst, then the next one comes along.

JUDGE: And all of this will be paid for by generations yet unborn because [it’s] borrowed money.

SACHS: Not only is it debt stacked up on debt, stacked up on debt, but what we’ve done in this kind of info war is we’ve also created probably the biggest financial bubble in history.

Our stock market is so inflated right now in value. These big tech companies, all of which, you know, drink from the trough of the Pentagon, among other things, are so wildly overvalued. Our exaggeration of American dominance is so weird. You know, I’m, as you know, on a long trip through Europe and Asia in recent weeks. Today, I was at a major Chinese company at one of their advanced factories that is really unbelievable. We have no sense of how the rest of the world is moving on, building things, deepening their infrastructure, improving their technologies while we’re fighting these wars and bragging how great we are, and how this stock market boom proves everything. What we’re setting up is a phenomenal financial crisis in the future. I don’t know when.

Nobody can predict such things, but we’re way out on a limb in all these wars that we can’t win. Trump doesn’t know how to stop anyway. It would take an extraordinary president of a great capacity to actually end these wars. And Trump is obviously not a person of any capacity. He is, as I say, he’s the perfect channeling of the greed and corruption of the military-industrial-complex. So, he’s in a way the perfect emblem of all of this. And we’re just building up a massive bubble, a massive amount of debt, unwinable wars, and no sense and truth about what’s happening because exactly as your opening says, these are undeclared wars. We are not told anything about the motivations that have contributed to this for 30 years and this is where we are Judge, it’s quite declared.

JUDGE: The undeclared war on Iran which the Secretary of State himself in an unguarded moment said was initiated because we have to protect Israel. Will this bring about the demise of the Netanyahu government?

SACHS: If the Netanyahu government falls, nothing better is going to replace it. I think Netanyahu one way or another is probably reaching his end. He’s one of the great disasters of politics of the last 30 years. He’s done what Trump actually said about him a few weeks ago, which is, “Everybody hates you.” Trump told Netanyahu, “And everybody hates Israel.” That’s pretty accurate, Israel behaves despicably.

It’s the worst of the worst around the world. Netanyahu is a thug leading a thuggish regime that has multiple in arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, which of course the United States then sanctions the court rather than respecting the fact that Israel is led by genocidal people who commit genocide with our complete complicity.

Will Netanyahu finally fall? Yeah, probably. Will the replacement be any better? It doesn’t look like it. I don’t hear anything in Israeli politics that says, “Hey, we shouldn’t commit genocide. Hey, there are 8 million Palestinian people. We should live together in peace with them. Hey, maybe it isn’t the right idea to go assassinate the leader of Iran.”

No, I don’t hear a word like that anywhere. nor do I hear anything much in Washington either about - I mean we have opposition in Washington to some of this so I don’t want to denigrate people who are speaking out but basically the war machine continues in the United States because, as has been true for decades, our politics are controlled by the military-industrial-complex, The presidents come and go, but the underlying idea that we need to feed the war machine so that America can kick the ass of any country in the world and thereby enrich and I should have emphasized this, the ultimate goal is the enrichment of Wall Street, the enrichment of big oil, the enrichment of Silicon Valley, the enrichment of our billionaire class. It’s pretty straightforward and pretty basic, but the point is it’s so deep-seated that you know, we had Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic Party Senator from New Hampshire. I saw a clip, I hope I’m not misquoting her, but she was complaining that Zelenskyy fired particular defense minister Fedorov. First of all, what is an American Senator doing intervening in the choice of the defense minister? Well, it’s obvious, sits on the Armed Services Committee.

She’s deeply funded by the military-industrial-complex. That’s American corruption up the wazoo. And that’s how this whole system works. It’s just too big a business. And Wall Street depends on these prerogatives. Big Oil depends on these prerogatives. The military industry itself depends on these prerogatives. Silicon Valley and its financial bubble that it is living on depends on the image of America being able to take on anybody and defeat anybody. And it’s a complete hubristic delusion that we’re living in right now. And it just gets more and more murderous and more and more dangerous because it’s so mistaken and wrongheaded. And maybe I’ll stop the rant by just saying none of these wars has any deep reason. None of them involves American security in the least.

None of them is impervious to solution through straightforward diplomacy. We don’t want peace or Washington doesn’t want peace. It wants dominance that it can’t have, but it could have peace and the American people could have security and we could actually save some trillions of dollars that we have squandered and continue to waste if we had just a modicum of understanding and transparency and accountability of our rogue government.

JUDGE: Last question. Is the Greater Israel Project collapsing?

SACHS: Yes, in the sense that the American Primacy Project is collapsing. Israel claims that it controls 8 million Palestinians, that it can kill them with impunity, that it can ethnically cleanse them. Right now these absolute murderers in the West Bank in Israel are going in and they’re burning down Palestinian homes. They’re killing flocks of animals of Palestinian farmers. They’re acting with complete impunity. And the United States is Yeah, Israel! That’s great. What a democracy. So forth. And Israel thinks that it can get away with operating the world’s most fascistic government right now, the most murderous and blatantly illegal from the point of view of every international standard of any government. But it depends entirely on the United States. Entirely. Israel can’t do this one day on its own. And Israel has had the stalwart support of the American public for decades, but it’s lost that. Now the American public is sick of what Israel is doing, that’s both Jewish public and non-Jewish public. It’s across the board, especially the young people in America.

They’re really disgusted with American support for this kind of murderous state.

And the United States can’t back Israel in this. That’s proved by the complete failure and debacle of this war on Iran, which Trump will continue because he’s weak to the pressures imposed upon him by the by the oligarchs who fund him.

That is the point. The oligarchs and this deep state. He’s inconsequential. He loves to dominate, but he doesn’t dominate anything. He goes along and he fights the wars of the geopolitical pivots that have been set in train decades ago and he doesn’t know how to stop any of this. But none of it’s working. None of it can work. You know, when does it end? Well, unfortunately, and we just have to acknowledge this in a world of nuclear weapons, it’s just always possible that this imbecility ends up with something far more catastrophic and horrific than we can really fathom in our normal conversations and normal life. Any of this could escalate by accident, by mistake, by depravity to something completely catastrophic for humanity.

That’s the main reason why we should stop it all today. But even aside from the catastrophic possibilities, none of this works. Israel is not going to be “Greater Israel.” Israel is not going to rule over millions of Palestinian people in some kind of genocidal state. This is coming to an end because the publics in the United States hate this. The European publics where their leaders are complicit as well.

They’re disgusted. You look at what’s happening in politics in Germany right now, the so-called far-right AfD, they’re saying every day, we need to stop the war. Now, that’s the far right where, you know, this is what is happening all through Europe. It’s what’s happening in American politics.

The military-industrial-complex calls the shots. The intelligence agencies continue the wars. The presidents and the prime ministers continue their theatrics, but the publics are completely disgusted with all of this. And so, to my mind, I don’t know how and when and who’s going to come and change this, but this is not sustainable. The bubble’s going to burst. I hope not through catastrophe but through somehow normal decency and understanding finally prevailing on this corrupted political system of ours and stopping these undeclared wars. [end]

Jack F. Matlock, Jr, was the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991, and had a key role in negotiating an end to the Cold War. Ambassador Matlock also served at the US embassy in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ambassador Matlock discusses the lessons of the past to end the Ukraine War and avoid nuclear war with Russia. Amb. Matlock was at the Embassy desk in dealing with the messages over the Cuban missile crisis, they couldn’t send Russian characters, and the President needed the translation, so he wrote the translations and sent the communiqué.

In the first part of the interview, he gives first-hand viewpoints on the Cuban missile crisis. It was more dangerous than commonly reported. In the end, Russia was required to remove the missiles from Cuba, and Khrushchev had to announce that, while the U.S. agreed to remove missiles from Turkey, but they could keep it quiet without announcement. America The Good never ever can be seen to make concessions. Not in the past, not now, and not in the future. Furthermore, those missiles in Turkey were scheduled to be removed anyway, from being too old.

Amb. Matlock is getting quite old and shaky, but makes it through this long interview. You might want to see what he has to say while he is still with us. Here are the parts about Ukraine-

JACK: We have, in the case of Ukraine - those borders which Ukraine is defined were created by Hitler and Stalin. They were created for the purpose of controlling that area. But those in Ukraine that were not historically part of Ukraine are not or are not historically part of the Russian Empire.

They were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire [and] are now virtually controlled by neo-Nazis and as this becomes more apparent it’s very clear that given what happened internally in Ukraine when the original guarantee to Russian language and other nationalities were guaranteed. This was taken away and so that the internal problems in Ukraine were very great and to sacrifice lives and property and everything over borders that were created by the two greatest dictators of the new 20th century is absolutely absurd. But I think most people simply do not understand how those borders were there or what happened internally into Ukraine which brought this on. And let me also add that unfortunately the United States has set a precedent for attacking countries which have not attacked them.

This was certainly true in the attack on Iraq, a total attack which occupied it which at the time not only Russia but also Germany and France opposed, they were correct to do so. But another issue is the expansion of NATO - once NATO started expanding after the end of the Cold War, it turned what had been a defense alliance into an offensive alliance and one which obviously countries that were not in it like Russia would oppose.

So that it seems to me today people have totally misunderstood the history of these, they are in a very dangerous situation.

And now when we get into these conflicts like Ukraine and also now Iran we tend to forget how they originated and how actually they’re not going to be solved by military action and they’re bringing the whole world I think into a catastrophic…

GLENN: One of the things I find I guess extraordinary is if you go back to the 1990s, there appears to have been a very vigorous debate. I remember that especially in the United States of expanding NATO. It seemed like there was a lot of opposition by leading diplomats such as such as yourself recognizing that this could put us essentially, well, in another Cuban missile crisis as we now see with Ukraine, however slowly it just it seemed to go away, not right away in 2008 of course when NATO promised future membership to Ukraine you had huge opposition then as well. So you had the former CIA director making the point that this would trigger war. You had Angela Merkel saying this would be seen by Moscow as a declaration of war. But why has it become so controversial to recognize that NATO expansion, that is expansion of an anti-Russian military alliance would provoke conflict? Because it appears that even the discourse seems to admit this thing.

JACK: Well, unfortunately, I think that the American governments from, you might say the 1990s on, adopted a foreign policy which it seemed to me ideologically was similar to the Soviet policy of what they called the version of doctrine which was that if a country once became “socialist” and I’ll put that in quotes because these were countries ruled by the communist party and that once they became socialist one had to defend socialism if there was a challenge to it and this meant that for example the Soviet Union intervened in Czechoslovakia and in in Hungary first and then in Czechoslovakia in order to preserve socialism. We talked about spreading democracy.

Well, first of all, we didn’t define democracy very carefully. I mean, but the idea that an outside power particularly using economic sanctions or military force can create a democracy in another country is simply absurd. It can’t happen. Interference from the outside in internal politics is usually resisted almost everywhere at one point. And so it seems to me that that was a false doctrine. And we have called what we called a liberal world order which was coupled with a military doctrine that said we had to dominate everything. Full spectrum dominance was part of the military doctrine which was proclaimed during the second Bush administration.

Well, I think the only solution is going to be redrawing those borders.

These are not, you might say, longstanding traditional borders of Ukraine.

All that territory up until the end of the Cold War had been parts of other countries, other sovereign countries.

And at first I would say Russia not only observed respect for the territorial integrity, actually, but the conditions for that I think were pretty clear that Ukraine not become part of a hostile military alliance.

So that to retain that, Ukraine had to stay out of NATO and NATO had to avoid trying to bring them in. And I think that was very clear to all of us when the whole question of NATO expansion came up in the late 1990s. I testified before the Congress of the United States to the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate headed at that time by Joseph Biden.

And I testified that it was a huge mistake to begin to expand NATO because if that was continued it could bring us to a very serious crisis.

Well the fact was that the argument for expanding NATO was that some would say out of [our] area or out of business. In other words, we had to use it as an offensive alliance.

And in effect, it was. And although Russia accepted some of the early additions, those in central Europe and then of the Baltic countries, I was in New York when Vladimir Putin then sort of a new president of Russia came on and he gave a talk at Columbia University and I asked him directly during that about if the three Baltic countries join NATO, he said he didn’t think that was necessary, but that in effect he would tolerate it as long as there were no bases there. And this is another thing that we began to put military bases in these countries in Eastern Europe even before the question of Ukraine membership came up. And this was very much opposed and I think for good reason because although the systems that we were putting in Poland and Romania were anti-ballistic missile systems.

Nevertheless, those systems could be used offensively with a change of software. So it was clear why any Russian leader would have opposed that and yet you know issue after issue we began to treat Russia different from others. We had sanctions which prevented them being part of the World Trade Organization over immigration practices which had ended actually in the last year of the Soviet Union and had never been an issue in Russia but we kept them on for other reasons, bringing China into the World Trade Organization more than a decade before we allowed Russia in and then we carried out sanctions over a so-called human rights violations when such violations were also occurring in the United States and this whole issue of sanctioning other countries for things they do at home I think has been totally misplaced and yet this is something that the Europeans are now carrying even further than the United States.

And yet, you know, obviously much of German industry is not going to be competitive without say Russian gas. And to tolerate such things as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline just to deprive Russia of a market I think it violates sort of not only traditional international law it violates in my word simply basic decency and so this idea that Russia is the only aggressor and has to be sanctioned when the other countries are also carrying out arguably even more serious aggressions.

Really baffles to me how anyone who really understands the history of these issues and what is involved can go this course. The only way. And you know, as these wars go on, they become more and more difficult to settle and you get more and more damage on all sides.

And the point is that if miraculously the original borders of Ukraine could be restored, Ukraine could not rule those areas. It would be a tremendous instability.

And anyone who knows this issue, you know I’m one, I happen to know both the Russian and Ukrainian languages and I’m familiar with the history of that area.

It is something that right now the politicians totally ignore and totally distort.

So, and this is to the damage of everybody involved.

So the only way it’s going to be solved is by Ukraine now relinquishing some of those territories and you know how much may be subject to negotiation but emotions are so hard on the side and both sides have been so dug in in trying to achieve something which is not achievable by the methods. Meanwhile, we see the Europeans putting more and more money into defense.

They would not be threatened by Russia in any sense if they weren’t interfering in Ukraine.

And this idea. And of course, my own country is bankrupting us with all of this emphasis on the military.

And as we see as we see further developments, we are seeing more and more means of destruction and of course which if continued is simply not sustainable.

Take a break and watch a bit of this video, of a ride up the highway heading north toward Moscow, with Stanislav Krapivnik on a fine sunny day in Russia. Yes, it can be sunny there, it’s no longer Communist. Watch to see how the Ukr propaganda is demonstrated by the closed gas stations, the massive lineups for fuel, and no cars on the road. (ha, ha)

“The uproar in Ukraine over Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky’s firing midweek of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, an admired technocrat, had less to do with warfare than with issues of corruption. As the press in Kiev have portrayed him, Fedorov turned what was a brutal and losing war against Russia into a contested one by emphasizing the aggressive use of drones. He made clear that he was not interested in sharing the spoils that came from US and European military aid as Zelensky has been accused of doing. Fedorov was in the defense job only six successful months when he was forced out...”

Time for Sy Hersh to close the typewriter and enjoy his retirement. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko resigned July 14th and may end up being posted as ambassador to the U.S. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is always called “President” in western press. Would you still call President trump [sorry, no caps for him] president if he refused to call elections and overstayed his term by two years?

And what exactly is President Putin’s “predicament”? Yes, NATO-backed Ukrainian forces made gains on a couple fronts yesterday, but with some re-deployment, those situations will be cleaned up. In President Putin’s address to SPIEF (St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) he never mentioned the Ukraine situation even once. This little issue in the south is not going to define Russia. The entire drive of the government is for economic growth and productivity and this forum brought in US$84B in new investment to the world’s largest country. Many countries would love this “predicament.”

NATO via its proxy Ukraine is still losing “this brutal war.” A couple days ago, four Tu-22M3 bombers headed for Sea of Azov from Engels-2 airbase in Saratov, with Kh-22/23 missiles, they were offshore south of Crimea and launched missiles at Ukrainian ports. Due to NATO’s intransigence, it has now come to actual war instead of the restricted mobilization of the SMO. An underlying issue is the food supply of Africa.

For the past week or a bit more, the UK-supplied Ukrainian drones (Hersh’s “aggressive use of drones”) has been hitting ships in the Sea of Azoz. Ukraine thought these were part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” and were tankers storing their reserve of petroleum products. Likely some were doing that, but a significant number were holding the grain supply for Africa, waiting to pass through to the Black Sea. In these missile strikes on Ukrainian ports, more grain infrastructure was damaged, again disrupting grain for Africa, and they hope to re-route some to Romanian ports, but those don’t really have adequate capacity. Certainly, more should have been done to enable delivery of critical food supplies, especially in this crop year which is facing many challenges.

If you like so-called writers that produce long posts every day or even more frequently, they are easy to find and rest assured these are AI-generated, nobody can research and write that fast. The other clue is the vapid, incoherent replies to a comment. This site remains AI-free.

Here’s an example of what you may miss by not following the comments section - Scott Ritter’s post “Shoot the Dog” is his address to the SPIEF (Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum) in which he went off-script and mentioned the need to “Shoot the Dog” - you should read this article if you missed it.

This is the top comment on that article from June 10th, with 45 likes as of July 15:

Kissinger’s idea of diplomacy was the art of controlling power, that being, of course, the power of others. In a better world, diplomacy should be about improving relationships, about developing trust, in search of cooperating for the betterment of all. That requires truth from all parties; lacking truth there can’t be trust or cooperation.

The structural basis for the EU was developed in pre-Nazi Germany and later implemented almost exactly as laid out in those plans. The entire scheme is a throw-back to an earlier time, almost an attempt to build a glorified version of the past. The EU continues to struggle from having a currency union but not a fiscal union, and the use of economic extractivism pulling cheap labour from the periphery. Having deprived themselves of cheap Russian energy, they face economic collapse thus imagine a buildup for war as being their economic savior. This plan fails on many fronts, a primary one is their false belief that Russia is collapsing thus an easy war target. The similar US/Israel assumption about Iran has done what?

As Jeffrey Sachs has written in his recent open letter to Chancellor Merz, the Europeans MUST begin serious dialogue with Russia, beginning with ending their military activities along Russia’s borders (that includes Ukraine). They MUST drop their outright hate of Russia - in this condition they think Russia has no right to exist, therefore Russia has no security concerns. Until they can accept this, they are not being truthful to themselves or to Russia; until then, there can be no meaningful diplomacy.

[Jeffrey Sachs’ Open Letter to Chancellor Merz, if you wish to review it]

OK, we’re going deep here, and this author’s work is not AI -

Ryan Perkins has been doing some fantastic work on a clever way that America can break China financially. Remember that Scott Bessent has pulled off these schemes before, for other clients, shorting the British Pound and the Japanese yen, and in 2026, wreaking havoc on Iran with his “economic statecraft,” causing a collapse in their currency to start the public protests. Ryan Perkins calls these efforts against China the “Petroyuan Trap.” His latest update on July 14 was “Priming the Trap.” In this article he reveals “Five signals suggest the financial architecture for a financial attack is being quietly assembled. It’s not proof, but it is a pattern.”

[my summary of his five points]

Creation of a FIMA RMB Repo facility, enabling financial authorities to pledge high-ranked Chinese bonds as collateral to borrow renminbi directly from People’s Bank of China.

Six state-owned banks are allowed to conduct offshore forex transactions within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, and a cross-border digital yuan payment system bypassing the SWIFT system.

Foreign investors have made record purchases of US equities, perhaps repatriating capital ahead of a known event. Yet, the renminbi has been appreciating. This may indicate the accumulation of RMBs (renminbis) in an accumulation move ahead of shorting the currency.

Alongside this, further calls for appreciating the yuan are developing, with the IMF calling the yuan undervalued by 16%, while German Chancellor Merz is claiming it is 30% undervalued, and invoked the 1985 Plaza Accord which tried to control Japan in the ‘80s when Japan was trying to replace the dollar system with the Japanese yen, by forced depreciation of the US dollar.

But here’s the thing - all these war activities of the US/isra3l Empire over the past two years are about the end game, which is China, as per previous posts The War is Coming and The Fury is about China, not Iran. Of course there is also the side-show in Ukraine, in the hopes that Russia will climb the escalation ladder that Europe is holding out (they won’t). Overall, it is an attack on the main body of Asia which contains actual civilizations which refuse to be vassals.

All these on/off war activities, “Schrödinger’s” Strait - (Hormus) are carefully articulated under the guise of tRump’s scatter-brain demeanor, to extend the economic pressure on China, to the detriment of the entire world. Bessent does not care who becomes collateral damage; the suffering of the American sheeple doesn’t even register.

Iran is being used. Every Gulf State is being used.

America can easily be sacrificed if the goal of taking down China succeeds. See my comment(s) on Ryan Perkin’s post:

As you mention about Bessent, as per his “economic statecraft” against Iran, the world’s hegemonic bully is perpetually devising new schemes to undermine any “adversary” - meaning any nation not willing to be a vassal. Even if you had a full treaty ending a kinetic war with the U.S., they would still be hard at it on every conceivable front still in attack mode. No amount of defeat is enough to cause a learning experience with those people, that’s just who they are.

Yes, in building an alternative currency, a lender of last resort is advantageous, as is filling the pool before people can swim (dispersed liquidity) and various swap mechanisms. The usual means of filling the pool is by trade deficit or foreign aid at scale. The flip side of that is funds returning by investment - capturing the savings of the world. China could, however, operate on a forward cash basis which doesn’t need foreign investment along with the drag on the economy of paying interest on foreign debt.

I would guess that China, being a productive economy while the U.S. is an entitlements economy, could weather this storm. The U.S. can’t understand the limits of its power; in fact, they firmly believe there to be no limits to their power. So they go headstrong into another round of war against Iran while being short of munitions. In grabbing for the petroyuan lever, they may be grabbing the wrong end of the stick, which, if the world is lucky, China can use to knock the wobbly legs out of the U.S. financial scheme. That, however, endangers the entire world financial system with all those central banks ending up holding worthless U.S. T-bills.

A mad scheme to break China would mirror the failed “regime change” in Iran - if China is taken out, who could replace that manufacturing? Nobody. If China could knee-cap the U.S. Dollar, there would be a global depression, but in the long run, to everyone’s benefit.

The Strait of Hormus was working as an international waterway before the zionist-inspired attack on Iran. There is no way it will be operational before US strategic oil reserves run out, leaving a large diesel shortage ahead of harvest time. This is the plan!

Russia, seeing what’s going on, has banned diesel exports. At some point, China may start buying oil again, the Petroyuan Trap backers are hopeful about that, but it isn’t essential to their schemes. China, being the world’s biggest importer, has more influence over world oil pricing than OPEC. But they have adequate reserves and many other energy sources so can delay purchases a long time. The rest of Asia is in dire straits for energy, but again, Bessent is like “What, me worry?” So watch for these war activities to carry on into Fall, while nations run down foreign reserves to buy highly-priced energy, all part of their plan for springing the trap. The insidiousness of the Empire knows no bounds.

Rabotayte, bratya! (Work, brothers!)

The orange swine has committed a most egregious foul by attacking Iran, bombing Iran, during the Imam Khamenei’s funeral. This was the biggest state funeral in human history - over an order of magnitude larger even than the one for Josef Stalin. But bombing is what America does - it is all they are capable of, that’s who they are.

Yet the orange swine sat there in Switzerland scribbling his name with a fat felt pen, in German script, on the MoU which he promptly ignored. “Sign here, it’s just a formality.” Yet perhaps ignored even while he was signing it - with the sneaky move of getting their Lebanese-puppet president to write a deal with isra3l to subvert the MoU by allowing permanent stationing of IDF in Lebanon.

So here was a superb opportunity for the U.S. to convince the world that it is actually agreement-capable, that Netanyahu’s vice-president (trump) could sign an agreement then follow its terms - but no, it was all a sham. Therefore, the U.S. has firmly proven to the world that it is a rogue actor in international relations, it cannot stand side-by-side with the world’s normative powers - Russia, Iran, China, and that every policy statement that it issues is a LIE, and absolute lie.

According to Transition Protocol, the orange swine [- not their term] is begging (to Pakistan) that the “negotiations” begin again. Obviously there is no point - any agreement with USA is worthless.

Next step for Iran should be to erase that Amalek on the east shore of the Mediterranean. John Kiriakou has some good comments on that nasty little problem on the TYT podcast, starting about 3:48.

This situation will not end well - the settler colony cannot exist in the same world with Iran. Another point in July 10th Transition Protocol is that Iran will formally leave the non-proliferation treaty, the purpose of that would be to build their bomb. Unlike a lying Western nation, they signed the NPT and therefore would follow it rather than find sneaky escapes from responsibility. All these recent years, stinking Bibi has held up a drawing of a round bomb with a fuse sticking out, pointing to how close Iran is to having a bomb. That was all BS, but now they have actually forced Iran’s hand, to build themselves a bomb. The settle colony has about 30 hydrogen bombs, and time is closing in on when they deploy some on Iran. Iran had best wipe that smear off the map before it is too late. The settler colony has now announced it will attack Iran independently from the U.S. These reports from Nima R. Alkhorshid’s Dialogue Works, July 11. As of July 11, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, until the U.S. backs out of the area and stops trying to force Iran to do things. Iran is now mining the shipping lanes near Oman, so all ships must use the Iran-approved channels.

Iran has launched strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar (Al Udeid AFB) and Jordan’s Muwaffaq al Salti airbase, since the U.S. missiles that hit Iran came from those bases.

Another insult to the Iranian State Funeral was holding the great odor of the NATO summit next door in Turkiyë. They could travel as far as Ankara but lacked the humility to come to the funeral? All the while, insulting Russia with more threats of war and sanctions, and proposing a “no-fly” zone over Ukraine.

Transition Protocol has learned that Pakistan has moved from mediator to operational security guarantor in the revived US-Iran diplomatic channel — providing surveillance, military intelligence, and protection to Iran’s delegation ahead of the confirmed July 11 Islamabad talks. Field Marshal Asim Munir’s discussions with Iranian leadership reportedly went beyond diplomacy into implementation: how to protect the MoU channel under extreme threat conditions, including alleged Israeli disruption attempts during Ayatollah Khamenei’s record-breaking funeral.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have confirmed total commitment to keeping the Islamabad MoU alive and moving forward, with further discussions beginning approximately July 11. They will make it perfectly clear that this MoU is the one and only off-ramp for the USA and failing that, all hell breaks loose. Same option for if the U.S. doesn’t get their dog on a leash (isra3l). Top-level Pakistani military forces will provide security for the Islamabad conferences. All these efforts are explicitly backed by China in partnership with Pakistan, with backing of Russia as well. Pepe Escobar is calling this the Eurasian Century. The U.S. foundational power scenario of control of West Asia via the petrodollar and the Gulf petrostates has come to an end, and isra3l is no longer in a position of control in the area. People will remember this as a pivotal time in history. As mentioned previously, Pakistan is the primary security actor in the area now, again, with backing of China and Russia.

And now, with the reckless orange fool proposing to institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine, peace has never been farther away.

Let’s start with my reply to another “July 4” Op-Ed:

“No number of defeats - Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran - will deter the Hegemon from grasping for world dominance through every tool available - weaponizing the world-reserve currency, controlling who has an energy supply, armed intervention, CIA infiltration (USAID etc.). These traits are hard-wired into the American psyche while overlaid with the patina of Goodness. I doubt that Exceptionalism can be broken except by capture and defeat of America. It certainly can’t come from within, regardless of the number of wishful thinkers.” - posted on: July 4th, 2026: Reflections on America’s Reckoning with Hubris and the Urgent Need for a Better Path - OMID SOURESRAFIL MBBS PHD FHRS - JULY 04, 2026

Again, Maria Zakharova sums it up so well, about the nature of the American beast:

Should Russia Continue Negotiating with the US – An Unreliable Partner? | RU-EN - Freelensia July 3 from Moscow, July 1.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responds to a question about U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine following President Donald Trump’s remarks after the G7 summit. She discusses Washington’s changing positions across different administrations, the value of negotiations despite policy shifts, the Anchorage discussions, and Russia’s view of international agreements and diplomacy.

Press question: At the G7 summit, Donald Trump raised the possibility of revising the “Anchorage Accords” on Ukraine, while already asserting the need to “pressure Russia.”

How does Russia view such frequent shifts in the US stance regarding its dialogue with Russia?

If agreements are so easily repudiated and positions change so quickly, is there even any point in negotiating with an unreliable partner that says one thing today and does another tomorrow?

Maria: Do you have any other options? You know, we proceed from the premise that this is a sovereign state shaping its foreign and domestic policy in this manner.

It is an actor in international relations.

We propose conducting affairs across various domains on a clear, stable, and time-tested foundation of international law, agreements, and the fundamental principles of the UN Charter.

Therefore, when you ask the Russian side why the United States of America changes its position, I believe that question is misdirected. It should be addressed to the American side.

Well, that is how the structure of their statehood is built. I think one could even put it this way: that is just who they are. [emphasis added]

And, I have already said this – that, in principle, it has even become a common understanding that whatever the presidents who come to power in the United States of America may say, it can change with the arrival of the next United States president, exactly the opposite.

The most incredible part – though it used to be incredible, and has now become practically a daily reality – is that they first convince the international community of the need to take certain steps, and then, when another President of the United States comes to power, they convince them of the exact opposite.

Or they simply ignore what their country had previously demanded of the entire international community.

Or they speak of their own interpretation of various obligations that were undertaken not by any individual U.S. president personally, but by the country itself. Of course, they personally attended, signed, insisted upon, or voted for, yet these are obligations assumed by the country as a whole, and they end up being, as it were, completely ignored by the next team that moves into the White House.

What are you talking about? Why has this only started concerning you now? Because the intensity, so to speak, of the change in mood is such … because the current team is experiencing a shift in mood, and because the potential for conflict has become too high.

Yes, I probably would even agree with you that indeed, in all these areas, we are observing, so to speak, indeed some kind of unprecedented volatility across all these areas.

But at the same time, it seems to me that even, I don’t know, the Paris Climate Agreement or the JCPOA, I mean, the so-called “Iran deal,” have already demonstrated how the United States of America behaves in world affairs, driven by the peculiarities of its domestic political structure.

As for Russia, the Russian side has repeatedly noted that the possibilities for ending the conflict around Ukraine were discussed in detail in Anchorage.

Despite the fact that no agreements were formally signed, the heads of state, with the participation of their negotiating teams, reached certain understandings.

Furthermore, as Russian President Vladimir Putin noted in a recent interview, within the framework of the summit in Alaska, the Russian side declared its readiness to make certain compromises.

We call for the results of that high-level meeting to be evaluated precisely in this light.

We note the ongoing attempts by the Europeans to sway the US leadership toward the demands of the Kiev regime, particularly those made during the G7 meeting in Évian.

This was discussed in detail by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during his public appearances.

In particular, on June 24th of this year, during the Primakov Readings forum. We will be sure to add a link to this segment of the briefing.

Meanwhile, the Americans themselves have not informed us of any change in their position through bilateral contacts.

U.S. President Trump’s desire to assist in a settlement has not, in principle, been in doubt.

No one has claimed otherwise either.

So, these are the kinds of assessments that have been repeatedly provided by our leadership, which I have just further and reiteratively informed you about.

As Maria said, regardless of the bluster and incoherence in U.S. posturing, this is how America is presenting itself “as an actor in international relations.” It could be a sincere, trustworthy player on the world stage, but instead plays the fool.

Thus, as foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said, America is not agreement-capable. And never will be, that is an impossibility given their unworkable structure of so-called governance. Yet they carry on in lauding their ridiculous Constitution.

A similar haze over reality persists in NATO’s war on Russia. In an interview on Glenn Diesen’s Greater Eurasia podcast, July 2, Alexander Mercouris states (at 22:31):

It’s obligatory in Europe to pretend that Ukraine is winning. This is what we have to chant now to show our loyalty to our countries.

I did see the president of Finland come out and sat that you know our conditions are still that Ukraine should be part of NATO, which is a very European way of pretending to be for Ukraine but really saying there will be no peace which is what you’re saying if you demand NATO.

[and continuing at 15:21:]

But the question then becomes, what do you do when those objectives are achieved? Do you try and return to negotiations trying to see whether there’s some kind of deal that can be done at that point trying to get the West and Ukraine to accept these realities and to agree to Ukrainian neutral status? I think there are increasing doubts in Moscow that that is possible. In which case the Russians very much I think against their initial wish wishes might decide that they have no real option but to push further west and I think that is something that in the west we have not understood.

[and from 16:39:]

[When] all the rest are captured, the Ukrainian military itself, Ukrainian economy will be so shattered that I don’t think the rest of the war is going to take as long as some people some people assume. But in effect by taking this extreme line, I mean what we are very close to doing is sealing the fate of Ukraine, dooming its future as an independent state.

This notion that Ukraine is winning or could win is pure fantasy, yet it underpins the mindset of all stalwart NATO boosters, as illustrated by my ongoing war of words with Hans Jonsson of Sweden, which you can read here. When people’s minds are made up, the conversation obviously ends. Perhaps Mr. Jonnson can’t verify my claim that WW-III has been stage-managed to be fought on Europe’s soil, since that idea isn’t in AI. It was my “Aha!” moment on June 15 following Prof. David Gibbs’ interview, and has been sent to some important people.

Yet this Ukraine winning fantasy carries on in the MSM press, as illustrated by a front-page article in Globe and Mail July 3rd that uses only the approved buzzwords which, as Alex Mercouris says above, “show our loyalty to our countries” and of course to not offend the diaspora. So you see words such as “Moscow’s full-scale invasion” which is MANDATORY in every article. If it was a full-scale invasion, Ukraine would look like Gaza. Naturally, they keep saying “President Zelensky” although his term expired a couple years ago. They may have an actual election in October and their top general may win, being much more popular than this MI6-trained actor. The article goes on to repeat all the Ukraine winning / Russia losing nonsense.

That is a most important point in Mercouris’s first paragraph, about the Europeans (and their vassal Canada) claiming to be “for Ukraine” but if they keep trying to have Ukraine join NATO or the EU there can never be peace.

The fake news of “Ukraine winning” comes up again in “John Mearsheimer: The End of Russian Restraint & New U.S. Grand Strategy” on Glenn Diesen’s Greater Eurasia podcast, - July 3, 2026. John says:

“And now we see this that everyone has to go and pretend that Ukrainians are winning. We have to look away from all the available facts. It’s just very strange that this is where we are where objective reality doesn’t have any value of its own. Everything seems to be only assessed by the extent to which you’re applauding the right team. And if you’re applauding the Ukrainians, then you have to pretend everything is a brilliant success and look away from the horrific defeats and horrible number of casualties. And otherwise you’re supporting the Russians. I mean it’s like we’re watching a football game. This is pretty much where we are.”

A report by Don Hank reveals, belatedly, that the UN has recognized Ukraine’s treatment of Russian POWs.

In the middle of the fifth year of the war, the United Nations suddenly noticed what had been known since the first days of the war: Ukrainian units were torturing Russian servicemen they had captured.

“About half of the prisoners of war captured by Ukraine, interviewed by my office, reported torture or other forms of cruel treatment, primarily in temporary detention centers,” UN High Commissioner Volker Türk stated during the 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Committee.

It’s not that the international bureaucracy’s acknowledgment of the obvious has changed the reality. The entire so-called civilized world has understood from the start that Ukraine is built entirely on terror, torture, murder, persecution, and suppression of ethnically undesirable citizens—that is, Russians.

But more important events are happening in this world than the navel-gazing in America. Friday, July 3rd began a week-long remembrance and funeral in Iran for Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei and his family (Dr. Mesbah al-Hoda, the Leader’s son-in-law; Seyed Boshra Hosseini Khamenei, his daughter; Zahra Haddad Adel, his daughter-in-law; Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani, his 14-minth-old granddaughter), whose bodies were transferred to the Mosalla of Tehran in the morning for the farewell ceremony for foreign dignitaries. So there were five caskets wrapped in Iranian flags, with the tiny one for the granddaughter. She was a beautiful young toddler, brutally slain by the U.S./isra3l Axis of Evil, for being at home while the leaders were preparing the documents for the supposed peace agreement. Here is a short video of her, singing along to a song, on Dimitri’s Reason2Resist.

The U.S. treachery was hard at work convincing their vassal nations to not attend this state funeral of the century. Of course, vassal states of the isra3l empire didn’t need warnings. From GeoPolitiQ:

“the US officials at the highest levels had launched a comprehensive campaign to dissuade countries from attending the ceremony to pay tribute to the martyred leader.”

…adding that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent confidential instructions to all US embassies and diplomatic mission saying that…

“all recipients of this instruction are obliged to use all capacities of the United States to justify the host country’s authorities that their participation in the funeral ceremony of the Iranian leader will be considered as an unfriendly act and will have negative consequences for their bilateral relations with the United States.”

Marco Rubio himself even discussed the matter with at least 5 Arab countries, while US ambassadors to some African countries threatened to cut off development aids, if the latter had attended the funeral of the Martyred leader! In fact, at least 13 countries, including 3 Eastern European countries, 5 African countries, 2 Persian Gulf Arab countries, and 2 major East Asian countries, withdrew from attending the ceremony under the pressure.

There you see it again, the vile treachery of reaching into the affairs of other nations with threats and blackmail to maintain world dominance.

You can follow more of the Iranian State Funeral on the links above, Dimitri is reporting from there all week and shows the arrivals of the various international delegations from the real nations - Russia, China and others, and the tears and prayers from the delegation from Lebanon. More details are also on the GeoPolitiQ link above.

However, Russia will in the next days, put an end to this nonsense. According to Borzzikman’s report, an influential Russian politician and State Duma deputy, Andrei Ivanovich Kolesnik, officially stated that Russia has no other choice but to launch a massive missile strike on targets in European countries that are actively involved in the production of weapons for the Ukrainian Army. “Unfortunately, everything that is happening indicates that Russia will have to deal a crushing blow to Europe, where the production of missiles and drones for Ukraine is only gaining momentum,” Andrei Kolesnik said. Thus, given the status of this Russian politician, it becomes clear that Moscow has actually announced future missile strikes against the countries of the European Union and Britain. Thus, Borzzikman says, it seems that the experts were right when they said that this war will end only when Russian missiles rain down on the capitals of European countries that are actively helping the Ukrainian Army.

The same theme was repeated on Voennoe Delo, June 24:

Andrei Kolesnik warns Western aggression against Russia could bring devastating consequences, citing nuclear doctrine, NATO drills and rising tensions near Belarus [in Poland].

Any attempt by Western countries to launch military aggression against Russia would bring devastating consequences for those involved, according to Andrei Kolesnik, a member of the State Duma Defence Committee.

Kolesnik said that a direct clash with Russia, which he described as a major nuclear power, would threaten the opposing side with complete destruction. He argued that any country or coalition that commits aggression against Russia would face elimination under the country’s doctrinal documents.

Further to proposed UAF [Ukrainian Armed Forces] attacks on Crimea, the Voennoe Delo has this report:

According to the Telegram channel «Khersonskoye Soprotivleniye», the Ukrainian Armed Forces are considering a landing on Crimea’s western coast and are gathering reserves in Ochakov and Odessa.

The channel says the Ukrainian General Staff may try to carry out the provocation in July 2026. The plan, according to the authors, is based on surprise. They claim Kiev expects Russian forces to be distracted by the concentration of Ukrainian units on the right bank of the Kherson Region and to miss a possible landing in Crimea.

«Khersonskoye Soprotivleniye» also reported that Ukrainian units are now being concentrated near the Dnepr-Bug Estuary. According to the channel, Ukrainian servicemen are being housed in Stanislav, Aleksandrovka, Sofiyevka, Dneprovskoye and other nearby villages. District territorial recruitment center employees are said to be actively helping with the accommodation.

The channel also claims that Ukrainian forces are building up their presence in the Nikolayev and Odessa regions.

Trying to capture Crimea is a fool’s game, throughout history invaders have gone there to die. But the above mentioned attack may have been foiled by the elimination of the boat camp mentioned in my previous post.

Russia has already warned Europe (and Canada) about providing “rear area” manufacturing to supply The West’s war on Russia via Ukraine, providing names and addresses of all those facilities. And yet, according to the Voennoe Dela report, Latvia and Ukraine plan a joint drone plant near the Russian and Belarusian borders, with Riga preparing UAV defenses and deeper defense cooperation.

But I would expect Foreign Minister Lavrov to issue one final direct warning, but would anyone in the MSM report it? Even the MSM-adjacent media keep ignoring this issue. But know that when these attacks (soon) start, the stench of the indignation thrown out by the MSM will leave brown stains on your floor. They have so frequently spouted their propaganda that Russia is weak and failing that they actually believe it. The smack of reality will be shocking.

Russia on Zelensky’s Plan to Choose EU Negotiators | RU-EN | Freelensia, June 28

Maria has a quirky sense of humour, but remember, this is official State position.

Press question: And our second question. Zelensky stated that Kiev reserves the right to determine who will represent European countries at potential negotiations with Russia.

Maria: “Lord of the European Flies“

Press question con’t: At the June EU summit, it was not possible to approve a single candidate for the role of negotiator.

Only one point out of eighteen in the final statement is dedicated to diplomacy. How does Moscow view the very concept of a “European negotiator” appointed by Kiev’s choice?

Maria: I have already spoken about this briefly. Allow me to interrupt. I will allow myself to interrupt you, because I have said it briefly.

The President of Russia Federation, Vladimir Putin, spoke about this extensively and with all the justifications.

He clearly outlined the Russian approach regarding the possible resumption of contacts with Europe.

We are ready to talk with everyone who enjoys the trust of European countries, has not descended into openly Russophobic rhetoric, and is capable of making a constructive contribution to the dialogue.

The article that the publication Politico refused to publish was also dedicated to this. They keep the citizens of the European Union in the dark, blinkered.

I am referring to the article by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, which is precisely dedicated both to the etymology of the crisis in Ukraine and to the problems of European security.

We have always preferred that all goals related to European security and to regional problems be settled through diplomatic means.

But we have not seen any movement toward us, and we do not see it now.

For now, in the EU, everything is limited to speculations regarding the candidacy of a possible negotiator, wrestling a place for oneself at the negotiating table or under the table, I don’t really know.

For us, the very essence of the European position is more important, rather than specific personas and the procedures for their selection.

What we are observing now are attempts by EU members to literally squeeze in, wedge themselves in, and some EU figures of the Kallas type are just trying to stick their faces into a crack, even though the negotiating process has not yet taken any real shape, but they still want to insert themselves somewhere.

Where, apparently, they hope to qualitatively and quantitatively strengthen the positions – no, not their own, but those of the Kiev regime – and dictate peace terms to us, as they think, from a position of strength.

So they must ask themselves a question: are they sovereign states, or have they surrendered their independence even to Zelensky? That is how the question must be posed now.

One of the fresh examples is the joint statement of the “Euro-trio” consisting of Britain, France, and Germany on June 7, which contains a set of literally ultimatums to Russia.

Perhaps this very document was developed by the Briton, the German, and the Frenchman, also laying out napkins and spoons “for sugar” in front of themselves, just as we saw this “trio” in a train car, departing from Kiev. In the same state, perhaps, they developed this document too.

Who knows? Judging by its content, they certainly were not sober.

At the same time, Europe, generally speaking, does not even hide that it sees itself at the negotiating table not as a constructive intermediary, not as a mediator, not as a professional diplomat, but simply as a representative of the anti-Russian camp within some kind of unified delegation of Ukraine and Western Europe.

Some kind of “hybrid” like that. Then they need to admit that they are a party to the conflict.

The statement by Zelensky that you mentioned about the “right” of Bankova to select a negotiator from the European Union also fits into this pattern.

One wants to ask a question: is Zelensky going to look at everyone?

It is rather strange that against the background of providing multifaceted military, financial, and other support to the neo-Nazi Kiev regime and encouraging terrorist attacks on the civilian population of Russia, Europeans are speculating on the topic of some kind of role in the Ukrainian settlement.

If you are completely bogged down in terrorist attacks carried out with your support, how can you pose as peace-loving negotiators?

In the context of the negotiation process around Ukraine, a question arises: what can the Western Europeans offer us at all?

Right now, they are acting on the principle: they pay for this war, therefore it supposedly cannot be ended without them.

In essence, it turns out, this is their only argument. But to this argument, there is also a corresponding answer.

In other words, they are interested in how not to lose their “investments” in the Kiev regime and their own military-industrial complex.

It turns out that they are not interested at all in bringing about a sustainable settlement.

In any case, the prospects for dialogue, regardless of whom it is conducted with, will directly depend on the real readiness and ability of the Europeans to respect our legitimate interests.

And this must be confirmed by concrete actions first and foremost.

If someone wants to help and does so, sincerely striving for peace, then, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “we can only welcome this.”

Obviously, Europe, being involved in the war by funding and supplies support and staffing, cannot pretend to also be a disinterested negotiator. They say they pay for this war, so must be involved in its ending, or they lose their “investment” in the Ukrainian regime. Note that somewhere between WW-II and presently, WW-III, the collective “West” has switched sides from fighting AGAINST Nazis to fighting WITH them. People brush off the “denazification” as mere propaganda, but they ignore history - the Russians rounded up the last of the true Nazis from Ukraine in 1951-1954, but Khrushchev released them to go back home in 1956. Yet, with himself being from Ukraine, he should have known better. Thus, as Dr. Thomas W. Dodman of Columbia Univ. has said, “Wars live on because of their lingering effects. Often the reasons for the next conflict were not fully resolved in the last one.“

Turning to the latest news, you probably aren’t supposed to know this story, but I’m dropping it anyway. George Galloway read this in the tea leaves yesterday which is actually today since he’s in China for an important interview. President Lukashenko of Belarus had two and a half day’s meetings (not hours, DAYS) with Vladimir Vladimirovich (President Putin) then immediately went off to visit the Allies, China and North Korea. Figure on a hugely more intensive Russian approach to the SMO in Ukraine. And with Belarus involvement. Russia is tired of the EU-backed Ukrainian drone attacks and their people want to see some consequences.

In my previous post I mentioned the likelihood of the big Russian planes flying over from Ukrainka base in Amur Oblast to the Saratov air base. But these actions could be in support of Iran, they don’t need that kind of weaponry for Ukraine. The situation re Iran is getting critical.

Since the June 17th Islamabad MOU, signed on behalf of the Empire of Lies by flying the blob over to Europe to scribble his worthless signature on it with a wide felt pen in German script, every activity of the Lying Empire has been to undermine that MOU and get back to fighting isra3l’s war. Even while Vance was at the negotiations pretending to be able to handle the zionist regime, they were working in Congress to eliminate the War Powers Act restrictions, even before any claimed Iranian attack on a vessel trying to transit Hormuz without prior authorization.

As well, the Lying Empire’s working PM, Rubio, was working to undermine the MOU by taking Lebanon off the table. People in Lebanon are in the streets protesting their supposed government caving in to Washington and isra3l, in an agreement signed in Washington to slip out from under the US/Iran MOU, just days after it was signed. This agreement allows isra3l to stay in Lebanon indefinitely, while the MOU demanded their withdrawal. This 3-way agreement demands disarming “non-state actors” (meaning Hezbollah) and curtails Lebanon’s ability to sue for any reason in any court, against the zionist entity. Source, Mahmood OD, June 27. The Empire is so insidious!

It gets worse. Leading up to the MOU negotiations in Switzerland, Pakistani military had credible evidence that under orders of Netanyahu, there would be an assassination attempt of Pakistani Field General Asim Munir. So they sent a message through trusted mediators to Tel Aviv that if you touch our delegation we’re going to wipe you off the map. Apparently they got the message. Source: Pepe Escobar, June 27. But they should have actually done the wiping, ending this entire problem in SW Asia.

On the front in Ukraine, a nuclear sabotage possibility was eliminated. Russian Intel was aware that on June 24, the 93-meter-long container ship “T Moon” arrived at the port of Odessa with yellow and red containers on board, which imply radioactive, chemical and explosive materials. They decided to track where the containers were delivered to, following them to an area in Kyiv. Then followed a Russian strike on the Darnytskyi district, in the SE part of Kyiv, following which local residents began to complain of nausea and a sharp chemical odor in the air, and an increase in background radiation in the area. These materials were stored in bunkers 30 meters deep, but they were destroyed by three Iskandar-M and two Zirkon hypersonic missiles. The Zirkons can easily penetrate that bunker and the Iskandars blew up the contents, including Western and NATO officers in charge. Source: Borzzikman, June 26. They don’t tell you that over 10,000 NATO & U.S. officers have been sent home in boxes so far.

“The total destruction of the Darnytskyi subterranean complex marks a watershed moment in the conflict. By attempting to introduce highly volatile radiological and chemical components into the theater under the guise of energy assistance, the Western managerial elite has instead handed Russian intelligence the means to execute a devastating material defeat. The empty rhetoric of the unipolar core has once again collided with the brutal mathematics of hypersonic realism, leaving the proxy architecture out of hidden options and forcing the population of the capital to breathe in the toxic reality of their leaders’ calculated escalation.” - Russia Truth Substack.

The publicity stunt by the EU-backed Zelenskyy regime to disrupt fuel supplies to Crimea has backfired spectacularly - to date, Russia has blown up over 200 gas stations across eastern Ukraine with precise strikes - there is no more fuel at all along the M-29 highway. The proposed Ukrainian naval attack on the Kinburn Spit in Crimea has been stopped by spotting the boat camp near Parutyne and blowing them up. In Dnipro, Novoskilivka & Pisansy have been liberated. Source: Military Summary, June 28.

On the Iran front, regarding the deliberate destruction of the MOU by the Empire of Lies, realize that this Empire can never back down - strategic defeat is but a fleeting shadow, the gun of empire must be “pried from its cold, dead hands” (Men in Black). The MOU has been violated by tRump again ceasing control of Hormuz by force, prohibited under Article 5 of the MOU. They have bombed Iran repeatedly, not allowed the transfer of any frozen assets and have not stopped isra3l from killing people on all fronts, especially Lebanon. They are openly encouraging Syria to “go in there” and help disarm Hezbollah, their troops are lined up along the border with Lebanon. The Isra3l/U.S./Lebanon treaty allows isra3l permanent occupation in Lebanon, violating Article 1 of the MOU - not just violating it, but essentially annulling the MOU just signed. The Lying Empire has again made existential threats against Iran, violating Article 1 of the MOU. They have continued to build up forces during the “ceasefire,” violating Article 9 of the MOU, which specified no new sanctions or additional forces. Source: Resaon2Resist, June 28.

In other news, the previous pre-war animosity between Pakistan and Iran, mainly over border issues and perhaps some previous U.S. influence over Pakistan has been put aside and replaced with deep appreciation for each other. How so? The settler-colony had been doing terrorist attacks to assassinate Iranian leaders - first killing the Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei on February 28, then Ali Larijani on March 17th. Then these assassinations ended, because the Pakistanis send certain supplies and technology to Iran to break the isra3li methods of discovering the locations of the leaders. This assistance was hugely appreciated by the Iranians. Even with those methods, the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei has been in absolutely top-secret locations while he recovers from very serious injuries from the February 28 attack. Source: Transition Protocol.

Of course AI isn’t going to replace any jobs. What nonsense!

Agility Robotics heads to Wall Street in a $2.5B bet on staffing warehouses with humanoids

Agility Robotics plans to go public via a SPAC merger valuing it at $2.5 billion, focused on commercial deployment of its Digit humanoid robots in warehouses and industrial facilities. Digit performs manual, repetitive, and injury-prone material-handling tasks, with a birdlike leg design and gripper hands to fit industrial workflows and enable future safe human–robot collaboration.

Exoskeleton and robotic arm reduce factory lifting strain by up to 65%

A wearable upper-body exoskeleton integrated with a single-arm collaborative robot reduces upper-arm muscular effort during lifting by up to 65%. The cobot weighs objects, estimates their center of mass, and wirelessly modulates exoskeleton support, enabling asymmetric load compensation. The system allows safe, close human–robot collaboration and task teaching by physical guidance without coding.

People in charge are now asking how they can make work for all the displaced workers. Well, your real existence ended years ago when someone in your family took the bait and moved to the city to take wages. Naturally, when the industrial machine no longer needs you, they spit you out. Cities need to go back to their original purpose - centres of commerce, where you go to trade - NOT where you go to attach yourself to the welfare state. Take your wool to the market town, exchange for durable goods and go back home. The massive social disruption from the demise of “employment” coupled with the rapidly approaching collapse of monetary value in the (previously) wealthy nations will be horrific.

This definitely has military applications for tracking even the quietest submarines:

Fiber-optic cables detect silent whales off Svalbard by tracking pressure waves

Existing seafloor fiber-optic cables can detect silent whales by sensing low-frequency pressure waves generated by their movement, analogous to ship wakes. Using ship AIS data and Rayleigh’s 1917 bubble-collapse equation, the pressure signals were calibrated and then applied to track a blue whale after vocalizations ceased. This approach enables passive monitoring of whale presence and movements for conservation.

The conference regarding the “MOU” at Bürgenstock almost failed three times when the Iranian members almost walked out. But Prince Fisal, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, phoned directly to the Iranians and the Pakistani mediators, that this conference MUST BE successful - “it must not fail” - exact words.

Security at the conference was secured by Pakistani deep intel services plus 2000 Swiss Army personnel and a 46 km no-fly zone around it, otherwise the Iranians would not attend. These details provided by Pepe Escobar and Zulfiqar Ali on BREAKING-PEPE: SAUDI ARABIA JUST DUMPED AMERICA-Will Pakistan’s Nuclear Umbrella Now Cover Saudi? via Transition Protocol, June 23, 2026

The entire security architecture in West Asia has been rearranged by the Saudi-Pakistani security agreements. This arrangement provides security for the entire Gulf region including the Emirates and Saudi Arabia itself, where presently 8,000 Pakistani troops are already deployed in King Abdulaziz air base with JF17 squadrons and the authorization to bring up to 80,000 troops. Saudi Arabia has abandoned connection and subservience to the predatory hegemon. From Pakistan, Sharif and Munir will fly to Riyad later this week, Thursday or Friday, for more serious talks. This brings the entire region under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella, with subtle backing by China. The Saudis have guaranteed backup for the US$12B transfer to Iran.

My comments: So the MOU has proceeded, this representing a strategic surrender by the predatory hegemon. But will this snake-in-the-grass, America, lie quietly by while this process carries on? Remember, this Bessent is the ghoul who in past lives shorted the Bank of England and then the Bank of Japan for billions, then carried out his “economic statecraft” to enable the initial public uprising in Iran which allowed the MOSSAD-CIA insertion of the armed rabble to carry out random destruction and carnage. What possible tricks could be deployed to disrupt the MOU and again damage Iran? Try this one: after the plane loads, yes plane loads of cash arrive in Tehran, since U.S. paper currency is no longer silver or gold certificates, they could simply collapse the old currency and begin a new issue, either below, at, or above par - locals can take their old dollars to their bank to exchange for the new currency. Foreigners are screwed. Iran had best put that cash right back on another plane to Shanghai Currency Exchange and change it for gold, immediately, or all they have is rather small fish wrap. As well, the U.S. may not be able to keep their dog (isra3l) on a leash, since that dog has “nuclear” toys - the Kompromat which could wipe out the entire US admin, or the bomb-type which could wipe out Tehran.

In any case, if the MOU and succeeding talks carry on, given the new security architecture of West Asia, the U.S. petrodollar is dead, which includes the entire U.S. economy. The Gulf States will sell oil, gas, etc., in whatever currency they wish, instead of being required to money-launder it back though the U.S. economy. That is the end of America extravagant consumption, extravagant military imperialism and the end to that Hegemon being in everyone’s face. The future is not new paint on the past, that’s passed, it has moved on.