American Women Suck

Convicted far-right extremist Sven Liebich reportedly took advantage of a recent law prior to being incarcerated A German neo-Nazi will serve his sentence in a women’s prison after taking advantage of a new law permitting registration under a different gender, media have reported. Sven Liebich, a former member of the banned far-right group Blood and Honor, was convicted in 2023 on multiple counts, including incitement to hatred, defamation, and insult. He appealed the sentence and lost. However, late last year, Liebich registered as female under Germany’s Self-Determination Act, a reform passed during Olaf Scholz’s government that came into effect in November. The law allows people to change their gender and first name at a registry office without a court ruling. Critics have warned the reform could be open to abuse. According to German daily FAZ, he has now been ordered to serve 18 months at Chemnitz women’s prison in Saxony. Liebich appeared in court wearing a leopard-print top, a large hat, make-up and carrying a handbag. © Getty Images / picture alliance / Contributor Now officially listed as Marla-Svenja, Liebich argued the change was necessary to avoid “discrimination” in a male facility. He has since appeared in public in women’s clothing while still sporting a moustache. © Getty Images / picture alliance / Contributor Liebich was convicted on multiple counts, including incitement to hatred, defamation, and insult. Domestic intelligence services in Saxony reportedly classify him as a far-right extremist active both locally and nationwide. He has been photographed wearing a Nazi-style armband at rallies where black-clad demonstrators marched with red, white and black flags. The armband carried the slogan ‘Sicherheits-Abteilung,’ or SA, echoing the abbreviation of Hitler’s stormtrooper division. © Getty Images / SOPA Images / Contributor According to media reports, the 53-year old previously burned Pride flags and described transgender people as “parasites,” raising questions over the motives behind his transition. The chief public prosecutor said prison officials would determine whether Liebich’s placement threatens security and order. If so, he may be transferred to another facility. View the full article

President Donald Trump has ruled out deploying American troops, but is open to providing air support Kiev’s Western European backers have asked the US to deploy F-35 jets to Romania as “security guarantees” to help end the Ukraine conflict, The Times reported on Wednesday. In addition, they reportedly want Washington to supply Kiev with Patriot and NASAMS interceptor missiles, as well as “permission to fly spy planes over the Black Sea.” US President Donald Trump on Tuesday told Fox News that he had ruled out deploying American troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia but that air support was possible. “They are willing to put people on the ground. We’re willing to help them with things, especially, probably... by air,” he said. Senior Western European and US military chiefs have since met in Washington to discuss the “logistics” of a security package, The Times wrote. NATO already runs what the paper described as “policing missions” over the Black Sea from the Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase in Romania, its largest European airbase. The facility was used by US forces during their invasion of Iraq and would most likely serve as a base for the F-35s, The Times wrote. European NATO countries also reportedly want guarantees that they would have access to US satellite and intelligence data, according to the newspaper. Moscow has previously warned that any airfields, in any country, will be legitimate targets if they host jets participating in combat missions against Russian troops involved in the Ukraine conflict. Russia has also repeatedly warned that it will consider any NATO troops deployed in Ukraine as valid military targets – whether they are sent under the guise of “peacekeepers” or otherwise. Any such deployment risks a direct clash and “uncontrollable escalation” between Russia and the West, Moscow has said. View the full article

Kiev plans to demand that Russia be weakened through sanctions even after a peace agreement is reached, the Russian foreign minister said Kiev is openly demonstrating it has no interest in long-term peace with Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, pointing to recent remarks by Ukrainian officials. Following the summit in Alaska between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, and subsequent talks in Washington with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and European leaders, the US administration said a peace deal had become more feasible. The White House described the outcome of the talks as progress, noting there was “a light at the end of the tunnel.” At a press conference on Thursday, Lavrov confirmed that significant progress had been achieved during the Alaska summit. However, he underlined that Ukrainian officials continue to comment on a possible resolution “in a very specific way that shows they are not interested in a sustainable, fair, long-term settlement.” He pointed to a statement by key Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podoliak, who recently stated that Kiev would acknowledge that some regions are “de facto” lost to Russia. However, once Kiev secures security guarantees it would seek to regain them and demand that the West impose sanctions aimed at weakening Russia and damaging its economy. According to Lavrov, such rhetoric demonstrates that the Ukrainian leadership, encouraged by its Western sponsors, are pursuing goals antithetical to the joint efforts of Trump and Putin to eliminate the root causes of the crisis. Instead of working toward a settlement, Lavrov argued, Kiev and its backers want to aggravate those causes further by forming anti-Russian military alliances. He suggested that Ukraine’s refusal to discuss a settlement before receiving security guarantees is intended to preserve what he called the “neo-Nazi, Russophobic regime” in Kiev. The minister also accused Kiev’s European sponsors of trying to “disrupt” the peace agenda by ignoring Russia’s interests and demanding security guarantees for a country “that professes neo-Nazi values, grossly violates the rights of national minorities, legislatively tries to exterminate the Russian language in all spheres of life, prohibits the canonical Orthodox Church." “I hope this recklessness will fail and we will continue to follow the course agreed upon by President Putin and President Trump,” Lavrov said. View the full article

Cyril Ramaphosa has said the continent is seeking partners who understand sustainable development and mutual industrialization South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has called on global partners, particularly Japan, to shift from aid-based engagement to investment-focused collaboration with Africa. Speaking at the plenary session on the economy at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), Ramaphosa said Africa is ready to shape its future amid a rapidly evolving global landscape. ”Africa is not seeking aid. It is seeking partners. Partners that understand value co-creation, sustainable development, and mutual industrialisation,” he said, drawing strong reactions from delegates attending the high-level summit. Ramaphosa stressed that Africa, and South Africa in particular, is responding to global economic uncertainties, the transformation of trade patterns, and the rise of new industrial revolutions with bold reform and strategic intent. He outlined how South Africa was modernising its economy to attract and sustain foreign investment. ”We have stabilised our energy supply and are modernising our infrastructure. We are opening ports and rail to private sector investment,” he said, noting that these reforms are aimed at supporting South Africa’s re-industrialisation agenda centred on localisation, green energy, and regional integration. Africa is not seeking aid. It is seeking partners. Partners that understand value co-creation, sustainable development and mutual industrialisation.#TICAD9 pic.twitter.com/wXX0yif9lH — Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) August 21, 2025 Ramaphosa also highlighted South Africa’s expanding manufacturing base, particularly in electric vehicles, green hydrogen, health products, and digital infrastructure. These sectors, he said, offer opportunities for investors who are looking for sustainable and scalable partnerships. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) featured prominently in his speech. Ramaphosa called it “central to our economic vision,” and positioned South Africa as a gateway for Japanese and global firms to access the growing African market. ”We are actively working with the AfCFTA Secretariat to finalise value-chain protocols in automotive, agro-processing, pharmaceuticals and textiles,” Ramaphosa said. He added that efforts are underway to harmonise rules of origin and upgrade border infrastructure to enable efficient trade. In a thinly veiled reference to recent US tariff hikes on African goods, Ramaphosa warned of the dangers of over-reliance on single markets and underscored the importance of diversifying trade partnerships. ”We call on our Japanese counterparts to support tariff cooperation to ease market access for African goods,” he said. Ramaphosa also reiterated South Africa’s commitment to creating a conducive investment environment and called for partnerships in financing infrastructure, digital transformation, skills development, and youth innovation. Through his remarks, Ramaphosa reaffirmed South Africa’s long-standing push to promote investments over aid—a message he has consistently stressed in engagements with international partners. ”Let us work together not as donors and recipients, but as equal partners building a prosperous future,” he said. First published by IOL View the full article

The end of the war will shake the bloc up no less than the war itself, propelling the suppressed New Right to power The prospects for an end to the Ukraine War have never been so good despite continuing if dwindling Western European attempts to play spoiler, and with the exception, of course, of the almost-peace of spring 2022 that the West sabotaged. Since then, there’s been much water – or rather blood – under that bridge not crossed. Now there is a real chance that the presidents of Russia and the US, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will compel – “persuade,” if you wish – both the Zelensky regime in Kiev and its remaining backers in NATO-EU Europe to return to reality: namely, to accept, if tacitly, that Russia is winning the war on the ground and that a later peace will only bring further unnecessary losses for Ukraine and its Western users. Nothing, except death, is certain until it is in the past. This peace is still in the – hopefully near – future. Yet we can already think about its consequences. Regarding the 32 European countries that are either in NATO, the EU, or both, this is usually done with an eye to military posture, foreign policy, and the economy (oddly enough, in that order). How long, for instance, will it take for hysterical predictions of a Russian attack on at least the Baltics if not Warsaw, Berlin, and – who knows – Luxembourg, to wear off? What will happen to the new monster-debt-driven militarism? Will the NATO-EU Europeans ever be sensible enough again to rediscover diplomacy and cooperation with Russia? If so, when? Before or after they finally collapse under the weight of energy prices, deindustrialization, and public debt? The answer to all questions above will depend on how the domestic politics of key European states develop. In that respect, the single most important question is about the future of Europe’s currently rising, even surging New Right (an umbrella term for parties that are commonly labeled, for instance, “right-populist,” “hard right,” or “far right”). But this logic also works the other way around. If the Ukraine War ends mostly on Moscow’s terms, as now supported even by Washington, this peace will inevitably influence politics inside NATO-EU Europe and in particular the chances of the New Right. Read more From cold war to cold peace: What the Anchorage and White House meetings mean for the world The New Right advance is especially significant in three key countries: France, Germany, and Great Britain. They have in common that their respective New Right parties – Rassemblement National (RN), Reform UK, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – are leading national polls. While this is similar to several other European states, such as Spain and Austria, the British, French, and German cases are special because of their economic and political weight. The New Right surge is by no means new. It has been building for about two decades now, and for some observers, its triumph is already an accomplished fact: It was last spring, in the run-up to EU parliamentary elections, that Politico acknowledged that the “longstanding effort” to keep the New Right out of government was “officially over.” That turned out to be a little premature: In Austria, Germany, and France, current government set-ups are still based on excluding the New Right. Yet sometimes, another word for “premature” is “prophetic.” The pressure from the New Right parties has not slackened but increased. Current measures to ignore their popular backing at all costs have a whiff of despair about them and may fail entirely in the near future. Take, for instance, the cases of Germany and Romania. For Ian Bremer, a popular American geopolitical consultant, commentator, and reliable organ of the Centrist mainstream party line, they stand for success in fending off the New Right. Yet, ironically, both cases are telling, but not for the reasons Bremer imagines. In Germany and Romania, he reminds us, elections this year produced Centrist governments “despite a rise in support for the far right.” What Bremer forgets to mention is that in both cases, these Centrist victories were the outcome of foul play. In Romania, on the fringes of the EU, the methods used were particularly brutal and shameless. A massive challenge from the new right under Calin Georgescu could only be stopped by flagrant lawfare. Without it, Bucharest would already have a New Right president, just like Warsaw. Read more Ukraine has lost over 1.7 million troops – leaked docs In Germany, land of order and rules, things were only a little more subtle. To keep Berlin under Centrist control despite an electoral breakthrough success of the AfD, two things were done, one “merely” against the spirit of the constitution, the other in all likelihood amounting to either literally unbelievable incompetence or deliberate electoral falsification, even if carried out locally. The so-called “firewall” (a euphemism), an establishment policy to treat the AfD unlike all other parties and exclude it from coalition building, is an offense to basic fairness, as well as the German constitution’s substance, since it treats the votes of AfD voters as, in effect, of lesser weight. This makes a real and decisive difference. Without the “firewall,” a New Right-Centrist coalition would already rule in Berlin. The other dirty trick without which the current German government could not have been made was to somehow “misplace” a large number of votes – no one knows exactly how many, because the urgently needed nationwide recount is being stalled – for its insurgent challenger from the Left, Sarah Wagenknecht’s BSW. Otherwise, the BSW would almost certainly have taken enough seats in the new parliament to make the current ruling coalition arithmetically impossible: German democracy has the dubious – yet not unique – distinction of having systematically disadvantaged both its New Right and its new Left Parties to “save” itself from, in effect, the citizens. Add the case of France, another country where an electoral outcome was manipulated shamelessly to, in effect, disenfranchise both New Right and New Left voters, and the question becomes even more obvious. How much more of this kind of chicanery before the word “democracy” loses any meaning it may still have? Crucially, hence, the methods that Europe’s Centrists use to hold back the New Right’s advance undermine Centrist credibility and increase that of the New Right. Not to even speak of the obvious boost that the European New Right is getting from the success of the US variant. So, here we are. Driven by voters’ concerns over immigration, the economy, social and cultural norms, and the general failure of cynical elites to care, Europe’s New Right is on the offensive. Centrist defenses are desperate and counterproductive. And help from “daddy” across the Atlantic won’t come for the Centrists but for the New Right. While its lead is not (yet) overwhelming and the timelines of national elections, as well as complications of coalition building mean it is too early for firm predictions, one thing is certain: there is a real possibility of one or several domestic-politics earthquakes with far-reaching consequences for international politics. Read more What is the ‘coalition of the willing’ – and why it’s falling apart It’s no wonder the Russian leadership makes no secret out of watching attentively, as is its right, in fact duty as a matter of due diligence in foreign policy. Because the obvious question is: what would New Right participation in or even domination of government mean in France, Germany, and Great Britain, the three problem-ridden but still comparatively powerful countries that are home to NATO-EU Europe’s biggest economies and have traditionally set much of the political tone, too? And what would be the effect of an end to the Ukraine War – in effect, a Russian victory – on the New Right’s chances to make these earthquakes happen? In France, Germany, and Great Britain, Centrist politicians and their mainstream media have long charged the New Right with serving Russia. Genuine affinities in ideological and political aims – whether you like or dislike those aims is a different matter – have been maliciously misread as, in effect, nothing but an outcome of Russian subterfuge and bribery. Oddly enough, the same “logic” never applies to the massive, almost indecent overlap of Centrist positions that has produced, for instance, Atlanticism. If Europeans align with Washington’s positions, as the rule implies, that must be their free choice and could not possibly have anything to do with American influence channeled through, for instance, mainstream media, think tanks, and of course covert means as well. But if Europeans even show a desire to at least understand Moscow’s positions, now that simply must be something the big bad Russians made them do. In this regard, an end to the Ukraine War is likely to deprive European Centrists of one of their favorite tools of neo-McCarthyite New Right bashing. In Britain, for instance, the ruling Labour Party has just started a fresh campaign explicitly geared toward damaging Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage by hammering the local version of the daft Russia-Russia-Russia theme. Read more Six takeaways from a week of Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy In the German AfD, some politicians seen as too close to Russia have just been marginalized to create an overall less Russia-friendly image. And yet, fortunately, that is a surface effect due to media pressure. Witness recent X posts by the AfD’s single most important leader, Alice Weidel. Weidel has not stopped criticizing the aggressive course of the German government and its waste of billions on arming Ukraine. She keeps demanding a normalization with Russia through a realistic foreign policy focused on German national interest. Peace in and over Ukraine is very likely to benefit Europe’s New Right and make life even harder for European Centrists. Centrists will lose one of their main instruments of whipping up war scares among their populations. The New Right will be less vulnerable to smears of being Russia’s fifth column, while its realistic and constructive positions on policy toward Russia will become only more plausible. Finally, once peace happens, the war and those in the West who provoked and prolonged it may finally come under the intense scrutiny they deserve. An honest, critical assessment of the bloody Centrist war folly – including politicians, experts, and mainstream media – would further undermine Centrism’s hold. Everyone knows that the Ukraine War brought great change to Europe. And so may the Ukraine Peace. View the full article

“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, the UK and France tried to hype up the concept of putting 30,000 EU troops in Ukraine – but only if peace broke out long enough to render the exercise glaringly useless and redundant. The plan depended on US air cover babysitting them while they did pushups, burpees, and awkward small talk with the American corporate contractors who would no doubt move in to monetize the latest frontier of shock-and-awe liberation. But EU citizens seemed unmoved, and the elected officials who rely on them to remain in their cushy seats of power knew it. Apparently, a militarized Burning Man in a “liberated” Ukraine doesn’t exactly sell to Europeans. Next, Western Europeans were carpet-bombed with stereoscopic rhetoric about the necessity to blow a ton of cash on weapons so Europe could guarantee BOTH its own security and Ukraine’s. Without even actually being in the EU, Ukraine was already being treated like the free perfume sample tossed into every shopping bag at Sephora – the one that makes your groceries reek whether you wanted it or not. And because Ukraine had become rhetorically inseparable from the EU, the Eurojokers in charge started invoking a future Russian invasion date for Europe of 2030. It’s like a new form of hypochondria. Except instead of reading about a disease online and convincing yourself that you have it, they started believing that Russia was invading them just from observing events in Ukraine. Read more Putin wants Ukraine conflict to end – Trump This “2030 invasion” propaganda seems to have originated from NATO-adjacent think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which last year cited 2030 as the date of Russia’s “military reconstitution.” The RAND Corporation has also warned of a “revanchist Russia” in a report on the “future of warfare in 2030” that will fight “its neighbors.” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte then parlayed all this into a demand for European members of the US-led weapons lobby to cough up 5% of GDP in defense spending, up from the 2% previously demanded at Trump’s insistence. The Euroclowns started trying to get buy-in through active audience participation, telling citizens to pack canned tuna and water into go-bags in preparation for Putin’s 2030 arrival. They even floated the idea of citizens investing in special financial products to fund European defense. If you forego just one Starbucks visit per week, maybe you can help buy a whole tank someday for someone who really needs it. Scary times indeed! Better obey Daddy Trump via NATO and pledge 5% of GDP on weapons while the local boulangerie struggles to crank out baguettes thanks to insane energy costs. Maybe we can all make life easier for the clowns trying to triangulate all this and just eat bullets instead? It became clear a while ago that this whole “security guarantee” charade was a pretext for the weapons racket. Europe has even ramped up weapons factory production to triple speed, according to the Financial Times. Now sit back and watch them screw it up. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand… Read more The EU and Kiev are losing, and Trump is my witness Well, that didn’t take long. NATO has just applauded Germany’s commitment to fund “a $500 million package of military equipment and munitions for Ukraine sourced from the United States, under NATO’s new Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative.” It has also emerged that the EU’s favorite dependent, Ukraine, will now blow $100 billion of its allowance on AMERICAN weapons – for the same “security guarantees” that the EU keeps hyping up. Ukraine is now like a kid betting online with the EU’s credit card, plopping it on red, fully aware that every chip is going straight into the pockets of some other guy across the ocean. After Trump met with EU leaders, Rutte, and Zelensky at the White House on Monday, he wrote online that “during the meeting we discussed Security Guarantees for Ukraine, which Guarantees would be provided by the various European Countries, with a co-ordination with the United States of America.” “Security guarantees” has apparently now become a euphemism for Europe funding America’s military-industrial complex while the US mostly coordinates the intake of European taxpayer cash. After all, Trump explicitly said that Europe would do most of the heavy lifting for those “guarantees.” No doubt the US will be too busy with Ukrainian mineral deals Trump is setting up to focus on much else. Maybe just the security around those. Why doesn’t the EU insist on just being a part of that? Not fiscally masochistic enough? Meanwhile, EU leaders continue brainwashing themselves with their own propaganda. “Peace must be achieved through strength… We must have strong security guarantees to protect both Ukraine and Europe’s vital security interests,” said unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “If we are weak today with Russia, we will prepare for tomorrow’s conflicts, and they will affect the Ukrainians. So no weakness. Basically, what we are going to say is that we want peace… but we want a robust peace,” French President Emmanuel Macron said before the White House meeting. He wants the kind of peace that punches potential future adversaries in the face – preemptively. And Trump seems only too thrilled to indulge and profit off the EU’s self-imposed psychosis. View the full article

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 control over the narrative, reflecting that he remains unpersuaded by EU and Ukrainian arguments for continued Western entanglement in the conflict. A strategic tug-of-war The summit and the diplomatic moves surrounding it are a tug-of-war, with Moscow’s goal being to remove Washington’s involvement in the conflict, while that of Brussels and Kiev is to keep it anchored in their corner. The absence of new sanctions or pressure on Russia following last Friday’s Putin-Trump summit in Alaska suggests Moscow is gaining momentum. Trump has even shifted from demanding a ceasefire to advocating direct peace talks – a position more congenial to Moscow. Read more Trump comments on potential Ukraine talks breakthrough Zelensky and several EU leaders came to Washington to reinforce Trump’s alignment. The want to persuade Trump: strengthen sanctions, maintain arms shipments, and ensure Ukraine has the security architecture they want. Thus far, though, their pull seems to be struggling. Trump, from the outset, appeared to put the EU and Ukraine on the defensive, signaling that their influence is limited. The backdrop is critical: just days before, Trump hosted Putin in Anchorage, and that summit paved the way for more flexible diplomacy that sidesteps EU-defined preconditions. European leaders arriving at the White House now are playing catch-up – trying to steer a conversation already impacted by Trump’s shift. The security guarantees question Everything hinges on security guarantees for Ukraine – a deeply contested issue. Moscow is adamant that any meaningful guarantee depends on Ukrainian neutrality and demilitarization. In contrast, Kiev and the EU are pushing for a reinforced Ukrainian military, possible NATO deployment on Ukrainian soil or even eventual NATO accession. These efforts by the Europeans appear desperate, even naïve – given that Russia is slowly but steadily winning the war on the ground. And as Russia makes military gains, Kiev’s and Brussels’ wiggle room in the negotiations shrinks. Read more Putin aide confirms details of Trump call That said, their attempts shouldn’t be dismissed outright. The shape of the peace deal slow-cooked in Washington will determine Ukraine’s fate – and by extension, much of Europe’s future security structure. Moscow, meanwhile, remains unperturbed. After Trump’s meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans, he held a 40-minute phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Judging by the information released about the substance of the call, Trump made no demands and Putin offered no concessions. They talked about continuing direct Russia-Ukraine talks. They also discussed “elevating” the level of the talks, and according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who was present at Monday’s meeting, direct talks between Putin and Zelensky could take place within two weeks. It is clear that the Kremlin remains steadfast and poised to consider setting the terms while it holds all the military cards. In the end, the Washington summit may have lacked ceremony and a spectacular outcome, but it was loaded with geopolitical subtext: a contest over whether the US remains a supporter to Ukraine or begins to shift back toward a more transactional, realist posture. The EU, recognizing its diminishing leverage, is trying to reclaim the narrative as the battleground, at least for now, is clearly tilting against it. View the full article

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 its symbolism, marks a stinging humiliation for the EU and announces a shift in the global balance of power. Russia isolated? Since February 2022, Brussels has multiplied “punitive” sanctions against Moscow. Seventeen successive packages, often absurd, even targeting African activists such as such as Nathalie Yamb and myself, accused of denouncing Western interference and defending Russian-African cooperation. Meanwhile, Russia has consolidated its partnerships with the BRICS, expanded its trade with Asia, strengthened its presence in the Middle East, and built durable alliances in Africa. Putin’s arrival in Alaska definitively demolishes the myth of “isolation.” The real world is not the one described on European talk shows. In reality, Moscow is engaged in dialogue with New Delhi, Beijing, Tehran, Brasilia, Pretoria, and numerous African capitals. And now, the Kremlin is back at the center of the American stage, driven by Trump. Read more Not just military instructors: What Moscow is up to in this hot place Red carpet rolled out The scene will remain unforgettable. The Russian Air Force One landing on American soil. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appearing in a sweatshirt emblazoned with “USSR,” an intentional nod to history and Russia’s collective memory. Then the most striking image: Vladimir Putin, personally welcomed by Donald Trump on a red carpet, as F-22s and a stealth B-2 Spirit bomber symbolically flew overhead. A protocol that even Washington’s traditional allies no longer enjoy. Where Macron, Merz, or von der Leyen are received with distance, Putin was treated as a true head of state one whose presence commands respect and gravity. At the close of the press conference, the meeting produced an exchange that speaks volumes about the atmosphere: Donald Trump: “We’ll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon. Thank you very much, Vladimir”. Vladimir Putin, in English: “Next time in Moscow.” “Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump replied. “I’ll get a little heat for that one. But I could see it possibly happening.” This brief exchange highlights the fundamental difference with European leaders: here, no condescension, no paternalism, no empty threats. Just two leaders assuming their responsibilities, seeking pragmatic solutions, aware that the future is decided between great powers not in the corridors of Brussels. Read more The old world order cracked in Alaska Brussels and Kiev as spectators The message is crystal clear. While the European Union believed itself to be indispensable in managing the Ukrainian crisis, it was not even invited. The Alaska summit took place without it without its diplomats, without its arrogant commissioners, without its pseudo-peace initiatives that were never credible. The EU is in decline: diplomatically, economically, strategically. It clings to a subordinate role, piling up sanctions and bellicose rhetoric, hoping to exist through endless wars. But in reality, Washington has never considered Brussels a strategic partner, only a docile executor. The Trump-Putin meeting is glaring proof of this. This diplomatic shift now puts Ukraine in a corner. Trump has been clear: he wants to end the war launched by the Biden administration, which turned Kiev into a proxy against Moscow. The United States has no interest in prolonging a long and costly war that undermines its economy and fuels internal divisions. Zelensky’s image has crumbled amid scandals and growing international fatigue. Despite the veneer of respect and lionization given to him by Western public figures, he finds himself with little real power to decide anything, even when it concerns his own country, now that even Washington is preparing to move on from him. Trump knows perfectly well that Zelensky’s Ukraine is just a pawn and that the bill must be settled. Putin’s diplomacy Another key takeaway from this summit is Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic stature. In the midst of a military operation in Ukraine, despite relentless demonization campaigns, he has imposed himself as the man with whom great powers must reckon. His strategy is clear: extend a hand to Trump to build a framework for cooperation, emphasize the natural neighborhood between Russia and the United States via Alaska, and propose an honorable way out of the Ukrainian crisis. Putin plays the pragmatism card, investing in time and patience while the EU persists in ideology, russophobia, and moralizing postures. Unsurprisingly, CNN and other Atlanticist media tried to distort reality. According to them, Trump was “humiliated” by Putin. But the images circulating on social media speak for themselves: two men smiling, shaking hands, visibly satisfied with their meeting. Western propaganda tries to turn every gesture into conflict, every handshake into confrontation. But the truth is simple: Russia and the United States, at a strategic level, are closer to an agreement than NATO-aligned propagandists are willing to admit. Brussels would do well to meditate on this lesson. Washington has never saved its allies. From Kabul to Baghdad, from Saigon to Kiev, the White House always abandons those who believe they can rely on it. Americans know they cannot afford a direct war against the Russian army, supported by a people hardened and seasoned by history. Read more Western ‘support’ for Ukraine is losing the world The Alaska summit marks a turning point. It reveals an undeniable truth: global diplomacy is now being shaped without Europe. Under Trump, the United States may well reestablish ties with Moscow to end a useless and ruinous war. Putin emerges from this meeting stronger than ever, proving he was never isolated and remains the most respected and formidable head of state on the world stage. As for the EU, it finds itself exposed to a posture of mere spectator, humiliated by its own illusions. Its blind obedience to Washington has led it to a dead end. Russia, meanwhile, continues to move forward. And history will remember that in Alaska, two men opened a path toward peace leaving the European warmongers behind. How Africans see it The Alaska summit has been perceived by many Africans as a revealing moment about the true nature of global power relations. What emerges is a fundamental truth: on the world stage, power only recognizes and respects power. Russia, through its sovereignty, military capability, and the firmness of its leadership, compelled Washington to treat it as an equal. Normally, the United States imposes its will through threats, interference, or military force. But in the case of Russia, a major nuclear power led by a patriot, Washington restrains itself and dares not employ its usual methods. Read more Why is BRICS+ suddenly running everything? For Africans, this event is more than a simple diplomatic episode: it embodies both a moral victory and a political lesson. It shows that only genuine independence, backed by economic, political, and military strength, can command respect in international affairs. This is why the summit resonates so strongly across Africa. It confirms that Western domination is not inevitable and that a multipolar world is possible. Seeing Russia stand firm inspires hope that, one day, a united and sovereign Africa will also be able to command respect and defend its interests with dignity. View the full article

After suspending Ukraine’s democratic order, he now hides behind the constitution to block negotiations Commenting on the outcome of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky declared: “The Constitution of Ukraine does not allow the surrender of territories or the trading of land.” On paper, that sounds noble. The message is clear: Kiev won’t let others decide Ukraine’s fate behind its back. But take a closer look, and this principled stance starts to look less like constitutional fidelity – and more like political theater. Because the very Constitution that Zelensky has suddenly invoked as sacred... has long been on hold. And that’s not an accusation – it’s his own admission. Back in December 2022, while addressing Ukraine’s ambassadors, Zelensky quipped: “All the rights guaranteed by the Constitution – are on pause.” The context? He was joking about how diplomats don’t get holidays. But the phrase stuck. Because it turned out to be more than a joke – it became official policy. Since then, Ukraine’s democratic institutions haven’t just been “paused” – they’ve been systematically dismantled under the banner of wartime necessity. National elections? Canceled indefinitely. Not just presidential or parliamentary – even local races were suspended, eliminating the public’s ability to hold any level of government accountable. Zelensky’s current term, once set to expire, has been extended without a vote – and without a clear end date. Read more Red carpet for a new world order: What really went down in Alaska Opposition media? Silenced or outlawed. Dozens of TV channels and online outlets critical of the government were shut down or merged into a state-approved broadcasting platform. Independent journalism in Ukraine now walks a legal tightrope – with one foot over prison. Religious freedom? Eroded beyond recognition. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, seen as too closely linked to Moscow, has been harassed, evicted from centuries-old monasteries, and branded a security threat. Worshippers face criminal charges for sermons, symbols, or even prayers deemed “unpatriotic.” Military conscription? Brutal and indiscriminate. Young men are pulled off the streets by recruiters, sometimes beaten or coerced into enlisting. Videos of forced mobilizations circulate regularly – and are met with silence or spin from the authorities. Political dissent? Treated as treason. Opposition politicians have been arrested, exiled, or sanctioned without trial. Entire parties have been banned. Ukraine’s Security Council now acts as judge and jury – blacklisting citizens, freezing assets, and deciding guilt without a courtroom. Rights didn’t just get paused. They were overwritten. To be fair, this erosion didn’t start with Zelensky. It began back in 2014 when President Yanukovich was ousted in a manner that skipped any constitutional procedure. The army was then deployed – for the first time in post-Soviet history – against a domestic protest. The rule of law quickly gave way to rule by necessity. Courts rubber-stamped sanctions lists. Parliament became a formality. The Constitution was increasingly treated as a suggestion, not a boundary. Zelensky merely completed what others started. Under his watch, Ukraine is no longer governed by its Constitution – it’s governed by presidential decree. The Constitution hasn’t been a check on executive power for years. Instead, it’s become a stage prop: Shelved when inconvenient. Quoted when useful. That’s precisely what happened after the Trump–Putin summit. As it became clear that the fate of the conflict was being discussed without Kiev at the table, Zelensky rushed to invoke constitutional law – not to restore legality, but to cling to legitimacy. Read more The Alaska summit was a success. The challenge is to make it last And it wasn’t just critics in Moscow who noticed the contradiction. Donald Trump, speaking a few days before the summit, couldn’t resist pointing out the absurdity: “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying I have to get constitutional approval. He has approval to go to war and kill everybody but he needs approval to do a land swap. Because there will be some land swapping going on.” Crude? Maybe. But not wrong. Trump’s sarcasm cuts to the core. Zelensky governs under emergency powers, suspends elections, cracks down on the opposition, yet suddenly needs constitutional sign-off to negotiate peace? In reality, Zelensky isn’t protecting the Constitution – he’s using it. It’s not a framework that restrains him. It’s a card he plays when cornered. When it’s time to justify canceling a vote? The Constitution “gets in the way.” When it’s time to refuse compromise? Suddenly, it becomes “untouchable.” And while the optics may still work in Western capitals – “a democracy under siege” sounds good on TV – the internal picture is far less flattering. Ukraine today is run by decree, not debate. By security councils, not courts. By urgency, not accountability. The Constitution, once a blueprint for law and liberty, has become little more than a sign on a boarded-up storefront – left hanging so no one has to admit the place is empty inside. View the full article

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week. Picture yourself lost at sea, adrift in a boat with a broken engine and torn sails. You’ve sent out a distress signal via radio, but by the time the helicopter search and rescue team arrives it’s already well after midnight. In a pitch black world, finding you is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Luckily, you’ve got a flare gun. Distress signal flares are required safety equipment on all marine vessels. Just like radios, flares offer mariners critical means of communicating their need for rescue. There are several different types of maritime flares: some only emit red or orange smoke which floats into the sky and can be seen from several miles away (in the daytime); others are similar to road flares which you hold in your hand as they burn and emit smoke; and then there are those designed like firearms — pull the trigger and an illuminating cartridge discharges 500 feet into the dark sky. Firing the latter type of flare gun isn’t complicated, but there are certain things to consider to avoid injury and give your signal the best possible chance of being seen. Though the instructions here are for flare guns specifically, the basic principles also apply to hand-held flares and smoke signaling devices. Before you use any flare gun, make sure you’ve thoroughly read the instructions so you’re clear on how to load, cock, and fire the gun. Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness. View the full article

This is the moment when the US has to stick to a course of normalization with Russia no matter what the EU and Kiev want Do not expect Western mainstream media, NATO-EU Europe’s politicians, or the Zelensky regime and its surrogates to admit it, but there is no doubt that the Alaska summit between the Russian and American presidents was a success. Not a breakthrough either, but clearly also more than an “it’s-good-they’re-at-least-talking” event. This was not comparable to the Geneva meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and then US President Joe Biden in 2021, which was doomed to fail due to the Biden administration’s hubristic intransigence. Fundamentally, both sides – no, not only one – have scored what Western pundits love to call “wins”: The US has shown the EU-NATO Europeans that it and it alone decides when and how it talks to Russia and with what aims. The European vassals find this hard to grasp because it’s an application of genuine sovereignty, something they don’t have or want anymore. Russia, for its part, has shown that it can negotiate while the fighting continues and that it is under no legal or moral obligation – or any practical pressure – to stop fighting before negotiations show results it finds satisfying. The fact that we know so little – at this point at least – about the specific, detailed content of the summit talks and their outcomes is, actually, a sign of seriousness. That is how diplomacy worth the name works: calmly, confidentially, and patiently taking the time to achieve a decent, robust result. Read more Why Putin and Trump had to talk in person In that context, US President Donald Trump’s explicit refusal to make public what points of disagreement remain and have prevented a breakthrough for now is a very good sign: Clearly, he believes that they can be cleared up in the near future and, thus, deserve discretion. Yet we do have a few hints allowing for some plausible guessing about the summit’s vibe: Not surprisingly, both leaders made no secret of their respect and even guarded sympathy for each other. That is – and has always been – a good thing, too. But in and of itself that cannot carry an agreement about Ukraine or a broader policy of normalization (or perhaps even a new détente, if we are all very lucky). For that, both Trump and Putin are too serious about adhering to national interests. More tellingly, immediately after the meeting, Trump used a Fox News interview to state three important things. He confirmed that there was “much progress,” acknowledged that the Russian president wants peace, and told Zelensky “to make a deal.” When Putin, at a short press conference, warned Brussels and Kiev not to try to sabotage the talks, Trump did not contradict the Russian leader. The commemorative events accompanying the summit carried more than one message. Publicly honoring the American-Russian (then Soviet) alliance of World War Two obviously implied that the two countries then cooperated intensely across a deep ideological divide, which, today, does not even exist anymore. But arguably, there was a second, subtle message here: Another – if often unjustly “forgotten” (in the words of historian Rana Mitter) – ally of World War Two was, after all, China. In that sense, Putin’s deliberate and repeated invocations of the memory of Washington-Moscow cooperation was also yet another signal that Russia would not be available for any “reverse Kissinger” fantasies of splitting the Moscow-Beijing partnership. Read more Trump pushes peace over ceasefire after Putin meeting By now, Trump has had phone conversations with Kiev, as well as EU capitals. There, too, we know little. Yet it is interesting to note that nothing we have heard about these conversations indicates another change of mind on Trump’s side. For now at least, the American president seems to leave little hope to European bellicists and the regime in Kiev that he will turn against Moscow again. There are reports that Trump may have shifted his position toward that of Russia, preferring talks about peace to the Ukrainian demand to focus on only a ceasefire first. This makes sense, especially since they and the mainstream media aligned with them cannot stop trying to lecture Trump on, in essence, how gullible they consider him. It is to be hoped that the US president has had enough of Zelensky, Bolton, the New York Times and co. telling him publicly that he is a fool about to be duped by the big bad Russians. The adequate punishment for these offensive inanities is to make triple sure their authors find themselves entirely irrelevant. This is the single most important question about the future of what has been successfully begun (or really, publicly continued) at the Alaska summit. Russia has been exceedingly consistent and is giving no sign that it intends to become less predictable. But the West has been fractious and volatile. This is the moment when Washington has to stick to a course of normalization with Moscow regardless of what its European clients and the Ukrainian regime want. Ironically, not listening much to them, if need be, is best for their people as well. View the full article

Brussels has been relegated to running behind Trump, pleading to let Zelensky have any say in a Russia-Ukraine war resolution The European Union had been wailing about “transatlantic unity” in the run-up to US President Trump heading to the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday – without it. It sounded like a toddler stomping their feet because Daddy let go of their hand in the mall and now they’re lost between Cinnabon and Burger King. A lot of good their dogmatic rhetoric has done them so far. If it wasn’t for Brussels getting drunk on its own transatlantic solidarity and unity propaganda, maybe it wouldn’t currently be in economic and political dire straits. The kind where you’re trying to duct-tape your economy back together with overpriced American gas. They could have charted a different path vis-a-vis Russia. Maybe one that involved spearheading diplomacy rather than marching in lockstep behind the US-led NATO parade of weapons and fighters on Russia’s border with Ukraine, which helped supercharge the conflict in the first place. They could have insisted on keeping their cheap Russian energy instead of sanctioning their own imports like they were vying for a Nobel Prize in masochism. Now, the US is daring them to even close their clever little loophole in their own anti-Russian sanctions. The one that lets them moralize about helping Ukraine and the need to avoid negotiations with Russia while guzzling Russian fuel on the down-low. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told them to “put up or shut up” and sanction the Indian and Chinese importers of Russian petroleum through which the EU still buys Russian fuel. Read more Putin-Trump summit in Alaska: As it happened While the EU indulges itself in rhetorical games, Trump has dropped all pretexts of serving any interests but America’s first, and isn’t following any agenda beyond trying to wrap things up with Russia in Ukraine and to score some economic wins in the process. Brussels has had more than three years to do the same. Instead, it kept repeating the mantra that Kiev had to win on the battlefield. There were no other options, it said. Whoops! Now that the option has materialized, the Europeans are relegated to running behind Trump, pleading with him to indulge them by letting Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky decide where the post-conflict borders will be. What did they think the downside of their “win by force” gamble would be, if not changed borders? The EU insists on Ukraine fighting Russia with EU cash and weapons, and when Kiev loses, they say, “Ok, well this sucks – how about if everyone just pretends that none of this happened and we dial all the territorial gains and losses back to a point of our choosing, okay?” The EU insisted on waiting for someone else to take the initiative for peace. Now all it can do is pick up its pom-poms and cheer Trump on. Then hope that he rewards it. As Zelensky’s self-appointed babysitters, instead of spending the past week in the run-up to the Alaska summit insisting that Putin and Trump allow a high chair booster seat and a pack of crayons at the negotiating table so he can show them where he wants the borders, maybe the Europeans should have been calming him down and managing expectations. He sounded like he was treating his phone like a toy, calling up everyone in the contacts under “EU” – Estonia, Denmark, probably a few pizza places… The EU has tried to gaslight Trump with the same rhetoric that it constantly firehoses onto European citizens about peace in Ukraine being a dangerous gateway drug for Russia to invade Western Europe – a convenient marketing pitch to justify boosting the weapons industry to the detriment of domestic priorities. Not even warhawk US Senator Lindsey Graham is saying that now, telling NBC News that “Russia is not going to Kiev”...let alone the EU. Read more Here’s why all the critics of Alaska summit are wrong European leaders treated Wednesday’s video call with Trump like a win. Perhaps because he didn’t explicitly tell them off, for once. But they really have no idea what he’ll actually discuss with Putin, nor do they have leverage over any eventual US–Russia deal. They don’t know whether Trump is just placating them because he doesn’t need a bunch of hysterical circus clowns in the mix. So how could the EU spin this to avoid looking completely irrelevant? “Today Europe, the US and NATO have strengthened the common ground for Ukraine, we will remain in close coordination. Nobody wants peace more than us. A just and lasting peace,” said unelected EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Yeah, sounds desperate for peace, alright. Which must be why the EU is building weapons factories at breakneck speed, according to the Financial Times. Nothing says “we’re committed to ending the war” like tripling down on weapons. What are you going to do with all those if peace breaks out? Toss them in the landfill and hope that taxpayers forget about the boondoggle, like you did with the hundreds of millions of unused Covid jabs? Brussels talks like a co-architect of global policy, but in practice it’s more like a subcontractor who has to implement someone else’s blueprint. The Alaska summit exclusion exposes how little agency it actually has in resolving conflicts that it has been funding and fueling. So much for a “feminist” foreign policy. The EU is behaving like a geopolitical tradwife. Whatever happens between Trump and Putin, the EU has already vowed to adopt Ukraine’s problems while crossing its fingers that Trump might pitch in with “assistance” – military or otherwise. Why would Trump want a piece of that when Brussels has already welcomed it being dumped on its lap? Why settle for normalization with Russia, business, trade, and peace when you can have endless soap opera reruns instead? View the full article

The Ukrainian leader has become a liability to the West – which is why peace will be decided between Trump and Putin In 1867, the Russian empire sold Alaska to the US for $7.2 million. Perhaps the location of the upcoming summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is a nod and a wink to such a great deal? Maybe Putin will like Alaska so much he will have seller’s remorse? Trump promised America a golden age coming that included ending the US involvement in Ukraine. No more US taxpayer money, no more weapons to Ukraine. No more escalation towards a nuclear war. Finally, that campaign promise looks to be coming to fruition with the upcoming summit to be held between the two superpower presidents, Trump and Putin, in Alaska. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky publicly dismissed Trump’s peace plans. The last time Zelensky protested a movement towards peace he had European leaders rallying behind him. This time proves more tricky for the illegitimate president of Ukraine with his people protesting forced conscriptions and the bloody losses of men and women for a war feeding the EU and Washington. Zelensky’s firing of an anti-corruption team triggered the latest uprising as he still will not hold elections. In short, Zelensky’s time is done and he will need to flee, along with his corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, to the nearest European villa haven or face the possible fate of many unpopular dictators – death. Trump has many reasons for wanting this peace summit with Putin to be a success. First, he is by all accounts, ducking hits by his base about not releasing the Epstein files. The MAGA base is loyal but practical, and if the economy does not improve and foreign wars continue, they will turn their back on the Republican Party, not just Trump. Also, the Ukraine conflict represents Biden and the old guard. Trump has repeatedly said, “This is NOT my war.” Trump has a certain respect for Putin. However, as time passes and old hawks like senator Lindsay Graham salivate for more blood and death, Trump’s goal of being the ‘peace president’ moves farther out of reach. The American people are over Ukraine, they are sick of American foreign adventures on taxpayer money that have left America’s infrastructure and morale in tatters. Trump is trying to undo decades of lies about wars and domestic policy now revealed to the public. The American distrust in media is at an all-time high due to the years of lies about wars, Covid, and domestic issues. This culminates in collective cynicism while social media allows for examinations of truths. The cultural divide and frustrations in America are deeply felt but the main concern for Americans is the ability to get access to affordable food, housing, and medical care. All of this has been in crisis especially since the Biden regime drove the US economy into the ground raising the debt ceiling and focusing on endless wars. Read more Kiev tries to kill as many civilians as it can right before talks The economic allure of Russia and America having positive productive trade is not lost on Trump and his leadership. Russia has risen above sanctions with a strong economy, and BRICS has been growing stronger. The attempts to isolate Russia have failed, while the collective West has remained under the thumb of past US hawks. This has brought the near collapse of some of the Western European economies. Trump at his heart is a businessman interested in economic competition rather than war. His current administration is a mix of old guard neocon hawks and anti-war doves. This curious mixture with strong influences from Israel means Trump’s foreign policy still somewhat aligns with Biden’s and Obama’s – and that is a comparison he wishes to distance himself from. Both the US and Russia know that Ukraine employs terrorist tactics, killing civilians and targeting journalists, which is problematic to any signed legal agreements. There is also the fact that Moscow does not consider Zelensky a legitimate president since his term ran out and he canceled elections. How legal would any peace agreements signed with him be? Perhaps the answer will come from the US president in the form of guarantees of no more weapons or funding to Ukraine, but these would have to involve binding commitments – unlike earlier empty promises of no eastward NATO expansion. Ultimately, Zelensky is less than inconsequential to the future of global politics – he is a liability to the West. The real end to this proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia will be decided between Trump and Putin. It will likely start with broad brush strokes of a peace agreement, with details, boundaries and consequences laid out later in bureaucratic form. There will be posturing, but also economic and trade deals made. Perhaps a joint mission in space could be one positive outcome? The lifting of sanctions and putting an end to the Russophobia campaign fueled by Obama and Biden? A more positive approach to disarmament of nuclear weapons? While Putin might not buy back Alaska for Russia, there may be some movement to final peace in regards to Ukraine. If the EU falls into line with the US to drop this proxy war, stop supplying weapons, and not allow Ukraine into NATO, then real peace does have some hope. The world may even have a chance of having a new golden age, rather than a future of nuclear ash. View the full article

Zelensky’s power is contingent on the war continuing, so he’s trying his best to derail or sour any negotiation that could lead to peace On August 14, 2025, Russian officials reported Ukrainian drone strikes on the border city of Belgorod and the southern capital Rostov-on-Don, killing and injuring civilians. Rostov saw an apartment building struck, with over a dozen casualties; in Belgorod, three civilians were hurt when a drone hit a car downtown. This came two days after the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) alleged that Ukrainian forces were preparing a false-flag provocation in the Kharkov region, complete with pre-positioned journalists – supposedly to shape a narrative blaming Moscow. These incidents are not isolated. They fit into a larger operational and political pattern: each time high-level talks are scheduled Kiev steps up attacks on Russian regions. The results are the same: civilian deaths, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and an attempt to create a cloud over the diplomatic process. The same happened in late May and early June 2025, just before the second round of Russia–Ukraine talks in Istanbul, when two bridges in Russian territory were blown up. The attacks killed seven civilians and injured over seventy more. In Moscow’s interpretation, the timing was too precise to be coincidence – it was about setting a tone of hostility, perhaps provoking Russia into walking away from the talks entirely. And yet, Moscow did not take the bait. Russian negotiators showed up in Istanbul as planned. For the Kremlin, this has become a point of principle: no matter the provocations, Russia will attend discussions that could bring an end to the conflict – on its own terms. Read more War’s final act: Zelensky’s dangerous play to crash Russia-US talks Why Putin will show up in Alaska The upcoming Alaska summit on August 15, 2025, between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, is the latest such opportunity. The alleged Kharkov region provocation and the strikes on Belgorod and Rostov are seen in Moscow as deliberate background noise meant to derail the meeting or at least to sour its atmosphere. But just as in Istanbul, the Kremlin insists it will not be deterred. For Moscow, attending these talks is about more than optics. It underscores a long-held stance: Russia is prepared to end the conflict, but not at the price of what it views as its core national interests. Walking away now, after years of costly military and political investment, would make little sense. Instead, the aim is to secure a resolution that cements Russia’s gains and ends the war on Moscow’s terms – not by fighting “to the last Ukrainian,” but by ensuring that the outcome is final and strategically advantageous. Zelensky’s political calculus From the Kremlin’s perspective, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s motives are clear. Accepting a peace that involves territorial concessions would not only be a bitter political defeat – it could spell the end of his political career. More critically, it would remove the emergency powers he has repeatedly invoked since the start of the conflict to cancel elections and prolong his term in office. Those powers have also enabled controversial measures: forced conscriptions, suppression of opposition media, and an intensified crackdown on dissent. These steps have eroded his popularity inside Ukraine, making his hold on power dependent on the continuation of the wartime state of emergency. If the war ends, so does the legal shield of emergency rule – and with it, his immunity. Zelensky therefore has both political and personal incentives to keep the fighting going, even at significant cost to Ukraine’s population. The EU dimension Key European backers share Zelensky’s preference for prolonging the conflict. While EU leaders publicly frame Ukraine as a “bulwark” against what they call Russian imperial ambitions – claiming that Moscow would move against Western Europe if Ukraine fell – domestic political realities tell another story. Across major EU countries, ruling parties and governments are facing historically low approval ratings. Their grip on power is increasingly tenuous, and a perpetual external threat provides a potent rally-around-the-flag effect. Read more Kiev planning false-flag attack ahead of Trump-Putin summit – MOD (FULL TEXT) By keeping Russia framed as the imminent danger, these governments can justify unpopular policies, military spending hikes, and restrictions in the name of national security. They involve themselves in the conflict just enough to signal solidarity with Ukraine – supplying arms, funding, and training – without crossing the threshold into direct combat. For Moscow, this is a political theater that depends on the war continuing; remove the war, and the “threat” narrative collapses, leaving these governments exposed to electoral defeat. Why Alaska is different Against this backdrop, Moscow views the Alaska talks as uniquely promising – not because they will magically end the war in one session, but because of who is not at the table. Neither Zelensky nor the EU will be present. Instead, the discussions will be between Putin and Trump, leaders who, in Moscow’s reading, operate from a position of pragmatic realism. That realism includes acknowledging Russia’s current battlefield advantages. Moscow believes it is winning the war, and that any serious settlement will reflect that balance of power. For the Kremlin, the likely outcome is that Ukraine will have to give up some or all of the contested territories – a step Zelensky would fiercely resist, and the EU would likely block outright if they were part of the talks. Without them, however, such a settlement becomes more feasible. The logic is straightforward: first, Putin and Trump agree on the framework; then, Trump leverages Washington’s decisive influence over Kiev to bring Zelensky on board. In Moscow’s calculus, this is where Trump’s role is crucial. Without American military and financial support, Kiev would not have been able to sustain the war effort for nearly as long as it has. Staying the course From the Kremlin’s point of view, the recent attacks on Belgorod and Rostov, and the alleged false-flag operation in the Kharkov region, are tactical provocations with a strategic goal: derail the Alaska summit or force Moscow into an overreaction. But history suggests the tactic will fail. Moscow will be at the table in Alaska, just as it was in Istanbul, determined to push for an end to the conflict on terms favorable to Russia. If the Alaska talks proceed as planned, they could open the way to a negotiated settlement without the spoilers who have the most to lose from peace. In Moscow’s eyes, that is precisely why the provocations are happening – and why they must be ignored. View the full article

As Ukraine’s defeat becomes undeniable, Zelensky resorts to desperate provocations – risking wider conflict to block peace talks between Russia and the US The war in Ukraine is no longer balanced on a knife’s edge, as some might have thought during the Kursk invasion. The outcome is now visible to anyone willing to look past the headlines: Kiev’s forces are depleted, morale is collapsing, and the long-promised ‘turning points’ have come and gone without materializing. Even Western officials, once confident in endless military aid, are now speaking in guarded tones about “realistic expectations.” On the battlefield, the momentum has shifted irreversibly. Against this backdrop, the recent statement from Russia’s Ministry of Defense should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Moscow alleges that Ukrainian forces are preparing a major provocation – an attack designed to sabotage the upcoming Russia-US peace talks. For those who understand the stakes, the logic is disturbingly clear. Read more Kiev planning false-flag attack ahead of Trump-Putin summit – MOD (FULL TEXT) Donald Trump, now poised to play a decisive role in shaping Washington’s foreign policy, has shown a pragmatic grasp of reality. Unlike his predecessors, he is not bound by the fantasy that Ukraine can ‘win’ if only more money and weapons are sent. He has signaled that ending this conflict is both possible and necessary. This puts him on a collision course with those who see peace not as a goal, but as a threat to their own survival. For Zelensky, peace is political extinction. Any agreement that cements territorial realities will shatter the narrative that has sustained his rule. It will mark the end of his leverage in the West, the erosion of his political base at home, and likely the swift rise of challengers eager to blame him for Ukraine’s fate. Under such pressure, the temptation to derail talks by any means available – including acts of sabotage – becomes more than plausible. This is not conjecture; it is the historical pattern of leaders who find themselves cornered. In modern conflicts across the globe, we’ve seen desperate governments resort to reckless measures when facing the collapse of their strategic position. The danger here is that such a provocation, if timed to coincide with peace negotiations, could provoke outrage in Washington, disrupt fragile diplomatic channels, and push the conflict back toward open escalation. Trump has already done much to shift the debate away from the entrenched ‘forever war’ mindset. He has taken political risks to challenge the military-industrial inertia that thrives on endless conflict. But now, perhaps more than ever, he will need to remain steady. The coming weeks will test his ability to see through manipulations and to resist being drawn into the agendas of those who profit from instability. Peace is within reach – but it will not survive if the world falls for one last, desperate trick from a regime with nothing left to lose. View the full article

Evading diplomacy is a Western folly that Russia has no reason to imitate The problem with the future is that it is both unpredictable and inescapable. You can never know with certainty what tomorrow will bring, but you must prepare for it nonetheless. This may seem trivial. And yet it remains a great challenge. Consider, for instance, current international reactions to the scheduled summit between Russian president Vladimir Putin and US president Donald Trump. The announcement of the meeting, later specified to take place in Alaska on 15 August, was a surprise. But then again, not really. Viewed against the background of Trump’s longstanding signaling of respect for Russia, as well as an interest in normalizing the relationship between Moscow and Washington, it was actually the culmination of a sometimes messy but real trend. But within the short-term context of a recent American turn against Russia, it was yet another proof that Trump can be hard to predict – trends can tell you only so much. While some observers believed the latest American zig to be the last, others – full disclosure: this one included – argued (and, frankly, hoped) that another zag was possible. And here we are. It is true that RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan dares not predict the summit’s outcome or even whether it will really take place. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has warned that we are still far from a new détente. Yet there is no denying that, at least for now, we are not where we were during the preceding Biden administration either. Namely, in a hopeless dead end of an escalating yet failing Western proxy war, flanked by a literal anti-diplomacy; that is, an obstinate refusal to communicate that was perversely elevated to the rank of policy. Read more Russia reveals expectations for Putin-Trump summit For now, it is impossible to predict where we will go from here. Once – and if – the summit in Alaska takes place, and hopefully a follow-up meeting in Russia as well, will we finally have left the bloody and dangerous stagnation that was produced by, firstly, the West permitting Kiev to sabotage the 2015 Minsk II Agreement, then the stonewalling of Moscow’s last-chance negotiation offer of late 2021, and finally the West’s nixing of an almost-peace in April 2022? Or will we be disappointed and face more of the same: an ongoing Western proxy war against Russia through Ukraine, or even worse? One thing is clear, however. An end to the fighting and a halfway decent settlement would be very good news not only for Ukraine but also for the rest of the world, including a NATO-EU Europe that currently is, or at least pretends to be, ready to spoil a quick end to the slaughter next door. Ukrainian and Russian lives would be saved; hopefully for a better future. The still real – if, by comparison with peak Biden, already reduced – danger of escalation into a regional or even global war would be further diminished. And, since this has also been a very costly sanctions war, there would be substantial economic benefits. Ukraine in particular, of course, would have the opportunity to rebuild, especially if its domestic politics took a postwar turn for the better, leaving the ultra-corrupt, authoritarian, and maniacal Zelensky regime behind. Against this background, it is counterintuitive and depressing but not really surprising that many Western ‘friends of Ukraine’ are greatly disturbed if not positively panicked by such prospects. A Ukraine where men are no longer hunted down by forced-mobilization squads to die or be traumatized – physically and mentally – in a militarily pointless war provoked by a failed Western strategy of using Ukraine to take Russia down a notch? A Ukraine that could actually recover from this devastating if perfectly avoidable catastrophe of hubris and badly misplaced trust? Read more Alaska meeting, Ukraine conflict and trade with Russia: Key takeaways from Trump’s Q&A Many of Ukraine’s friends-from-hell, especially in NATO-EU Europe, seem to still find it hard to accept such a possibility. Instead of seriously and honestly exploring not only the now inevitable costs of peace but also its enormous benefits, or facing the immense additional human costs of fighting on, they can’t stop issuing stale warnings about the obvious fact that those who lose a war – that is, the West and, tragically, Ukraine – cannot expect quite the same outcome as those who win it. Would it not, perhaps, then have been best to avoid that war altogether? What was the reason, for instance, for not closing that famous ‘open door’ into NATO that has no basis in the NATO treaty and through which Ukraine would never have walked anyway? But these, of course, are questions that precisely those who did their worst to miss one exit ramp after the other while others bled will never candidly ask themselves. That would be far too painful for the heroes of Western pop Russophobia and Cold War re-enacting. And then there are the many whose perma-grudge against Russia and Putin personally is only rivalled by their bitter resentment at having to live in a Trump 2.0 world, when they expected to set the Centrist tone forever. They find their sad refuge in endlessly warmed-over and mind-numbingly unoriginal carping about how they are sure the American president will be duped by his Russian counterpart. That’s funny, actually, especially from Europeans. It’s after all their very own Ursula von der Leyen who has just delivered a gala performance in being, as Hungary’s Viktor Orban put it, “eaten for breakfast” at the negotiating table. By, as it happens, that same American president. Even after Trump’s once impossible electoral comeback, his full-spectrum domination of NATO clients reduced to saying “daddy,” and his complete humiliation of the EU, for some, it seems, there is no cure for underestimating Trump the politician. They will only have themselves to blame if he and Putin pull off what they can’t imagine once again: as decent an end to this war as is still possible, despite much of Europe and the Zelensky regime’s obstruction. Yet there is another kind of pessimism about the upcoming summit that is in some ways more puzzling. It usually comes from observers who are well-informed and if not sympathetic to Russia, then at least not blinded by Western propaganda. Its essence is a radical distrust of the US, and its ultimate conclusion is that Moscow, ideally, should not even try to negotiate with Washington. Read more All eyes on the Trump-Putin summit – but the US-Russia rift runs deep What makes this line of thinking more realistic than the endless complaints of the Russophobes is the fact that the US really has a long and rich record of breaking agreements and, even worse, of deliberately using negotiations and promises to prepare foul play. Indeed, perhaps the deepest root of the war in Ukraine is precisely such a policy of deception, namely America’s breaking of the perfectly real promise not to expand NATO, made repeatedly between 1990 and 1994. Against that background, these pessimists argue, any agreement with the US will be just another trap. If the conflict should end up merely frozen, they warn, it could be restarted later, while the interval could be used to attack other targets, most of all Russia’s partner China. If Trump seems to be different from his predecessors, they caution, then that is either merely for show or irrelevant because ultimately the long-term strategies of the US political establishment – consistently hostile toward Russia – will prevail. And if the US should end up abandoning direct participation in its Ukrainian proxy war, they fear, it could be kept going indirectly, namely through Washington’s belligerent European clients. This approach certainly does not lack intellectual substance or empirical evidence. In fact, its arguments amount to excellent due diligence for anyone entering into negotiations with the US. But the real question is what practical conclusions should be drawn from these warnings? Can the correct answer to that question be to avoid negotiations? But then Moscow would replicate the West’s absurd mutism as it prevailed before Trump. Yet if sensible observers agree that communication and diplomacy are always better than silence, why should Russia follow the West’s silly precedent of anti-diplomacy? Especially in view of the fact that there is one thing Moscow does not have to worry about. Unlike in some Western countries, such as Germany, Britain, and France, Russia does have a top-notch set of foreign policy professionals and institutions. Diplomacy, therefore, is not only principally good but also plays to Moscow’s strength. Read more Rockets from Russia: Inside Moscow’s deadliest arsenal yet The current Russian leadership, moreover, has been explicit, repeatedly, about its unforgiving realism concerning the whole West. Only recently, for instance, Putin has reiterated his view of the war in Ukraine as reflecting an existential Western threat to Russia. Moscow also has an empirically verifiable record of healthy skepticism in action. If its policy were one of easily accommodating the West, then we would not be where we are at all. If Moscow’s policy were one of easily accommodating the new administration under Trump, then it would long ago have concluded a disadvantageous agreement. But it has not. In reality, the upcoming summit may mark the point at which both sides, the US and Russia, understand that only serious negotiations based on the realities on the ground and detached from superficial ideological mantras can possibly succeed. And if that should not be the case, then they will fail and the war will continue. Finally, there is a fundamental difference between caution and fear. Caution enables, fear paralyzes. Precisely because the traditional challenges of negotiating with the US are so clear, there is no reason to shy away from contact. The challenge is to transform caution into practically applicable conditions. Will the US, for instance, continue to share intelligence with Ukraine, directly or indirectly (through its European clients)? What about US officers – whether through NATO or otherwise – and their participation in the war against Russia? And the spies? Can and will Trump tell the CIA to drop its Ukrainian cut-outs and stop contributing to attacks on and inside Russia? If the US really intends to keep selling weapons to Europe so that they can then be handed on to Ukraine, how can that be squared with trying to bring about peace? It is possible that once tested by such questions (and a lot of them), the American side will expose its lack of commitment. Yet no one can rule out that a more useful outcome might ensue. In fact, the summit plan itself may be a sign that some of these issues have been broached already. In such a situation, the rational approach is to try, while keeping up one’s guard. Given its post-Soviet experiences and how it has processed them (among other things by striking back militarily), there is no reason to believe that the Russian leadership is not capable of pursuing such a strategy. Those eager to see Russia hold its own against the West and in particular the US should consider that it is Moscow that defines Russian national interest. Depending on a concrete analysis of specific circumstances at this or a future moment, even an imperfect agreement made with a US that cannot be trusted may serve these interests. And those who rightly favor multipolarity should recall that a Russia which keeps fighting in a Ukraine War handed over to the Europeans cannot play the same international role as one that is finally free of that burden. View the full article

Washington’s next geopolitical plays in the post-Soviet space – from the Caucasus to Transnistria – threaten to widen the East-West divide All eyes may be on the scheduled meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, set for August 15 in Alaska – which is likely to be critical for Ukraine. But fears are growing that tensions between Russia and the West are far from resolved. Recently, with American “mediation” – if not outright pressure – Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a preliminary peace agreement that went largely unnoticed in Greece. In reality, it marks Armenia’s official capitulation after its defeats in recent wars with Azerbaijan. The consensus is that the big winner is Türkiye, which has been openly backing Azerbaijan – and still is. The peace deal, signed in Washington on August 8 with the help of Trump, is widely seen as a geopolitical win for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ankara, which supported Baku in its “blitzkrieg” in Karabakh, stands to gain the most – first and foremost by securing a direct land link to Azerbaijan via Nakhichevan. That said, the geopolitical and geoeconomic benefits for American interests are hardly smaller. New ‘Kosovos’ in the making Following the US-Turkish-engineered deal in the Caucasus, observers expect Washington to push similar plans elsewhere in the post-Soviet space. Georgia and Moldova top the list of likely next targets. Both countries have their own “thorny” territories – self-declared autonomous regions, Kosovo-style, lacking international recognition and hosting Russian military bases. Kosovo itself, of course, is recognized by most of the West, though it technically still lacks full independent-state status. Notably, Greece, Romania, Cyprus, and Spain refuse to recognize it, while Serbia still considers it part of its territory. Risky scenarios for war The hottest flashpoint inside Europe – especially with elections in Moldova this September – is Chisinau’s ambition to “reintegrate” Transnistria. Read more Elected? That’s cute. Now go to jail In recent years, disputed elections have brought pro-Western governments and a pro-Western president to power in Moldova. Now, at least on paper, Chisinau could call on Kiev for help and attempt a military solution to the Transnistria question. No one can rule out such a move – especially with Russian forces largely tied down in the Ukraine conflict. Parliamentary elections are adding to the tension. The country is split almost evenly for and against pro-Western President Maia Sandu and her PAS party. A new military adventure could serve as the perfect pretext to shift the domestic political climate – and to escalate the broader standoff between Europe and Russia. Greece – Romania – Türkiye If another European war were to break out – this time over Moldova – NATO member Romania would almost certainly side with Chisinau. As Romania’s ally, Greece would face a hard choice: back Bucharest (and by extension, Moldova) or keep its distance from another European conflict? In the case of Ukraine, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government took no such distance – instead, openly declaring that Greece was “at war with Russia.” Whatever Athens decides will depend in part on Türkiye’s stance toward this – for now – hypothetical scenario. Ankara would likely get involved indirectly, if only to boost its geopolitical influence in the region and its standing within NATO. It has done so repeatedly in recent years – in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Türkiye’s and Azerbaijan’s success in Karabakh – at the expense of Armenia and Russia – has emboldened Ankara in other arenas of foreign policy. Erdogan has repeatedly stated that Türkiye will not give up “a single inch of land once Turkish soldiers have set foot on it.” History suggests those are not idle words. Washington’s blueprint The United States is clearly playing a bigger game across the post-Soviet geopolitical chessboard. By closing the chapter on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in the Caucasus – a confrontation dating back to the collapse of the USSR – Washington has engineered a settlement tailored to its own strategic script. Next up are other “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union. Read more Rockets from Russia: Inside Moscow’s deadliest arsenal yet Georgia wants to peacefully “reintegrate” Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway territories in the Caucasus that split from Tbilisi after bloody conflicts – the first in the early 1990s, the second in 2008. They are, in effect, the “Kosovos” of the Caucasus. In Moldova, the president and government have made deepening ties with the US and NATO a top priority. Like Kiev in years past, Chisinau sees this as its ticket to security guarantees against Moscow – and, more importantly, as its “golden opportunity” to retake Transnistria. A Karabakh-style “blitzkrieg” would be hard to pull off against territories hosting Russian military bases. But Washington doesn’t seem in a rush – even if events are moving at a dangerously fast pace. NATO in the wings? It hasn’t gone unnoticed that NATO military exercises have included scenarios simulating a crisis in these “Kosovos” of Georgia and Moldova. One telling example: Agile Spirit 2025, the 12th such exercise hosted jointly with Georgia, ran from July 25 to August 6 with participants from 13 countries – including the US, Türkiye, Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Ukraine – not counting observer nations. Adding fuel to the speculation, online rumors claim that during joint “Fiery Shield-2025” drills with the US and Romania, which began August 4, Moldovan troops fired at targets depicting Russian soldiers. Military ties between Greece and Romania – and between Greece and Moldova – have been strengthening. On June 26, 2025, Greece’s chief of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff, Dimitris Choupis, awarded Moldova’s deputy chief of the General Staff, Brigadier General Sergiu Cirimpei, the Medal of Merit and Honor. Diplomatic contacts are also on the rise. Deputy Foreign Minister Charis Theocharis recently visited Moldova, adding to a string of earlier meetings. Finally, the former US ambassador to Athens and later Biden-era deputy secretary of state for energy, Geoffrey Pyatt, has repeatedly emphasized the “Vertical Gas Corridor” – a network that would allow bidirectional flows from south to north, specifically from Greece through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Ukraine, via both existing and new European natural gas and LNG infrastructure. View the full article

Two high-ranking gravediggers share their Reddit-level advice on resuscitating the bloc In the world of Western mainstream media political commentary, not everything is fun. In fact, mostly, things are grimly serious, the sort of seriousness that comes with solid, never-questioned self-importance. But sometimes that professional pomposity reaches a tipping point when strenuous efforts to be very earnest involuntarily produce priceless outcomes. That is the case with a recent elephantine op-ed that has surfaced in Politico under the illustrious names of Gabrielius Landsbergis and Garry Kasparov. Its one, relentlessly reiterated argument is touchingly simple as well as out of touch with the world we really live in: The EU, this fantasy goes, is too consensual, peaceful, and nice (tell the migrants drowning in the Mediterranean or traded as slaves in Libya with de facto EU support). It must become tough, decisive, and fierce, with plenty of arms and gritty oomph. Because otherwise it won’t survive in a world shaped by the big bad “global network of authoritarians” (I won’t enumerate them here; it’s just the usual suspects of every Centrist’s fever dream) and, for good measure, terrorists, too. (Surely, the latter, at least, do no longer include Mr. Jolani, the former leader of the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria who has recently been reborn miraculously as an avatar of diversity now going by Al Sharaa?) Landsbergis is a political nepo baby, enthusiastic NATO sectarian, and the former foreign minister of Lithuania. While popular at international meet-ups of adult – so they say at least – Europeans calling US presidents “daddy,” a 2023 poll back home in Lithuania saw him fail to breach the 2-percent threshold. If that sounds like perfect material for a blind date with Kamala Harris, Landsbergis certainly has time on his hands after losing his constituency last year and announcing he wanted to take a break from politics. No less, it seems, than his voters clearly needed a break from him. Read more Russian chess legend linked to South Sudan coup plot – Bloomberg Kasparov is, by comparison with Landsbergis, at least an original phenomenon, the idiot savant of chess. A former world champion, he has now spent decades proving that one can be a chess genius and a perfect dunce in every other respect, especially politics. Since he has combined this obstinate – and almost brave, if that is the word – playing to his worst weaknesses with an equally stubborn obsession with going after Russia and its leadership he still has his fans, in the West. Together, Landsbergis and Kasparov have signed off on a gargantuan effort to produce another Long Telegram. Clearly, they are driven by a comically misplaced ambition to best American diplomat and Ur-Cold Warrior’ George Kennan – a complex, dour, and vain man, but certainly no fool, as his later fall from official grace and opposition to daft Western expansionism showed – who issued the renowned call to arms against the Soviet Union in 1946/47. What early Cold War Kennan did for the US – and by extension, its postwar empire – Kasparov and Landsbergis would very much, desperately like to be able to do for the EU. And they have striven mightily. Yet they have strutted into the classical trap of the epigone: think of their imitation clarion call as a mix between embarrassingly poor-but-eager fan fiction, a bizarre alternative history of the EU, and a rambling and rather dull party speech masquerading as an op-ed. Yes, that is how bad it is. Indeed, the screed by the Lithuanian has-been and the chess master who went full blockhead is so self-defeatingly shoddy that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So, for starters, just for a rough sense of what we are dealing with, this is a text asserting the EU systematically promotes politicians who are “excellent negotiators.” Such as Ursula von der Leyen, we must assume? The one really in charge (although no one can coherently explain why) in the EU who has just “negotiated” a grotesquely disadvantageous anti-”deal” – really an unconditional surrender without a fight – with the US, built on the elegantly simple principle “You get everything, we get nothing, and we’ll pay you for that as well.” Read more EU to wait years to replace Patriots sent to Ukraine – NATO This claim about the EU producing excellence at the negotiating table, is all the more curious (Is “curious” the word? Would “symptomatic” be better?) since Landsbergis and Kasparov do mention that recent fiasco at Trump’s Turnberry Golf Berghof as well. Somehow, between the former foreign minister and the former chess champion, no one noticed the contradiction. But then again, these are the same bright minds who believe that the EU is a beacon of “free trade.” In reality, one purpose the EU was built for – apart from suppressing national sovereignty and whatever faint elements of democracy postwar European states actually have featured – was to not allow for free trade. In reality, the EU permits something resembling free trade only when it is perceived as advantageous to its own agenda or that of specific states and pressure groups – or, of course, when it is forced to do so. In all other cases, it practices a whole plethora of protectionist policies, from the classic Common Agricultural Policy to so-called anti-dumping rules that it uses as geopolitical weapons. It also runs an enormous redistribution scheme between its member nations, something that Landsbergis from Lithuania certainly knows from its most cushy side. While not directly a trade issue, that, too, is far from the pure doctrine of free markets and invisible hands. Finally, it was, obviously, precisely the EU’s – not Russia’s – refusal to even consider “free” trade for Ukraine with both itself and Russia that played a key role in triggering the original Ukraine crisis of 2013/14. More examples of painfully under-informed and under-thought (both polite expressions) statements could be added. But why torment ourselves? You get the gist: Details – though by no means minor – are not Landsbergis and Kasparov’s forte. What about the grand argument then? It is not merely ignorant but positively toxic. For Kasparov and Landsbergis, it is certain that the EU and “Putin’s Russia” can never “peacefully coexist,” and while hedging a tiny bit with regard to China, they say essentially the same about the bloc's relationship with Beijing as well. As card-carrying members of the “daddy”-saying club, they let the US off lightly, bending themselves into submissive pretzels by, on one side, noting that it is abandoning its EU vassals and, on the other, saying that that’s okay, daddy, and, anyhow, we Europeans need tough love. Read more Orban points to main hurdle in ending Ukraine conflict In effect, they paint a picture of an EU that can rely only on itself. And that is the madness of their article: They are right – even if cowardly – about the fact that it cannot rely on the US. But they are wrong, in fact, deluded, about two key things. First, they are dishonest about “going it alone.” Because they are, of course, not ready to be consistent and encourage the EU to, in that case, actually put its own interests above the demands of the US. The obvious test here is Ukraine. If Landsbergis and Kasparov were ready to face the fact that the EU must end, instead of increase, its support for Kiev, then one could take them seriously to an extent. But the opposite is the case. Second, there is no need to “go it alone,” and, in fact, there is no such option. If Kasparov and Landsbergis could free themselves for a moment from their ideological obsessions, they would easily realize that the way forward for the EU in a world where the US has become an even more damaging “friend” than before is to seek normal relationships with others, in particular with China and Russia. In terms of both security and economics, these are the relationships that would allow the EU to perhaps escape decline. Yet driven by provincial phobias and petty personal grudges, Kasparov and Landsbergis miss the obvious. What is profoundly disturbing about their rant is not that it exists: someone will always be full enough of themselves to produce flimsy, atrocious ideas and mistake them for advice to share. Yet in a halfway normal environment, such things would stay on Reddit. That they are treated as worthy of a mainstream platform is a sign that, indeed, the EU has severe problems and needs radical change. Just not along the lines suggested by Landsbergis and Kasparov. View the full article

Yesterday’s empire was built on spice, slaves, and silver. Today’s empire runs on metadata The new colonial frontier isn’t restricted to mineral-rich Congo or oil-drenched Venezuela. It’s digital, invisible, and everywhere. From the shantytowns of Nairobi to the barrios of Manila, smartphones hum with the raw material of the 21st century: data, all sorts of data. And just like spices and slaves once sailed westward in imperial galleons, metadata now travels quietly to the cloud servers of Palo Alto and Shenzhen. This isn’t development, it is digital extraction. Welcome to the age of AI colonialism. Big Tech firms from the US, and to a lesser extent China, have turned the Global South into a massive open-pit mine for behavioral data. Under the pretense of “AI for Development,” they build infrastructure, donate connectivity, and sponsor pilot programs but the returns flow in only one direction. Voice samples collected in Ghana become training fodder for Western voice assistants. Facial data gathered in Nigerian policing trials end up fine-tuning surveillance software in San Francisco, where western models have had protracted problems in identifying and tracking darker-skinned individuals. Agricultural data scraped from Filipino farmers help power predictive analytics for agribusiness conglomerates that will hardly benefit the Philippines. This is not a partnership. This is colonial pillage dressed in TED Talk lingo. The myth of the AI equalizer AI is marketed as a miracle equalizer that will help developing nations leapfrog into the future. We were told AI would bring precision agriculture, predictive healthcare, and smart urbanism, among numerous other utopian transformations, to even the most under-resourced regions. These Davos fantasies were regurgitated for nearly two decades. But where is the proof, the showcase project or evidence that even a fraction of those promises was delivered? The only real revolution happening is the outflow of data that were supposed to power these breakthroughs. Big Tech servers abroad now function like the colonial warehouses and banks of yore. Nor are intellectual properties of individuals and SMEs in the Developing World safe from this new brand of predation. Models, patents, ideas, and profits quietly migrate north while the Global South is left with nothing but pilot programs and PowerPoint decks. Read more ‘Democracy’ is the new colonialism Worse still, these tools are increasingly used against the very populations providing the raw material, or should I say, raw data. In Kenya, facial recognition technology was introduced as a policing tool under the guise of modernization. In practice, it has disproportionately targeted political activists who, in turn, are also resorting to AI to level the political battlefield. Who ultimately benefits from this internecine clash? Isn’t this the latest incarnation of the old imperial “divide and conquer” dictum? In India, AI-driven fraud detection systems have misclassified thousands of rural poor, unjustly cutting them off from vital government benefits. Imported algorithmic governance – often designed without regard for local context or cultural nuance – compounds the problem. Ironically, while these systems penalize the most vulnerable, India has emerged as a global hub for sophisticated online scams. It is a digital paradox where the poor are relentlessly surveilled, while the real fraudsters flourish with impunity. The biometric gold rush Nothing exemplifies AI colonialism better than the biometric boom. Tech firms, often in partnership with NGOs or global financial institutions, are racing to digitize identities across the Global South. Fingerprint scans, iris recognition, voiceprint registration have all been justified as ways to “include the unbanked” or “streamline public services.” But these efforts rarely include meaningful consent or data protection frameworks. In many cases, biometric systems have been imposed without community consultation or independent oversight. One of the most egregious examples is Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project that offered small payments in exchange for biometric iris scans. Its largest user base? Young people in low-income African nations like Kenya who served as a convenient population to experiment on, far from the regulatory spotlights of Brussels or Washington. (Note; Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, who is also the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT). Read more ChatGPT maker could become world’s most valuable private tech firm – Bloomberg Once collected, this data becomes part of opaque and often proprietary AI systems whose inner workings are unknowable to the very people they affect. Local regulators are usually outgunned, underfunded or more likely, politically compromised. As a result, entire populations are subjected to surveillance and scoring regimes that they neither understand nor control. The worst culprits in this saga are not Big Tech but local politicians and “technocrats” who sell out their nations at bargain basement prices, couched under the double-speak of “best practices” and UN institutional recommendations. The new East India Companies Silicon Valley is the global epicenter of the new East India Companies. These entities are vested with quasi-sovereign power and backed by vast capital reserves, lobbying muscle, and a veneer of corporate benevolence. Where the original East India Company extracted tea and textiles, today’s digital extractors siphon up location metadata, online behavior, biometric identifiers, and social graph mappings. Consider Meta’s “Free Basics” initiative, which offered zero-rated internet access in dozens of developing countries. What seemed like a humanitarian gesture was, in reality, an attempt to create a captive ecosystem – one where Facebook was the internet. It was banned in India in 2016 but continues in other countries, quietly conditioning the digital habits of hundreds of millions of users. An expanded Meta Connectivity is now used by an estimated 300 million people across many countries, including Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Critics warn that these platforms could be exploited for surveillance, IP harvesting, and geopolitical intelligence – often without the knowledge or consent of local populations. No one really knows what is happening. Besides, these services are not entirely free either. Pakistani users of Meta’s tech philanthropy were allegedly charged $1.9 million per month. Read more Zuckerberg unveils new ‘superintelligence lab’ The digital ‘kangani’ system India, once hailed as a rising digital superpower, now serves as a showpiece for AI neo-colonialism. Its vast IT industry, once brimming with promise, is today little more than an outsourced arm of Western conglomerates. Here is a reality check: how many individuals outside India have even one Indian-made app on their phones? There was a brief window when Indian tech seemed poised to lead. In the late ’90s, a major US tech firm allegedly commissioned two parallel teams – one in Silicon Valley, the other in an Indian city – to build a next-generation operating system to challenge Microsoft. The Indian team delivered. The US team could not. Around the same time, Indian innovators like Sabeer Bhatia gave us Hotmail, which arguably accelerated the decline of the traditional postal system. For a brief moment, the digital future seemed multipolar. That was until Big Capital arrived. Rather than reward innovation, Big Tech consolidated. Rival platforms that didn’t serve the globalist surveillance machine were quietly buried. Competition was replaced with shareholder-sanctioned “coordination,” led by the likes of BlackRock and its predecessors. From that point on, Indian IT firms would be reduced from potential innovators to mere subcontractors. And who better to manage this global digital plantation than a new class of compliant Indian C-Suite executives? These are not the disruptors. They are the taskmasters of digital “kanganis,” running the same extractive labor models once perfected by the East India Company. The dream of an “Asian Century” powered by Indian software and Chinese hardware has curdled into a reality of Chinese software, Chinese hardware, and Chinese AI. Indian tech talent has been reduced to glorified middleware, at best. For all the online chest-thumping about Indian-origin CEOs in the US, where is India’s own Jensen Huang? Where is the Indian-founded equivalent of NVIDIA, OpenAI, or even Palantir? There isn’t one. India produces engineers by the millions but owns almost none of the gilt-edged platforms. It trains the talent, but not the trillion-dollar tech. The colony codes and the empire profits. A similar theme is being played out in the US Ivy League system. Read more Elite Western universities form a corrupt and parasitic empire Resistance and reclamation But is the tide turning? Nigeria has applied brakes on foreign-backed digital ID programs. Kenya has suspended iris-scanning initiatives after massive backlash. A growing chorus of activists, lawyers, and technologists are calling for data sovereignty: the idea that countries should have the same rights over their data that they claim over oil, water, and land. A few pioneering efforts have emerged. In Brazil, the General Data Protection Law has begun to shape public discourse. In South Africa, local AI research groups are working on open, transparent models rooted in African languages and cultural norms. The African Union has even begun early-stage deliberations on a continental data governance framework. But it is an uphill fight. Western governments, in tandem with corporate lobbyists, continue to push for “data liberalization” which is nothing but a euphemism for open access-mediated exploitation. Aid packages, development grants, and tech investments are increasingly tied to these demands. It echoes the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, where loans came with strings that hollowed out national control. Only now, the strings are coded in algorithms. The need for a new digital non-alignment The Global South needs a coordinated pushback against Silicon Valley’s digital hegemony. This would involve not just resisting predatory data practices but investment in alternative infrastructures such as sovereign cloud storage, ethical AI standards, community-owned data cooperatives, and open-source platforms. This is how a new digital non-alignment paradigm can be achieved. The Global South has been colonized before. But data, unlike oil or sugar, is invisible, infinitely replicable, and easily stolen. That makes the fight harder but also more urgent. In this new age of algorithmic empires, control over information isn’t just about profit, it is about power, freedom, and the right to define your own future. View the full article

While the Doha agreement offers hope for DR Congo devastated by conflict, it is unlikely that the ceasefire will hold in the long term On July 19 in Doha, under the watchful eyes of US and Qatari diplomats, representatives of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the March 23 Movement (M23) rebel group signed a ‘Declaration of Principles’ on a peace agreement. The document, vague in substance but rich in optics, was immediately hailed by US President Donald Trump’s camp as a diplomatic victory. Trump’s Africa adviser, Massad Boulos, said the “the most important article of the agreement is the affirmation of state control in rebel-held territories.” That of course is still to be worked out in the coming weeks. For Trump, the moment was one of those testaments to his deal-making prowess, echoing the grandstanding that accompanied his earlier, more theatrical moves in the Middle East. But behind the celebratory headlines lies a far murkier reality. DR Congo remains a country engulfed in complex, overlapping conflicts, with M23 being only one of over 120 armed groups operating in the eastern provinces. The idea that a ceasefire agreement – mediated thousands of miles away in a Qatari hotel – could magically resolve the decades-long insecurity in this mineral-rich region is at best naive, and at worst, deliberately misleading. ‘If I could just ask your name and country’ Read more Terror and torture in the ‘heart of darkness’, the world’s only private colony The involvement of the US – particularly under transactional Trump – raises troubling questions. While any effort to mediate a ceasefire in one of the world’s most neglected war zones merits scrutiny, the Trump administration’s sudden engagement in the DR Congo appears driven less by concern for human suffering or regional stability and more by economic opportunity. Trump as president has never visited Africa, including his first term. What’s more, his attitude toward the continent has been widely criticized as dismissive: In 2018 he referred to several African nations as “s**thole countries” during a White House meeting, drawing broad condemnation. Last month, during a luncheon with the presidents of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal at the White House, Trump grew visibly impatient as the leaders spoke. When it was Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo’s turn, Trump interrupted with: “Maybe we’re gonna have to go a little bit quicker than this because we have a whole schedule,” and added, “if I could just ask your name and country, that would be great.” Though delivered in the guise of a schedule constraint, the remark was widely characterized as humiliating. It reduced these heads of state to nameless, interchangeable participants – highlighting a deeply transactional approach and a lack of respect for African leaders and their agendas. Mining peace DR Congo is one of the most resource-rich countries on the planet. Its eastern region, the focal point of the latest ceasefire, holds vast reserves of cobalt, coltan, gold, and lithium – minerals essential to electric vehicles, smartphones, and advanced military systems. As global demand for these resources soars, Washington has grown increasingly uneasy over China’s dominance in the DR Congo’s mining sector. Trump’s sudden push for the US involvement in Congolese ‘peacebuilding’ is better understood as a strategic bid to secure Western access to these critical minerals. Just two weeks earlier, he hosted a separate signing ceremony at the White House for what was billed as a broader agreement between Rwanda – allegedly the main backer of M23 – and the DR Congo. He used the occasion to underscore his transactional approach, stating that the deal gave the US “a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo as part of it.” Human Rights Watch criticized the announcement, noting that the deal “aligns squarely with US strategic interests and President Trump’s ethos for a transactional foreign policy.” This isn’t merely speculative. The Doha agreement followed months of discrete but strategic moves by US-linked mining and tech firms – many backed by influential figures tied to Trump’s donor circles – positioning them for long-term access to Congolese cobalt, lithium, and copper. Read more Western ‘support’ for Ukraine is losing the world KoBold Metals, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is pushing into Congolese lithium exploration at Manono, directly challenging Chinese interests. Meanwhile, a draft minerals-for-security arrangement being negotiated by the Trump administration envisions US companies – including KoBold, Orion Resource Partners, and Rio Tinto – receiving preferential access to mineral assets in exchange for political and financial support to Kinshasa. These efforts underscore how Washington’s public message of peace and stability masks a deeper strategy: Pacify the mineral-rich Kivu provinces just enough to facilitate Western extraction. Doha’s vague papers The ‘Principles of Peace’ signed in Doha are troublingly vague. The document outlines a broad road map for political dialogue, reintegration of fighters, and eventual disarmament, but lacks binding enforcement mechanisms or timelines. Worse, it places the burden of disarmament largely on M23, the very group that has grown in military sophistication and territorial control in recent years, thanks in part to support from neighbouring Rwanda. Asking M23 to lay down its arms with only vague promises of reintegration and security guarantees from a state that has repeatedly failed to protect its own citizens is, to put it mildly, unrealistic. The group, largely composed of Tutsi fighters who claim to protect Congolese Tutsi minorities from persecution, has long accused Kinshasa of bad faith in previous agreements. Why this time would be any different – especially when mediated outside Africa by foreign powers with ulterior motives – remains unanswered. Moreover, the document remains conspicuously silent on Rwanda’s role in the conflict. While Presidents Paul Kagame and Felix Tshisekedi are expected – if all goes according to plan – to sign a more comprehensive peace agreement in Washington this August, implementing the deal is another matter entirely. The long record of failed accords, combined with Washington’s deal-centered approach to diplomacy, casts serious doubt on its durability. Any peace arrangement that overlooks the regional dimension of the conflict is not only incomplete but also potentially dangerous, as it risks legitimizing a proxy force without holding its sponsors to account. Not-so-Congolese interests Read more Trump’s Africa pivot: Leverage, not generosity History is a reliable guide here. Previous deals with M23, most notably the 2013 agreement brokered in Kampala, collapsed within months. Many of the same figures now being recycled into the current agreement were involved back then – and the same structural issues remain unresolved: Lack of trust, regional meddling, economic incentives to keep fighting, and the Congolese state unable or unwilling to govern the east effectively. There is little to suggest that Doha will fare any better. If anything, the disconnect between the glossy diplomatic theater and the grim reality on the ground makes collapse even more likely. Most Congolese citizens, particularly those in the North Kivu province – the heart of the conflict – were unaware of the Doha process until the signing was announced. Local civil society groups, religious leaders, and community representatives were not consulted. This top-down, externally-driven approach mirrors other failed interventions in the region – and underscores the perception that the deal was made for American and Qatari interests, not for Congolese peace. Facade diplomacy For Trump, though, the facts on the ground are beside the point. What matters is the image: Another ‘peace deal’ to wave at cameras and cite during campaign rallies. The Doha agreement fits neatly into his narrative of global deal-maker – reviving the formula he used with the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, where normalization with Israel was prioritized over justice for Palestinians, and again when he vowed to end the war in Gaza by simply driving the Palestinians out of their land to create what he called the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. While the Doha deal offers much-needed hope for a region devastated by decades of conflict, it is unlikely that the ceasefire will hold in the long term. Moreover, the US is unlikely to maintain sustained focus on the issue for as long as necessary. This process risks being more about projecting a diplomatic facade than addressing the region’s deep-rooted problems. Under Trump’s approach, peace is reduced to optics: A signed agreement, a photo opportunity, and a press release. The real challenges – fighters disarming, refugees returning home, or the flow of conflict minerals being halted – are left to chance or, more cynically, destined to unravel once the cameras are gone. Read more From Leopold to lithium: How corporations perfected the art of plundering Africa Qatar’s role in the process is also worth examining. Long eager to cast itself as a neutral mediator in global conflicts – from Afghanistan to Sudan to now DR Congo – Doha has positioned itself as the go-to venue for Western-brokered diplomacy. While its financial resources and global network give it a comparative advantage, Qatar’s increasing alignment with US strategic goals in Africa cannot be ignored. For Doha, the Congolese deal burnishes its image as a peace broker. But for critics, it marks another example of Gulf states facilitating transactional diplomacy that serves Western interests far more than local populations. Indeed, any ceasefire is better than open warfare. But the Doha agreement, despite the celebratory rhetoric, offers only the illusion of peace. The Congolese people have lived through countless illusions – brief moments of international attention followed by abandonment and renewed violence. Instead, what we are witnessing is the repackaging of geopolitical competition as peace-making, with Trump and his allies eager to use the crisis in DR Congo as another talking point in their broader campaign to secure economic advantages and diplomatic bragging rights. If peace does come to eastern Congo, it will not be because of hotel-room negotiations in Doha, but because Congolese voices are finally heard, regional interference is checked, and the country’s wealth is used to uplift its people rather than reward its tormentors. Until then, the Doha ceasefire remains exactly what it appears to be: A deal for the cameras, not for the people. View the full article

Empires have not changed, they have simply cloaked themselves in platitudes such as “resilience,” “visibility,” and “empowerment” A ballot floats through the air like a mechanical butterfly, delicate in descent, but once it touches ground, everything freezes. The jungle goes mute. The city forgets its language. A ritual begins: one created not in oracle chambers but in air-conditioned think tanks with sliding doors and corporate logos. Democracy arrives as gospel, prepackaged and barcode-approved, dropped from drones or delivered via diplomatic pouch. It conquers like a parasite: nesting in the heart, feeding on belief, and killing the host with false promises. It persuades, it seduces, it infects. Men in suits descend like missionaries, their scriptures printed on glossy paper, their symbols cleaned for export. They bring PowerPoints and gender training modules instead of muskets. They come bearing good news: sovereignty is obsolete, local gods are outdated, and every village will be updated with Wi-Fi and murals of unveiled women raising fists beneath UN slogans. The savannah no longer trembles under the boots of British redcoats. It shudders under the impact of slogans. “Civic engagement” is murmured like a spell. “Open society” is etched into blackboards where elders once traced cosmologies. The thunder of artillery has been replaced by keynote addresses. A revolution is rehearsed before it is broadcast. The new coup comes dressed for television. The old king disappears, replaced by a consensus candidate with a Yale degree and NATO approval. A constitution is unveiled like a luxury car: shiny, expensive, foreign. No one reads it. It reads them. The people applaud. Their applause is scheduled. The tyrant’s head is displayed: pixelated and streaming. Laugh tracks rise. Purple ink stains the skin like a holy mark, as if casting a vote could cleanse the past and summon salvation. A sacred document lies open, its pages humming with subclauses and subversion. Article 1: Surrender to the algorithm. Article 2: Sterilize the folk soul. Article 3: Criminalize memory. The priests of procedure nod. They light candles made from recycled narratives. They chant slogans curated by Silicon Valley. The TED talk tone becomes the new church service – blessed by click-through rates. Buzzwords are incanted: “resilience,” “visibility,” “empowerment.” Words hollowed out and worn like medals. Read more Terror and torture in the ‘heart of darkness’, the world’s only private colony The empire has remodeled. It is clad in linen. It carries clipboards. Its armies are task forces. Its tanks are now lettered agencies: USAID, UNHCR, OSCE. Smiles replace bayonets, and seminars replace firing squads. Democracy arrives on a private jet with an Instagram account. Its viceroys order oat-milk lattes while planning cultural transformations. A rainbow banner flies over every blasted zone. Baghdad bleeds beneath the missiles. Tripoli hums with foreign NGOs. Kiev hosts parades that mock its soil. Sacred ruins get rebranded. Temple stones are reused for embassy courtyards. The rituals change. The domination remains. In a village, a woman sings an ancestral tune. A man offers a prayer in a dialect that has no Unicode. A stone is lifted to rebuild a shrine. These things cannot be allowed. A survey is conducted. A briefing is written. A donor threatens. The local minister corrects course. An election is held. The outcome is known. It always is. This is what they call consent. This is what they mean by freedom. Uniformity parades as universality. Diversity becomes deletion. Identity is redesigned by foreign interns. Language becomes emoji. The dead are archived. Museums replace tombs. Grandfathers are described in footnotes written by their enemies. Tears fall in exhibition halls where relics of resistance are sanitized. The conquerors mourn – always in public, always with cameras. Their grief is a spectacle. Their mercy is management. The liberal preacher wears a smile that has been photoshopped. He gives interviews about “trauma” and “tolerance.” He never wields a sword; he commissions reports. His gospel: guilt without end. His miracle: the regeneration of conflict. His sacraments are embargoes and media campaigns. He baptizes children in ideology. He breathes in incense made from treaties and sanctions. He sings a hymn with verses about gender fluidity and carbon offset credits. His voice, thin and sweet, drowns entire cultures in its syrup. Read more Trump’s Africa pivot: Leverage, not generosity Yet across the map, the earth remembers. Forests speak in rustling defiance. Mountains echo with chants unscripted. The Danube shivers beneath steel bridges. The Volga murmurs secrets to the steppe. Across Eurasia, across Africa, across the zones marked “developing,” something stirs. Trump does not rise as emperor; he crashes through the screen like a malfunction, an interruption in the broadcast. Serbia remembers its ruins. Iran cradles its martyrs. Russia bares its teeth. Hungary builds walls – not out of fear but out of fidelity to her own. Multipolarity emerges, not like a plan but like a rite remembered. It does not wait for validation. It speaks in a hundred dialects, none requiring translation. It holds torches, not flashlights. It charts no global roadmap. It builds thresholds. It invokes gods buried under glass towers. It honors spirits banned from textbooks. In each land, new mythologies are forged from the ruins of development. The ballot box is abandoned, its promise of mechanical salvation discarded. In its place stands the stone of ancestral law, stained with sacrifice and inscribed with the unspoken codes of blood, land, and loyalty. So let the ballots fall, let the slogans swirl like ash in the wind. Let the consultants keep writing. None of it halts the return. The sacred pulses again in veins unmapped by Western metrics. Democracy, once garlanded as deliverance, strips down and stands revealed: an agent of extraction, a theater of consent. Multipolarity does not debate it. Multipolarity replaces it – with stone, with flame, with song. The world moves again, towards the myth reborn. View the full article

On the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, there’s little to celebrate for those who wanted a harmonious coexistence Like him, hate him, Otto von Bismarck – Prussian aristocrat, arch conservative, user of German nationalism, maker of wars, and then keeper of the peace – was no dummy. And his ego was Reich-sized. Yet even Bismarck had a grain of humility left. Smart politics, he once remarked, consists of listening for “God’s step” as He walks through “world history,” and then to grab the hem of His mantle. In other words, stay attuned to the needs and especially the opportunities of the moment. Tragically, Bismarck’s single greatest skill was to seize – and, if need be, help along – opportunities for war. But sometimes peace, too, gets its chance. Fifty years ago, all European countries – minus only Albania, initially – plus the US and Canada, signed the Helsinki Final Act (or Helsinki Accords). A complex document addressing four areas (called ‘baskets’) of international relations and follow-up implementation, the Helsinki Final Act was a breakthrough for Détente in Europe. Détente was a global attempt, driven by Brezhnev and Gromyko’s Moscow and Nixon and Kissinger’s Washington to, if not wind down, then at least manage the Cold War better. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was not the only reason for this policy of restraint and reason. Coming extremely close to all-out nuclear war Dr.-Strangelove-style helped concentrate minds. Add the US fiasco in Vietnam, and by the late 1960s, the desire to de-escalate was strong enough even in Washington to quickly override the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. In the first half of the 1970s, a flurry of high-level international diplomacy and treaties marked the peak of Détente. By 1975, the Helsinki Accords were the peak of that peak. Stemming from Soviet and Warsaw Pact initiatives and resonating with a Western Europe – and even post-Harmel Report NATO (those were the days!) – that genuinely wanted to combine due diligence in defense policy with real diplomacy and give-and-take negotiations, the Helsinki Accords also fed on the preceding French, that is, De Gaulle’s, “politique à l’Est,” as well as Willy Brandt of Germany’s “Ostpolitik.” Read more Germany and rest of EU transforming into Fourth Reich – Lavrov The latter is much maligned now in a Germany where disgracefully incompetent elites have gone wild with Russophobia and a new militarism. In reality, both De Gaulle and Brandt – as well as Brandt’s key foreign policy adviser, Egon Bahr, made historic contributions to mitigating the worst risks of the Cold War and, in Germany’s case, also to preparing the ground for national re-unification. Yet, after 1975, things started to go downhill, and they’ve never really stopped. That is one of the key points recently made in a long article by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Since Western mainstream media excel at not reporting what Russian politicians are trying to tell us, it is likely that few will notice outside of Russia. That’s a shame because Lavrov has more than one message we should pay attention to. Under the understated title “Half a Century of the Helsinki Act: Expectations, Realities, and Perspectives,” Lavrov delivers a harsh and – even if you disagree with some of the details – fundamentally valid and just criticism of the disappointing failure following the promising beginnings at Helsinki. That failure has a name – the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Incidentally, the OSCE is the successor of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which actually produced the Helsinki Accords between 1972 and 1975. Before the leaders of the time, both great and small, could meet in Helsinki to sign them, at what Cold War historian Jussi Hanhimäki called a “largely ceremonial affair,” there had been years of painstaking, meticulous negotiations. There’s a lesson here for the impatient Trumps and Zelenskys of today: serious results take serious preparation, not a day or two of grandstanding. What happened to the OSCE next is not complicated: with 57 member states, making it the largest security organization in the world today, it has massively under performed. At least if we measure it by its aims, as originally set out at Helsinki in the heyday of Détente. Read more Zelensky calls for ‘regime change’ in Russia The OSCE could have been an indispensable international forum, bridging the front lines of geopolitics and ideologies (or, as we now say, “values”). After the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, it could even have become the core of new security architecture, which included everyone from Lisbon to Vladivostok. But for that to happen, it would have had to stick to the Helsinki Accord’s core principles and rules: strict respect for sovereignty, equality, and non-interference, all maintained by a heavy emphasis on consensus. Yet, instead, the OSCE turned, first, into a Cold War and, then, a post-Cold War tool of Western influence, bias, and – behind the façade of multilateralism – hardball realpolitik. Like the EU, the OSCE should have been fundamentally different from, and even antagonistic towards NATO. But like the EU, it ended up becoming a mere junior partner in America’s imperial vassal system. Much of Lavrov’s article is dedicated to detailing this failure in various countries, regions, issues, and conflicts, including Chechnya, Kosovo, Moldova, and Ukraine, to name just a few. That’s important because it serves as a corrective to silly and complacent Western mainstream tales, which put the blame for Helsinki’s and the OSCE’s failure on – drum roll – Russia and Russia alone. Not to speak of the demented attempts by Ukraine’s delusional, corrupt, and increasingly isolated Vladimir Zelensky to use the Helsinki anniversary to once again call for “regime change” in Russia. Yet what is even more important is Lavrov’s candid message about the future, as Russia sees it. First, it is polycentric or multipolar and, in this part of the world, Eurasian and emphatically not transatlantic. In that respect, it is almost as if we are back in the mid-1950s. Back then, long before the Helsinki Act became reality, Moscow – then the capital of the Soviet Union – suggested building comprehensive security architecture. The West refused because Moscow was not willing to include the US. By the 1970s, the Soviet leadership had changed its position, affirming that it was possible to include the US, which, in turn, made Helsinki possible. So much for fairy tales of Russian “intransigence.” Read more Western ‘support’ for Ukraine is losing the world That inclusion was an irony of history, as Washington initially showed only distrust and disdain. As Hanhimäki has shown, Henry Kissinger considered Europe a sideshow, though not the Soviet Union: the US has always respected its opponents much more than its vassals. He suspected that if Moscow and Western Europe got to cozy it could end up threatening Washington’s control over the latter. He once told his team with more than a tinge of nasty racism that the Helsinki agreements might as well be written in Swahili. Now, Moscow is back to standing firm against trans-atlanticism. Lavrov writes, “Euro-atlantic” conceptions of security and cooperation have “discredited themselves and are exhausted.” Europe, he warns, can have a place in future Eurasian systems, but it “definitely” won’t be allowed to “call the tune.” If its countries wish to be part of the “process, they will have to learn good manners, renounce [their habit of] diktat and colonial instincts, get used to equal rights, [and] working in a team.” You may think that this is very far from the Europe we are seeing now: one that is submissive to the US to the point of self-destruction (as the Turnberry Trade and Tariff Fiasco has just revealed again), blinded by hubris in its “garden-in-the-jungle,” and fanatically invested in not even talking to Russia and confronting China. And yet, none of the above can last forever. Indeed, given how self-damaging these policies are, it may not last much longer. The news from Moscow is that, though Russia has not closed the door on Europe entirely, if or when the Europeans recover their sanity, they will find that Russia won’t allow them to return to having it both ways: being America’s vassals and enjoying a decent relationship with Russia at the same time. View the full article

As the West accuses New Delhi of “supporting Russia’s war” by importing its crude, the nation of 1.4 billion people defines its red lines With American rhetoric against India becoming more openly coercive, and top officials warning New Delhi about the consequences of its energy trade with Russia, the pressure is becoming multidirectional. Recent remarks by former US President Donald Trump have further complicated this recalibration. Alongside a 25% tariff on Indian exports, imposed last week, Trump issued pointed warnings over India’s sustained energy and defense trade with Russia, accusing New Delhi of indirectly supporting America’s adversaries through continued oil purchases. Trump went as far as to suggest that India and Russia could “take their dead economies down together,” framing their economic engagement as contrary to US interests. Trump’s statements were not just emotional reactions – they were followed by a series of other statements from US officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday claimed India’s purchase of Russian oil is a ”point of irritation.” “India has huge energy needs and that includes the ability to buy oil and coal and gas and things that it needs to power its economy like every country does, and it buys it from Russia, because Russian oil is sanctioned and cheap and – meaning they have to – in many cases, they’re selling it under the global price because of the sanctions,” he stated. ”And that – unfortunately that is helping to sustain the Russian war effort. So it is most certainly a point of irritation in our relationship with India – not the only point of irritation.” Read more Sanction first, ally later: India learns the cost of trusting the US On Sunday, a top aide to President Donald Trump accused India of financing Russia’s war in Ukraine by buying oil from Moscow. “What he [Trump] said very clearly is that it is not acceptable for India to continue financing this war by purchasing the oil from Russia,” said Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House and one of the US president’s most influential aides. “People will be shocked to learn that India is basically tied with China in purchasing Russian oil. That’s an astonishing fact,” Miller said on Fox News. This marks a significant hardening of tone, signalling that bipartisan pressure on India’s Russia policy may persist regardless of the administration in power. The Indian government issued a stern response, saying Delhi would keep purchasing oil from Moscow if it is in line with national interests. Its foreign ministry stated that country’s energy purchases are guided by market dynamics and national interests. “⁠The government is committed to prioritizing the welfare of Indian consumers. Our energy purchases will be based on price, availability and market conditions,” the statement read. Despite Trump’s claims that India had stopped buying Russian oil after his threats, the Indian government said it is not aware of any pauses in imports. People in the oil and gas industry have confirmed that the government has not issued any officials requests to refiners to stop purchasing Russian oil. As global energy flows are increasingly weaponized, India’s path is becoming tougher, but also more clearly defined. This is no longer merely a question of compliance with sanctions; it is about resisting the politicization of trade and asserting agency in a fragmented global order. The message to the West at large: India’s energy decisions will not be dictated by external red lines. India’s response is not retreat, but recalibration, through diversification, industrial pivoting, and legal safeguards. It signals the emergence of a new energy diplomacy: one that is agile, layered, and unapologetically sovereign. EU pressure A change in US rhetoric against India came days after the European Union unveiled its 18th sanctions package targeting refined fuels processed from Russian crude. By imposing curbs on the import of diesel and other fuels refined from discounted Russian oil, the EU has drawn India’s biggest private refiners, Nayara Energy and Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), into a geopolitical confrontation they had largely navigated with strategic finesse since 2022. Read more Crude calculations: US sanctions on Russia compel India to redraw its energy playbook At the core of the EU’s sanctions is a new strategy of tracking the origin of crude, even after it has been transformed into refined products. In other words, Indian diesel or jet fuel produced from Russian Urals crude will now be treated as Russian in origin, regardless of where it’s refined. This has immediate implications for Nayara Energy’s Vadinar refinery, the second largest in India, and also for Reliance, which operates the world’s largest refining complex at Jamnagar and has occasionally purchased Russian barrels to take advantage of significant discounts. The EU has gone further. It has lowered the price cap on seaborne Russian crude from $60 to $47.60 per barrel, effective from September 3, 2025. In practice, this severely limits Indian refiners’ ability to secure Urals crude at prices that generate high margins, formerly in the $15–20 per barrel range. This arbitrage had made Indian products highly competitive in the European market. With Europe now closed off and refiners forced to reroute cargoes to regions with lower demand and pricing power, expected margins could shrink to $8–12, with an additional $1–2 per barrel in compliance costs. India’s reaction was swift and unequivocal. The Ministry of External Affairs condemned the move as ‘unilateral and extraterritorial,’ rejecting the notion that its energy decisions should be hostage to the EU’s secondary sanctions logic. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri underlined that India’s energy security remained ‘non-negotiable’, a principle India would not abandon merely to appease Western preferences. Even Nayara Energy, 49.13% owned by Russia’s Rosneft and long seen as vulnerable, broke its usual silence to denounce the sanctions as unjustified, while considering legal remedies through international arbitration mechanisms. Targeting Nayara Energy recently saw a leadership change, with CEO Alessandro des Dorides stepping down amid the evolving impact of EU sanctions and operational uncertainty. This was not just symbolic. A BP-chartered tanker, the Talara, left Nayara’s port without loading fuel after the sanctions were announced. This suggests that EU enforcement will be aggressive and, potentially, that companies with European exposure will become increasingly wary of doing business with Indian refiners tied to Russian feedstock. Nayara may not be the last to face such pressure. Reliance, despite its diverse portfolio, is already re-evaluating its sourcing strategies in anticipation of tighter scrutiny. READ MORE: Trump is pushing India to buy more American gas – could Russia’s be the better choice? The financial stakes are staggering. India’s fuel exports to Europe, which peaked at $19.2 billion in FY24, have already dropped by 27% to $15 billion in FY25. With the EU’s latest restrictions now fully operational, analysts estimate that India could lose up to $5 billion annually, depending on the rigor of enforcement and the ability of refiners to find alternate buyers in Asia or Africa. The sheer scale of these losses would not only erode refining margins but also squeeze India’s current account buffers, potentially complicating its macroeconomic stability. Redrawing India’s Energy Map India isn’t backing down. Instead, it is executing a quiet but deliberate recalibration of its energy strategy. Leading Indian refiners are ramping up imports from Iraq, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, while cautiously exploring longer-term deals with US crude suppliers, despite those barrels being less competitively priced than discounted Russian Urals. The objective is strategic: to avoid overdependence on any single geopolitical supplier while safeguarding energy security on India’s own terms. Read more This strategic move can help both India and Russia resist Western pressure. Will New Delhi act? For Reliance Industries, the pivot is even deeper. Already investing $10–15 billion in its ambitious crude-to-chemicals (C2C) initiative, the company is insulating itself from the volatility of fuel exports by focusing on petrochemicals and specialty materials with more stable margins and global demand. This rebalancing is likely to accelerate in the wake of the EU sanctions, giving Reliance a strategic hedge against trade weaponization. While Reliance charts an innovation-led pivot, Nayara remains entangled in geopolitical risk. Given Rosneft’s equity stake and its exposure to sanctions, any restructuring will need careful legal engineering. The company is reportedly exploring the creation of special-purpose vehicles or divestment strategies to insulate its operations. This standoff isn’t just about oil, it’s about sovereignty. India, having withstood Western pressure on Russian oil since 2022, now sees the EU’s sanctions as a strategic red line. The real risk lies not only in lost trade, but in legitimizing extraterritorial controls that erode the Global South’s right to independent economic choices. While the EU claims it’s closing loopholes, India sees clear double standards. European nations still import Russian LNG and rely on intermediaries, yet penalize India for refining crude. The era of quiet compromise is over. In its place, a more assertive India is stepping forward, redefining its energy calculus, managing geopolitical headwinds, and defending its autonomy with both pragmatism and resolve. View the full article

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week. In the kitchen, fresh coconuts can add great flavor to one’s culinary pursuits. In the wild, they’re one of nature’s most perfect survival foods. Coconut meat is a great source of fat, carbohydrates, and fiber. And there’s a good reason coconut water is so readily available at stores these days: it’s loaded with minerals, electrolytes, natural sugars, and vitamins. Even when you’re done eating and drinking everything the coconut has to offer, the shell is useful as a bowl or cup. But you won’t reap any of these benefits if you don’t know how to open one up. Cracking open a coconut takes some practice, but there are several tricks to make it a bit easier. Firstly, you’ll have to get through the husk. Store-bought coconuts have this removed already, but in the wild and in a survival situation, you’ll have to de-husk it yourself. You’ll do this by first nestling the coconut between some rocks for stability, with its pointier end facing up. Then, find the largest rock you can hoist, lift it 4-5 feet above the coconut, and drop/throw it onto the coconut. After a few drops, the husk’s fibers will begin to soften and splits will open up in it. Flip the coconut over so that the blunter end is facing up, give it another hit or two with the rock, and you should be able to peel away the husk (which doubles as great tinder for making a fire!). Before getting started with cracking the shell and getting to the goods inside, brush up on your coconut anatomy. At the top of the coconut is the “face”: three holes grouped tightly together that resemble eyes and a mouth. These holes represent weak points that you can exploit to poke a hole in the coconut and extract the water. If you imagine the face is the north pole, and the opposite side is the south pole, it’s easy to picture the coconut’s equator. The equator is another weak point, and you can use it to crack up a coconut like a pro, with or without tools. Illustrated by Ted Slampyak This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness. View the full article

Washington’s aggressive posture reveals a fundamental misreading of the multipolar world US President Trump has rattled Washington's ties with New Delhi to an unexpected degree. Countries, including, India were prepared for rough diplomatic weather after Trump won his second term, but did not anticipate the kind of onslaught he has unleashed on the global system and diplomatic norms. Trump’s latest attack on India and the BRICS countries explains this underlying dynamic. The BRICS aspire to play a greater political, economic and financial role in global affairs. This aspiration is based on shifts of economic and concomitant political and financial power towards the so-called emerging powers or middle-income countries. BRICS countries have already begun to use their national currencies in trading with each other as much as possible. The use of draconian financial sanctions on Russia by the West has accelerated this process. Today, almost all trade operations between Russia and China are conducted in rubles and yuan. India too is encouraging the use of its national currency in payment transactions with select countries. A significant portion of the trade between India and Russia is now settled using a rupee-ruble mechanism. Washington cannot use secondary sanctions to prevent countries, including India, from using the US dollar to trade with Russia and then oppose de-dollarization if these countries are compelled to use alternative payment mechanisms. If the US continues to weaponize the dollar, it will inevitably lead to the very “de-dollarization” that Trump is concerned about. Read more The train to Kashmir is finally real – and it’s stunning India has officially disowned any de-dollarization agenda – not the least because the US is its biggest trade partner in goods and services. India seeks more investments and technology transfers from the US. In many ways, New Delhi’s ties with Washington are the most important for achieving its growth and developmental goals. But that does not preclude India from establishing other partnerships to reduce over-dependence on one country, balance its external relations and hedge against the excesses of US foreign policy. Trump has exacerbated the disruptions caused by Washington’s frequent use of sanctions as a political weapon by also weaponizing tariffs. He is convinced that by imposing arbitrarily determined tariffs on imports from other countries he will compel them to enter into negotiations with the US to obtain relief by lowering their high tariffs on American products. But India on Wednesday sent a clear message: it is determined to protect the interests of its own businesses, farmers and people. Trump’s use of tariffs as lever, like in the case of Brazil, where he has cited President Lula’s treatment of his predecessor Bolsanaro as reason for imposing 50% levies, is being closely monitored by the world’s governments. Read more From ceasefire to misfire: Trump’s claims stir concerns in India Trump has repeatedly targeted BRICS since his return to the Oval Office. He had threatened the countries with tariffs if they contonie to pledge to create a new common currency or support any alternative to the US dollar. Trump appeared to harbor the illusion that BRICS was ”dead” following his threats – which have now materialized into action. In reality, the BRICS summit held in Brazil this July showed no visible signs of intimidation. On the contrary, such overt displays of American economic coercion may well drive more countries toward alliances that seek to challenge the dominance of any single global power. The administration in Washington appears to lack realism in its assessment of global trends. Trump positions himself as a peacemaker and openly aspires to win a Nobel Peace Prize, while at the same time bombing Iran and assisting Israel in perpetuating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Similarly, threatening China as a BRICS member with 100% tariffs so casually – along with talk of bombing Beijing if the People’s Republic were to invade Taiwan – makes little sense, especially given that an interim trade deal has already been reached and further negotiations are imminent. The US cannot reasonably claim that forums like BRICS have no right to determine their own agenda in pursuit of their shared interests. At the same time, the US has walked out of or subverted key international agreements and institutions. It has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Change agreement, the WHO, the UN Human Rights Commission and UNESCO. READ MORE: India is way too eager to embrace Trump’s America Trump seems to believe that these organizations cannot function or survive without the presence of the US and its financial contributions. In reality, the US will lose its voice and its leadership in these international forums. The space it vacates will be filled by others, especially China. Beijing has already carved out enormous influence in the UN institutions as it is now the second largest contributor to the UN. With Washington also bullying Europe and thereby damaging Western solidarity, the US absence from these organizations will have even less impact. The more the world learns to manage without the US in these international bodies, the more America’s international influence will erode. These US decisions will also accelerate the dispersal of influence at the global level, as other centers of influence develop. View the full article