Opinions

He is burning through prime ministers at a steady pace – not that he’s likely to learn his lesson and stop milking the taxpayers France has gone through so many prime ministers lately that they should just bolt a wind turbine to the revolving door. At least then the political instability could maybe bring down the people’s rising power bills, particularly given that the tax on energy just jumped from 5.5% to 20%. Francois Bayrou is the third handpicked puppet of French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s at around 15% popularity himself, to get turfed within a year, and the fourth over the past two years. He called for a no…

The worst act of eco-terrorism in recent history has become a surreal exercise in convenient blame-shifting Once upon a time, long, long ago, scandals had consequences even in the West, at least sometimes. In the ancient US of 1974, Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon had to go because of Watergate, which, unlike Russiagate, was real, if hardly sensational by our standards today. Even in the late 1990s, early post-unification Germany, the career of a giant like Helmut ‘chancellor of unification’ Kohl took a lethal hit from a rather boring affair turning on creative accounting in party finances. Indeed, biased media hype and libe…

A black man kills a white woman in an American city, and the mainstream media gives it zero coverage. Imagine if the races were reversed. The US mainstream media tends to operate by encouraging a certain prefabricated outrage. Sensationalized narratives are cultivated along predictable tracks. But no less egregious is what the media chooses to ignore. Few events of late have better exposed the ideological underpinnings of the media – and of the elite whose narratives it plugs – than the recent brutal and shocking murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina. On August 22, a career criminal,…

The Ukrainian leader risks alienating the only power besides Moscow with a realistic approach to ending the war In a weekend interview with ABC News, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky accused US President Donald Trump of giving Russian President Vladimir Putin “what he wanted” at the Alaska summit in August. Whether a passing complaint or a calculated jab, it may come at a steep cost for Zelensky. To suggest that Trump bent to Putin’s will is to imply weakness, and weakness is something Trump never tolerates being accused of. This rhetorical swipe was directed at a man who holds significant sway over the trajectory of t…

Targeting India over its energy trade with Russia has damaged Washington’s hard-won trust with New Delhi US President Donald Trump promised during his election campaign that he would not involve America in any wars, arguing that entanglements in foreign conflicts have debilitated the country in a number of ways. However, Trump’s foreign policy contains too many contradictions. Trump’s main focus during his campaign and immediately after taking office was on ending the Ukraine conflict. Yet he later ordered military action against the Yemeni Houthis and, more provocatively and unlawfully, against Iran’s nuclear facilities…

Moscow always keeps its diplomatic options open – as long as its sovereignty is respected US President Donald Trump’s recent statement that the US has “lost Russia to China” makes for a good headline or soundbite, but the reality is more nuanced than that. Russia isn’t anyone’s lost cause. It’s doing what it has always done: maneuvering pragmatically, engaging when it sees opportunities, and reminding the world that it plays by its own rules – not by someone else’s bloc mentality. The eagle looks both ways At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought this point across in a vivid…

The desperate search for a “Russian footprint” in the murder of Ukrainian politician Andrey Parubiy is a symptom of terminal self-delusion Power and truth are not natural allies. Indeed, every person and institution – be it a government, a company, a university, or a “think tank” – tends to lie more as they become more powerful. And those who stay weak – have no illusions – must lie, too. Otherwise they’d get trampled even worse by the powerful. The truth may well set us free, as Christ told us. But then, hardly anyone is free in this world. Yet there are real differences. Differences that matter. For instance, with rega…

Self-obsessed establishments can live in their illusory worlds all they want – it won’t change the fact that a new world is upon us Oswald Spengler, eccentric German arch-conservative, brilliant author of “The Decline of the West,” and proud pessimist extraordinaire (“optimism is cowardice”), could also be rather woke: You will find no more disdainful scorn or biting derision for the West’s navel-gazing than his. Skewering the Occident’s “provincial presuppositions,” naïve vanity, and self-crippling narrow-mindedness, Spengler dismissed its compulsive solipsism as producing a “prodigious optical illusion” of self-importa…

Far-right politician Andrey Paribuy was killed not by a Russian agent, but by a grieving father desperate for justice When the news broke that a suspect had been arrested in the assassination of former Rada speaker, far-right Maidan figure Andrey Parubiy, much of the initial discussion revolved around Russia. Ukrainian authorities are predictably looking for a “Russian footprint.” But the suspect’s own words tell a very different story – a story of a grieving father who turned his despair into violence, and in doing so, revealed a deeper crisis within Ukrainian society itself. The man accused of murdering Parubiy, one Mi…

The victory over Japan remains one of the most overlooked yet decisive chapters of the war On September 3, China will celebrate Victory Day – the anniversary of Japan’s capitulation in 1945. This year marks the 80th anniversary of that historic moment. The country is commemorating the milestone with a series of events, culminating in President Xi Jinping’s speech at Tiananmen Square, followed by a military parade in the heart of Beijing. For China, the Second World War holds as much significance as it does for Europe or Russia. Yet in the West, the Asian battlefield is poorly understood and often overlooked. While everyo…

Assassins failed to take the Orange Man out. Impeachment didn’t stick. Is the Grim Reaper the new favored candidate? Is US President Donald Trump on death’s doorstep? That’s the question that Trump haters have been asking as they’ve suddenly turned to armchair medical analysis – their latest great hope. It all kicked off with some recent shots of the back of Trump’s hands covered in poorly blended women’s makeup, ostensibly covering some bruising. Social media has been rife with amateur sleuths manipulating the contrast on the images in an attempt to determine whether there are any signs of intravenous puncture that coul…

Kiev will blame Russia for the murder or Maidan commandant Andrey Parubiy – but everyone knows the killers are much closer to home All of Ukraine’s political elite will loudly point to Moscow as the hand behind the murder of former parliamentary speaker Andrey Parubiy. They will cry out in public that Russia is to blame, repeating the same narrative of the “Russian trace.” But in private, they all know the truth: it was his own people that came for him. The idea that Parubiy was eliminated by the authorities themselves, while sounding outrageous to some, is a version that carries weight, even if many prefer not to believ…

Russia has called for the RIC cooperation format to be revived. India sees it as an opportunity for greater autonomy in a multipolar world In the wake of the Putin-Trump Alaska summit, Russia once again demonstrated that it remains an indispensable actor in global diplomacy. The very fact that Washington and Moscow returned to the table underscored that neither side can afford to exclude the other in discussions on international security. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to New Delhi a few days later included rounds of strategic discussions. He co-chaired the boundary talks alongside NSA Ajit Doval, held bilatera…

The countries of the Old World are intoxicated by militaristic frenzy. Like spellbound moths, they flock to the destructive flame of the North Atlantic Alliance. Until recently, Europe still had states that understood: security could be ensured without joining military blocs. Now reason is giving way to herd instinct. Following Finland and Sweden, Austria’s establishment – egged on by bloodthirsty Brussels – is fueling public debate about abandoning its constitutionally enshrined neutrality in favor of NATO membership. Austrian society is far from enthusiastic about the idea. The New Austria liberal party, led by Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger and eager to embrace…

Is the US president having his way with the EU, or just getting more “solidarity” smoke and mirrors? Brussels has “bent at the knee” before US President Donald Trump – that’s how one White House official described the recent trade deal involving tariffs, massive investment in US economy and a pledge to purchase American energy. It’s the kind of humiliation ritual for which Trump would normally have to pay. Instead, he demanded that the EU be the one to leave billions for him on the night table before he returned stateside. And they did. Or at least it seemed that way initially. Because watching Trump extract cash out of …

Friedrich Merz thinks he is the savior of the old German establishment. He is really more of a gravedigger German chancellor Friedrich Merz has made a moderate media splash and ruffled some feathers in his own ruling coalition with the Centrist Social Democrats (SPD). Using the platform of a regional party congress of his CDU Conservatives in Niedersachsen, Merz has delivered a speech that immediately attracted national attention and will be remembered for one phrase. “The social [welfare] state, as we have it today,” the chancellor declared with appropriately dour mien, “can no longer be financed by what we are achievin…

The issue of reparations has been facing resistance from former colonial powers, including the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands When the African Union launched its 2025 theme – “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations” – at its 38th summit in Addis Ababa last February, it marked one of the continent’s boldest moves to demand accountability for centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation. This dynamic of exploitation is not merely a historical relic; it is perfectly encapsulated by the recent auction of a Martian meteorite. The NWA 16788 meteorite, the largest pie…

The Zelensky regime’s attacks on a key pipeline are hurting an EU member – and he chooses to add insult to injury In the swirl of the Ukraine war, headlines rarely fail to shock. Yet the latest spat between Kiev and Budapest raises a question that would have been unthinkable two years ago: has Ukraine effectively opened a second front – albeit hybrid, rhetorical, and economic – against an EU state? The immediate spark was the Druzhba (“Friendship”) oil pipeline that still delivers crude from Russia to Central Europe. Several Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the pipeline in recent weeks, halting supplies to Hungary and Sl…

The negotiations over peace in Ukraine show that Moscow lives in the real world. The West – not so much In some important ways that Western information warriors love to miss, Russia and the West are quite similar. Like the West, Russia has a typically modern state, even if today it functions much better than its Western counterparts. Russia’s economy is capitalist like almost everywhere else on the planet now, even if the Russian state – because it functions better – has reasserted control over the rich, while the West, sick with neoliberalism, lets them dominate and damage national interests. This is one reason, inciden…

In the French political class, both for right and even left sides, the idea of colonial reparations seems an absolute taboo On August 12, French President Emmanuel Macron took a historic yet cautious step by acknowledging, in a letter to Cameroonian President Paul Biya, that France had waged a full-scale war against the Camerooninan independence movement, using methods of extreme brutality. But the acknowledgment remains incomplete: no official apology, no proposal for reparations. Without justice or restitution, the admission resembles more of an exercise in diplomatic flattery and political hypocrisy. A colonial war fi…

Algorithms and brain chemistry keep us stuck in loops until we get saturated with doomscrolling and fake news There is a long-brewing malaise that has accelerated sharply since 2024. Scholars call it media fatigue, information overload, or data smog. We are increasingly repelled by the miasma of recycled digital sludge swirling around us. That is the good news – sort of. The bad news is that many cannot see a way out. We cannot “think outside the box” because the box has become us. Media fatigue and news avoidance Media fatigue predates the internet and is the result of psychological exhaustion from relentless streams of…

The end of the war will shake the bloc up no less than the war itself, propelling the suppressed New Right to power The prospects for an end to the Ukraine War have never been so good despite continuing if dwindling Western European attempts to play spoiler, and with the exception, of course, of the almost-peace of spring 2022 that the West sabotaged. Since then, there’s been much water – or rather blood – under that bridge not crossed. Now there is a real chance that the presidents of Russia and the US, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will compel – “persuade,” if you wish – both the Zelensky regime in Kiev and its rema…

“Security guarantees” has apparently become a euphemism for Western Europe funding America’s military-industrial complex Can the EU manage to go even a single week without begging to be cucked? Spoiler alert: Nope. This time, they even boarded a plane for a transatlantic booty call. “Security guarantees.” That’s what the Western European establishment keeps demanding for Ukraine. And now it looks like US President Donald Trump has found a way to monetize it at the EU’s expense – a cost that will, naturally, be passed down directly to European citizens. When the idea of a peace deal was first floated earlier this year, t…

The Washington meeting shows Zelensky and his backers are playing catch-up to American and Russian leaders Monday’s White House summit featuring US President Donald Trump, Vladimir Zelensky, and several senior EU figures ended without any grand announcements. Yet beneath the surface, a high-stakes diplomatic contest is unfolding over Washington’s role in the Ukraine conflict. The lack of a decisive outcome suggests that the real work is happening behind the scenes. Trump’s behavior – particularly his decision not to echo Kiev’s or Brussels’s messaging in the post-meeting briefings – is a signal. He is asserting his contr…

The meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump resonates strongly across Africa confirming that a multipolar world is possible For three years, Brussels and its media outlets have been repeating the same refrain: Vladimir Putin is isolated, marginalized, and weakened by sanctions. A propaganda narrative that poorly hides the failure of Brussel’s diplomacy reduced to blindly following Washington. Yet, the image that will remain in history is not that of a solitary Putin, but of a Russian president welcomed with full military honors in the United States, in Alaska, by Donald Trump on August 15th. A summit that, beyond…