Past days have seen the European political classes turning up the volume to maximum on clearly concerted – and shared – speaking-notes: “War with Russia is coming; Russia intends to strike NATO; we must prepare; stock up on bottled water, tinned food, and be ready to...
President Trump's emissaries shuttled from Moscow to Kyiv seeking a way to end the Ukraine war. Afterward, Trump negotiator Jared Kushner explained, "…the hardest issue is still territory." That dispute centers on Crimea and Donbas. These areas have been points of...
In California, gas stations are facing a unique challenge. The station signs are only configured to go up to $9.99 per gallon and at several stations the price of diesel has reached that maximum. Diesel prices are higher than they have ever been in history. Worse,...
Professor Sergei Karaganov has written a paper – How to Win a World War – that advocates a limited nuclear strike on an adversary by Russia, as the means of preventing a World War. On the face of it, this may seem to be an oxymoron – a nuclear strike precisely done to...
Washington and Moscow both enthusiastically celebrated the victory of the Allied “Grand Alliance” over the fascist powers at the end of World War II. Since then, however, the two capitals have typically been on opposite sides of numerous nasty geostrategic...
This line of argument that we shouldn’t be afraid of Russia... Maybe someone also calls us a ‘paper tiger’, like Trump called NATO, but I would caution against such parallels. We have a quality in our character like patience. ‘God was patient and commanded us to be...
The proverb “revenge is a dish best served cold” traces to French (“La vengeance se mange froide”), appearing in English literature by the 19th century. Most Americans do not know the French orign of the proverb… It entered popular culture thanks to Star Trek....
It is not a glitch (that nothing gets resolved). It’s a feature. For it opens rather, a path for “Business” to be done – for “stakeholder” deals to be cut, and for billions to be shared out in payoffs. This is Trump’s geo-political transactional model: Business...
Kaja Kallas stood at the 62nd Munich Security Conference, at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof where the Atlantic Empire had assembled not to project power but to perform its own autopsy while the patient was still breathing — and delivered what she imagined was a...
Sergey Lavrov didn’t hedge. He didn’t soften. He lit the match and let it burn. “In Anchorage, we accepted the United States’ proposal.” And now, he says, Washington is no longer prepared to implement what it itself put on the table — not on Ukraine, not on expanded...
Last night Ukraine was finally confronted with the consequences of attacking Russian infrastructure. And no, I do not mean last nights Oreshnik strike on the large gas storage facility in west Ukraine. The seismic impulse from that strike likely damaged the...
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now admits that “parts of Germany’s economy are in very critical condition” and that his government “hasn’t done enough.” That phrasing is an evasion. Germany did not drift into this collapse. The numbers were visible in real time. The...
Today the NY Times published a long piece on the relations between the Trump administration and the government of Ukraine. The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership (archived) – NY Times, Dec 30 2025 There is a lot of gossip...
When a prime minister tells her own staff to rest because next year will be much worse, it is not gallows humor. It is not exhaustion speaking. It is a slip of the mask, the kind of remark leaders make only when the internal forecasts no longer align with the...
The negotiations over the weekend between the U.S., Ukraine and Europe about the parameters of a ceasefire or peace agreement with Russia were surreal. The three sides are fighting each other over detailed points that Russia is sure to reject. They also left out...
Western headlines are screaming that Ukraine has “encircled” Kupyansk city… a glorified town, selling it as a nightmare for Moscow. But this is not a battlefield report. It is narrative management, timed precisely to negotiations in Berlin. Kupyansk is not Stalingrad....
Let’s stop pretending Brussels is engaged in noble statecraft. The EU’s rush to steal more than €180 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets held at Euroclear is the most reckless gamble Europe has taken in decades. Moscow’s central bank is not wrong to call the...
With the benefit of hindsight, we’re all geniuses. The Wall Street Journal article, Inside Ukraine’s Daring Operation Spiderweb Attack on Russia (published December 8, 2025) details the operation’s planning as a 18-month effort starting in late...
The great farce of late-imperial Europe is that every time Brussels stumbles into another historic blunder of its own making, it immediately searches for a foreign hand to blame. And so the EU’s court chronicler, Politico, delivers its latest fever dream: that...
As it is becoming obvious that Ukraine is losing in the proxy war against Russia, the ideas European governments are are throwing around are getting more crazy. Some are now eager to ‘pre-emptively’ attack Russia in ‘retaliation’ for alleged ‘hybrid attacks’ against...
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