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War on Iran pushes US debt toward $40 trillion as borrowing costs surge

Press TV – August 19, 2026

The US national debt is on track to surpass $40 trillion this week, months earlier than previously projected, as the US-Israeli war on Iran, renewed inflation fears and rising government borrowing push long-term bond yields higher across major economies.

The Treasury reported on Monday that US government debt stood at $39.9 trillion, putting it within reach of the milestone. Six months ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had projected that federal borrowing would reach $39.4 trillion during the current fiscal year.

The faster accumulation of debt comes at a perilous moment for US finances. Investors are demanding higher returns to hold long-term government bonds amid concerns over inflation, geopolitical tensions, government debt levels and spending on artificial intelligence.

The yield on 30-year US Treasury bonds climbed to 5.33% on Tuesday, its highest level since June 2007. Long-term borrowing costs also rose in Britain, where yields reached 5.85%, as well as in Germany and Japan.

A key driver has been the surge in oil prices linked to the US-Israeli war on Iran and disruptions to energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global oil supplies.

Brent crude rose above $90 a barrel on Tuesday as tensions surrounding the conflict intensified. Prolonged high oil prices could reignite inflation by increasing transportation and production costs, potentially forcing central banks to keep interest rates higher for longer or raise them again.

John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, told the BBC that oil-driven inflation risks were only part of the pressure facing bond markets.

High government debt, uncertainty over the vast amounts being invested in AI and questions about when those investments will generate returns are also contributing to higher borrowing costs, he said.

The US debt outlook is worsening as federal revenue falls and spending rises. The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs reduced projected federal revenue by an estimated $250 billion, while the Treasury has also increased borrowing to build its cash reserves.

The federal deficit was already expected to approach $2 trillion this year. Annual interest payments on the debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion, roughly equivalent to the Pentagon’s budget.

Military spending linked to the war on Iran could add further pressure to federal finances in the coming months, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The growing debt burden could also bring the next US debt-ceiling confrontation forward. Congress set the borrowing limit at $41.1 trillion last year, but preliminary projections by the Bipartisan Policy Center suggest Washington could reach that threshold between late winter and midsummer 2027.

The broader pressure is not confined to the United States. Economists at Capital Economics said the sharpest increases in long-term borrowing costs were occurring in the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, where fiscal conditions were considered particularly challenging.

They said the moves did not amount to a bond-market crisis, but investors had rational reasons to demand higher returns given greater geopolitical and inflation uncertainty, questions over US monetary policy and concerns about the sustainability of government finances.

For consumers, higher government bond yields can eventually translate into more expensive mortgages, car loans and other forms of credit, while companies may face higher financing costs and pass those increases on to customers.

Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, said rising yields were troubling investors because they signaled a more expensive borrowing environment, particularly as uncertainty remained over when the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure would generate returns.

The mounting debt comes after decades of borrowing under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump pledged during his first presidential campaign to eliminate the debt within eight years, but it has instead doubled since he first took office.

Washington has repeatedly raised or suspended the debt limit when it has been reached, often after contentious political battles. Such confrontations have rattled financial markets and contributed to downgrades of U.S. government debt by major credit-rating agencies.

August 19, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | | Comments Off on War on Iran pushes US debt toward $40 trillion as borrowing costs surge

Senior Iranian MP warns France over ‘constant betrayals’ after Tehran expels diplomats

Press TV – August 19, 2026

Senior Iranian lawmaker Ebrahim Azizi has condemned France’s “constant betrayals” against the Islamic Republic, warning that Paris’s continued anti-Iranian measures will only further complicate its ties with Tehran.

“The Iranian people will never forget France’s constant betrayals over issues such as contaminated blood, INSTEX and snapback,” Azizi, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, wrote on X on Wednesday.

“Continuing this course and anti-Iranian actions will only make conditions more difficult for it,” he added.

Azizi’s reference to the INSTEX (Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges) and snapback comes against the backdrop of longstanding disagreements between Iran and the E3 — France, Germany and the UK- over Tehran’s peaceful nuclear program.

The three countries shut down the INSTEX mechanism in 2023. Established in 2019, the INSTEX was designed to facilitate trade between European companies and Iran, bypassing the US sanctions.

The E3 also moved to trigger the UN Security Council’s “snapback” mechanism under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last year, despite Tehran’s commitment to diplomacy and transparency regarding its nuclear program.

Azizi’s remarks came after Iran’s Foreign Ministry declared two French diplomats working at the French Embassy in Tehran persona non grata over activities that violated international law and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

In a statement on Tuesday, the ministry said the two French officials had engaged in activities contrary to international law, particularly provisions of the Vienna Convention.

The ministry said that, despite several weeks having passed since the misconduct was uncovered, France had taken no steps to address the diplomats’ actions or provide assurances against similar incidents, prompting Tehran to bar the two from entering the country.

The move follows a diplomatic dispute between Tehran and Paris that escalated in July, when the diplomats were briefly detained in Tehran after Iranian forces discovered them at a secret meeting site while carrying out a judicial order to arrest two suspects in a major case involving foreign infiltration and interference.

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence said the two diplomats had “extensive records of violations and conduct contrary to domestic laws and diplomatic obligations.”

Azizi also referred to the issue of HIV-contaminated blood products supplied by France in the 1980s, another longstanding grievance in Tehran’s relations with Paris.

In 1985, French pharmaceutical company Institut Mérieux supplied blood-clotting products contaminated with HIV to several countries, including Iran. The products were administered to hemophilia and thalassemia patients, many of whom contracted the virus and later died.

Iran recorded its first HIV infections among patients who had received the contaminated French blood products.

August 19, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on Senior Iranian MP warns France over ‘constant betrayals’ after Tehran expels diplomats

Europe’s Looming Winter Preparations Just Got 1.5X Costlier

Sputnik – 18.08.2026

European gas prices during preparations for the heating season in 2026 were 52% higher than the average over the past three years, Sputnik found on Tuesday after analyzing trading data.

Calculations show that from April 1 to August 14, the average settlement price of gas futures based on the TTF index, Europe’s largest hub located in the Netherlands, amounted to $585.3 per thousand cubic meters. This is 41.2% higher than during the same period last year and 52% higher than the average for 2023-2025.
However, in 2022, amid the gas crisis, prices averaged $1,373.7 per thousand cubic meters.

The conflict in the Middle East led to a significant increase in gas prices in Europe. Average exchange prices in March ultimately rose by almost 60% compared with February, exceeding $600 per thousand cubic meters. Prices have remained volatile throughout these months. In July, settlement prices jumped by almost 20% month-on-month, averaging $637.5 per thousand cubic meters.

To prepare for the heating season, Europe is injecting gas into underground storage facilities (UGS). According to the European Commission, UGS facilities play a key role in ensuring the reliability of gas supplies in Europe, allowing the region to cover up to one-third of its needs during winter. However, storage facilities are currently only slightly above 60% full, their lowest level on record.

Against the backdrop of the crisis surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and concerns about disruptions to fuel supplies, the EU decided to lower the required level of gas storage in member states by the beginning of the winter season from 90% to 80%, European Commission representative Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told Sputnik in June. However, Russia’s Gazprom had previously forecast that UGS levels would be below 75% by October 1 if injections continued at the current pace.

August 18, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia, Wars for Israel | | Comments Off on Europe’s Looming Winter Preparations Just Got 1.5X Costlier

Latvia wants EU billions for its anti-Russia policies

RT | August 17, 2026

Latvia wants Brussels to provide billions in additional funding as lost trade with Russia and soaring military spending put growing pressure on the Baltic state’s finances, Politico reported on Monday.

Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs told the outlet that he has asked Brussels to provide €7 billion ($8.2 billion) under the EU’s next seven-year budget, on top of other funding already earmarked for Latvia.

The sum would cover almost half of Riga’s projected €15.1 billion ($17.3 billion) military spending bill for 2028-2034.

Kulbergs said that Latvia is taking on debt to finance what its government views as security spending benefiting the rest of Europe. “We are getting our budget deficit to the maximum,” he told Politico, saying Latvia is borrowing to pay for “the defense of the whole of Europe.”

Latvia has been one of the EU’s strongest advocates of sanctions on Russia and has steadily dismantled trade, transport and energy links with its eastern neighbor since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

The policies, however, have led to a significant economic decline across the region. Politico reported last year that cross-border trade with Russia had “largely collapsed” across the Baltic states, while tourism and investment had also declined, prompting Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to seek additional financial aid from Brussels.

The costs of Riga’s anti-Russian policies have since become a major campaign issue ahead of Latvia’s October 3 parliamentary election. Opposition politician Ainars Slesers has insisted that Riga should demand compensation in return for backing further EU sanctions.

“We are losing money … we are talking about how to support Ukraine, but we are a victim,” he told Politico, adding that economic ties with Russia should eventually be restored.

Despite seeking billions from Brussels to offset the fallout, Kulbergs has called for even tougher measures against Moscow, including a total EU visa ban for Russian citizens and renewed attempts to use frozen Russian sovereign assets for Ukraine.

Russia has long argued that the Baltic states have devastated their own economies by dismantling previously profitable ties while sharply increasing military spending over what their governments describe as a potential threat from Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly denied having plans to attack the Baltic states or other NATO members, dismissing such claims as “nonsense” and Russophobic fearmongering intended to justify inflated military budgets to taxpayers, while warning that European nations are preparing for a full-scale war against Russia.

August 17, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Comments Off on Latvia wants EU billions for its anti-Russia policies

Israel Rejects 15-Point Gaza Deal, Insists on War, Genocide, and Economic Armageddon

By Kevin Barrett | American Free Press | August 15, 2026

No-one has ever accused President Donald Trump of being anti-Israel. Trump has supported Israeli extremism far more than any other US president. In 2017 he moved the US embassy to Occupied Jerusalem, an extreme violation of US policy, international consensus, and international law. He strong-armed regional nations to establish “normal” relations with genocidal Israel, against the wishes of more than 95% of their populations. And he has waged relentless war on Iran on behalf of Israel, setting the stage for the current countdown to global economic catastrophe.

But all of that isn’t enough for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who fancies himself Trump’s boss. On August 9, Netanyahu arrogantly rejected Trump’s 15-point Gaza peace plan, thumbing his nose at Trump himself and the Board of Peace that Trump chairs.

Since the Trump-brokered “ceasefire” of October 10, 2025, Israel has killed 1,258 people in Gaza. Trump has remained silent. But now, the stakes are higher. To end his disastrous war on Iran, Trump needs to comply with the first term of the Memorandum of Understanding that he signed, mandating “permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” by both parties and their allies.

In other words, Israel must cease firing at Palestinians and Lebanese people, or Iran will continue to throttle global supply chains via the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab. If the Americans want to stop the bleeding, they must force Israel to withdraw from Gaza and South Lebanon and stop attacking Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.

To prevent economic Armageddon, Trump needs to compel Israel to withdraw from Gaza in accordance with his 15-point plan. That plan is laid out in stages, with Israeli withdrawal and Hamas disarmament happening simultaneously and in parallel. Hamas will relinquish its heavy equipment and weapons during Israel’s withdrawal, but it is not required to give up the small guns it needs to ensure that its people are not exterminated by ISIS terrorists in the pay of Israel.

Hamas accepted Trump’s peace agreement even though it had to give up its only leverage, its Israeli hostages. But Israel refuses to implement the deal. It continues committing genocide, deliberately slaughtering hundreds of women and children while destroying infrastructure and preventing humanitarian aid from entering.

Before August 9, Israel had pretended to accept Trump’s deal, while muttering curses under its breath. But now it is openly refusing. Israel is telling Trump, and the world economy, to go get stuffed. Retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, explains: “Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come.”

Trump’s Board of Peace Roadmap document states: “Israel shall fully complete, without delay, all remaining commitments.” The Board’s original language, which is still in effect, required Israel’s “full withdrawal” from Gaza, but last week it changed the wording to mere “withdrawal” under pressure from Netanyahu.

But small changes in wording won’t alter the underlying reality. Israel needs to get out of Gaza—and stop killing Palestinian and Lebanese people—or Iran will strangle the world’s economy, maximizing damage to the US and its allies.

Given the stakes, Netanyahu’s willingness to raise his middle finger at the US president is bizarre. Israel is a small country. It is immensely vulnerable to American economic, diplomatic, and military pressure. American taxpayers have been keeping it afloat ever since it metastasized in 1948. It is universally reviled in West Asia, and despised by ever-growing majorities everywhere else.

Netanyahu’s paradise for pedophiles and dog rapists wouldn’t last five days without American taxpayer support. Yet it is prepared to destroy the world economy, and with it the Trump Administration, so it can continue committing genocide and waging wars of aggression.

Trump should exit the Iran war smoothly and painlessly by transferring the pain to Israel. What Iran wants is a new regional order that will prevent further aggression against it. Trump could achieve that, and avoid the humiliation of a complete US withdrawal from the region, by making Israel, not the US, the loser of the war Israel started. How? Simple. Just put all of America’s economic, diplomatic, and (if necessary) military power behind a draconian ultimatum to Tel Aviv: “Withdraw to your pre-1967 borders within the next two weeks, declare those as your permanent borders, and disavow the Greater Israel Project, or face complete obliteration.” A roundup of the Israeli agents who currently infest America’s media and financial sectors, authorized by an executive order declaring Israel’s occupation of the US a national emergency, would drive the point home.

Can Trump force Netanyahu to toe the line? Or will the Israeli prime minister show that he is America’s real boss?

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August 15, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Israel Rejects 15-Point Gaza Deal, Insists on War, Genocide, and Economic Armageddon

JPMorgan says Iran, Oman ‘legally justified’ to charge Hormuz navigation fees

The Cradle | August 14, 2026

US investment bank JPMorgan has suggested that Iran and Oman’s strategy of imposing mandatory “navigational safety” fees to transit the Strait of Hormuz may be legally justified, the Financial Times (FT) reported earlier this month.

JPMorgan explained in a memo that international law grants ships the right of “innocent passage” through territorial waters, making it illegal to charge fees simply for transit (tolls).

However, charging fees for specific navigational and security services may be permissible, the memo argued.

For example, Denmark and Sweden currently levy charges on vessels transiting the Danish Straits. Rather than charging a toll, which would be illegal, they charge for services.

Denmark’s Pilotage Act makes pilotage mandatory for vessels carrying hazardous cargo – such as oil, chemicals, or gases – or more than 5,000 metric tons of bunker oil.

Pilotage refers to the service of guiding a ship or aircraft through hazardous, confined, or coastal waters and local areas using visual landmarks, charts, and specialized local knowledge. The pilotage fees are paid to the Danish Ministry of Business and range from $10,000 to $25,000 per transit for a Balticmax tanker.

Another country operating “a de facto tollbooth” on oil tankers is Turkiye, a US ally and NATO member, JPMorgan wrote.

Turkish authorities have “broad regulatory powers in the Turkish Straits and can charge for services under the 1936 Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits.”

Ankara charges a Suezmax oil tanker approximately $130,000 for a round-trip passage, roughly $0.13 per barrel of crude.

In exchange for the fee, Turkiye provides lighthouses, light, and channel buoys, as well as sanitary control and emergency rescue services.

According to JPMorgan, these precedents indicate that Iran and Oman’s plan to impose mandatory charges for “navigational safety” to transit Hormuz could be legally justified.

In a previous note published in May, the investment bank’s analysts wrote: “By structuring the measure as a service fee rather than a transit toll, and by coordinating with Oman as the other littoral state, Iran could attempt to create a legal framework that appears consistent with international maritime law.”

Amir Handjani of Responsible Statecraft (RS) argues that establishing an Iran–Oman transit authority would benefit commercial shippers.

“Ships get a predictable process instead of IRGC commanders deciding by whim who passes, who doesn’t, and an unpredictable pricing mechanism,” Handjani wrote.

At the same time, US sanctions and restrictive insurance clauses may pose severe compliance issues for international oil and shipping firms seeking to traverse the Strait of Hormuz under such a proposal.

Reuters reported on 6 August that if shipping firms pay service fees to Iran to pass Hormuz, this would trigger US sanctions imposed unilaterally on the Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA).

“Any payment could lead to asset freezes,” Reuters quoted unnamed industry sources as saying.

Major shipping firms have also raised concerns over a clause introduced last month by Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) that terminates vessel insurance if it pays a toll or charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

August 14, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on JPMorgan says Iran, Oman ‘legally justified’ to charge Hormuz navigation fees

US National Debt Grows By Over $500Bln Since Beginning of July

Sputnik -14.08.2026

WASHINGTON – The national debt of the United States has increased by more than $500 billion since July 1 and has come close to a record high of $40 trillion, RIA Novosti calculated based on data from the US Treasury Department.

In early July, that number was $39.389 trillion, by mid-August, the figure reached $39.913 trillion. Thus, the net increase in less than a month and a half amounted to $524.22 billion.

In the first 10 months of the 2026 fiscal year alone, the US government allocated a record $963 billion to service and pay interest on the national debt, RIA Novosti previously found out based on data from the Congressional Budget Office.

In the future, the debt burden will only increase. According to the congressional estimates, the US national debt will continue to grow continuously over the next decade. As early as fiscal year 2027, the figure is expected to exceed $41.3 trillion, the psychological mark of 50 trillion will be reached by 2033, and by fiscal year 2036 it will reach more than $56.2 trillion.

August 14, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | | Comments Off on US National Debt Grows By Over $500Bln Since Beginning of July

The Caspian Sea: America’s New Eurasian Containment Arena

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – August 13, 2026

The Caspian Sea — for thirty years a backwater of great-power politics — has quietly become a battlespace, and most of the world is still treating it as a footnote.

In late July, Iranian officials confirmed that a US strike had damaged the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Seyyed al-Shuhada naval facility in Zibakenar, in Iran’s Caspian province of Gilan — the first time in the current war that Washington has reached into Iran’s Caspian coastline. Days earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Kyiv’s drones had struck several vessels in the Caspian more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian-held territory, including a ship reportedly ferrying military cargo from Iran toward Russia. Iran, however, said one of the vessels hit was carrying iron ore from Astrakhan to the Iranian port of Anzali and summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in protest.

Neither strike, on its own, would rewrite anyone’s map. Together, they are a signal. For the first time, the US and US-backed Ukraine have demonstrated that they have the will and the reach to hit targets on a sea that geography, more than strategy, had long kept insulated from direct confrontation. The Caspian’s basin states — Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan — built an entire diplomatic architecture, including a 2018 legal convention on the sea’s status, around the premise that outside militaries would stay out. That premise no longer holds.

What is emerging is not a contest for territory in the traditional sense. It is a contest over connectivity: over the ports, rail lines, pipelines, and shipping lanes that allow Russia, Iran, and, at one remove, China to function as an integrated economic and strategic space rather than three isolated, sanctioned, or otherwise constrained powers. Call it America’s New Eurasian Containment: a strategy that treats infrastructure, not territory, as the terrain worth contesting.

Severing the Connective Tissue

The clearest evidence of this shift sits not on the Caspian’s water but on its shores, in two projects Washington has spent the past year reshaping.

The first is the International North-South Transport Corridor, a roughly 7,200-kilometer multimodal freight route agreed upon by Russia, Iran, and India in 2000 that links the Indian Ocean, through Iran, across the Caspian, to Russian rail networks and on to Europe. Long stalled by under-investment, the corridor has become a priority for Moscow since 2022, precisely because it offers a way around Western sanctions. Its central artery is the Caspian crossing between the Iranian port of Bandar-e Anzali and the Russian port of Astrakhan. More importantly, it is the same stretch of water where Ukrainian drones struck in July and where Israeli forces had already hit Iranian naval and port assets at Anzali back in March, according to regional shipping trackers. A degraded, contested Caspian corridor is a direct blow to the one overland route that lets Moscow and Tehran trade around US and European sanctions. These attacks are, therefore, not about the US war on Iran; they are about reshaping the very geography of trade passing through the Eurasian landscape.

The second is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP — the transit corridor Washington brokered in August 2025 between Armenia and Azerbaijan, granting a US-led consortium a 99-year lease to build and manage rail, energy, and fiber-optic links through Armenia’s Syunik province. The deal ended a decades-old territorial dispute, but its geopolitical function is narrower and sharper. It places Iran’s only land border with Armenia under American-supervised transit control, cutting off Tehran’s most direct overland access into the South Caucasus and, by extension, into a region Russia has treated as its own backyard since the Soviet collapse. Whatever the deal’s stated humanitarian purpose, it functions as a wedge driven into Eurasian connective tissue.

Neither project was designed with the other in mind. But together with the Caspian strikes, they describe a single logic: deny Russia and Iran the infrastructure that lets their January 2025 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership — a 20-year treaty covering defense, energy, finance, and counterterrorism cooperation — translate into real economic integration rather than a document signed in Moscow. China, meanwhile, watches from the margins. Beijing has no naval presence on the Caspian and is not a party to any of these strikes or corridors, but its own westward trade ambitions run through the same chokepoints, i.e., the Middle Corridor via the South Caucasus, and Iranian ports as a Belt and Road terminus. A Washington-controlled TRIPP and a contested Caspian complicate China’s overland options as a side effect, even if Beijing was never the intended target.

A Frontier Without a Front Line

The danger in this strategy is precisely that it has no clean edges. Containment during the Cold War had defined lines — the Fulda Gap, the Elbe, the 38th parallel — and a doctrine that most parties understood. Infrastructure containment has none of that. A drone strike on a cargo ship, an airstrike on a naval depot, and a 99-year land lease branded with a president’s name: each is individually deniable, incremental, and justifiable in its own narrow terms, even as the cumulative effect reshapes the strategic map of an entire region. That ambiguity is a feature for Washington, which can advance the strategy without ever declaring it. But it is also a source of volatility because affected countries are left to infer intent from actions rather than respond to a stated policy. And, inferences, in a region this armed and this aggrieved, tend toward worst-case assumptions.

The more durable question is what happens once the corridors themselves become targets, not just prizes. Pipelines, rail lines, and undersea cables may now be legitimate objects of great-power coercion. If so, the Caspian will not be the last “peripheral” space pulled into contested geography. The Arctic shipping lanes, the Malacca chokepoint, and the fibre-optic seabed of the Indian Ocean are all candidates for the same treatment. In this environment, the states that thrive will not be the ones with the largest militaries. They will be the ones that make their infrastructure redundant, diversified, and defensible: multiple routes, multiple partners, no single artery whose loss is fatal. Iran and Russia have bet heavily on a small number of chokepoints. Their partnership may keep deepening going forward. But the deeper it goes, the more attacks it will face and endure.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs

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August 13, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on The Caspian Sea: America’s New Eurasian Containment Arena

Putin warns West over ship seizures

RT | August 12, 2026

Russia could seize ships carrying Western cargo in retaliation for similar actions against Russian maritime trade, President Vladimir Putin has warned.

There have been several incidents in recent months in which Western militaries have seized vessels that their governments accused of being part of a so-called Russian ‘shadow fleet’. Putin warned on Wednesday during a meeting with Pacific Fleet commanders that Moscow could take retaliatory measures wherever it deemed necessary.

“Some nations are violating the Law of the Sea by trying to restrict the movement of our civilian traders. They recently came up with the idea of seizing our ships and selling off our plundered property. This is certainly nothing short of piracy and robbery,” Putin said.

“If such a policy is implemented in practice, we will be forced to take mirror responses. And not necessarily in the waters where our ships are being raided. We’ll do it wherever and anywhere we see fit,” he added.

Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Viktor Liina reported in response that the Russian military has detailed information about Western commercial traffic.

“From April 24 to August 6 of 2026, 1,001 ships passed through the Russian exclusive economic zone, including 379 with flags of unfriendly nations,” he said. “That includes 273 general cargo ships and 71 tanks, including 26 under the British flag and nine under the French flag.”

The UK and France have carried out several interdictions of supposed Russian ‘shadow fleet’ vessels. In June, The Telegraph reported that British authorities were considering selling around 100,000 tons of Russian crude seized from a sanctioned tanker and using the proceeds to benefit Ukraine.

The term ‘shadow fleet’ is used by Western governments to describe vessels they accuse of helping Russia circumvent sanctions, particularly the price cap imposed on Russian oil. Moscow rejects the designation, saying it has no basis in international law and violates Russia’s right to conduct maritime trade.

Western governments have targeted hundreds of vessels with unilateral sanctions and have increasingly resorted to physically intercepting and detaining some of them.

Kiev has also broadened its use of the “shadow fleet” label, applying it to various Russian commercial vessels targeted in Ukrainian drone strikes, including tankers and cargo ships.

Notable ‘shadow fleet’ detentions

At least a dozen vessels have been detained by Western nations since last year as part of their campaign targeting Russian trade. The list of incidents includes:

  • In March 2025, Germany seized the tanker Eventin carrying some 100,000 tons of crude. German courts later blocked the government’s attempts to sell the Panama-flagged ship.
  • In April 2025, Estonia detained oil tanker the Kiwala, claiming it had no valid flag. Weeks later the ship was released.
  • An oil tanker going by the names the Pushpa, Kiwala, Boracay, and others was targeted by France in September 2025, but resumed its voyage towards the Suez Canal the next month. Western media claimed it was linked to the mass hysteria over “mystery drone sightings” in Europe.
  • In March 2026, French-backed Belgian forces boarded the oil tanker Ethera. It reportedly remains impounded under a €10 million ($11.6 million) bail.
  • Sweden seized the cargo ship Caffa in March 2026 for allegedly carrying “stolen Ukrainian grain.” Earlier this month the country’s top court agreed to the government’s request to transfer the ship to Ukraine.
  • British forces for the first time directly seized a ‘shadow fleet’ ship in June, 2026, when they targeted the oil tanker Smyrtos. Previously, the UK only provided assistance to France for such operations. The ship’s Indian master, Ajay Pant, remains in British custody pending a criminal trial for violating the UK’s anti-Russian measures.

August 12, 2026 Posted by | Economics, War Crimes | , , , | Comments Off on Putin warns West over ship seizures

Russia’s lockdown of Odessa ports could be a grim turning point in war

By George Beebe | Responsible Statecraft | August 11, 2026

Over the course of a few short weeks, a grim new reality has taken shape in Ukraine.

Russia has shown that it need not conquer and occupy Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coastline to turn that country into the equivalent of a landlocked state. It need only deny access to Ukraine’s critically important Odessa port complex, something it is doing quite effectively through air and missile strikes on port facilities and approaching ships.

That reality will probably not amount to a knock-out blow in the ongoing war. But it is likely to have a profound impact on Ukraine’s already gloomy post-war prospects — and, by extension, on the contours of a new European security landscape in the current conflict’s aftermath.

Only a handful of months ago, Russia was conducting few military operations against Odessa. Early in the war, attacks by Russia and Ukraine on merchant shipping in the Black Sea had threatened to choke off agricultural exports vital to world markets. Under pressure from India and other key partners in the Global South, Moscow agreed to the so-called “Grain Deal” with Ukraine, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, to allow unimpeded commercial exports from the region.

For some four years thereafter, the Odessa port system remained open to Ukrainian imports and exports, handling some 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural trade. Russian hardliners bristled at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to attack Ukraine’s vital but vulnerable port, grumbling that Putin seemed more interested in avoiding rifts with Global South states than defeating Ukraine.

Several factors have combined to change this picture. One was the evident failure of the West’s campaign to turn Russia into a pariah state, a brainchild of the Biden administration that had magnified the importance of the Global South to Moscow as a means of avoiding international isolation. A second has been the depletion of Ukrainian air defense interceptors, which has left Odessa largely defenseless against Russian ballistic missiles and allowed bomb-carrying aircraft to operate in closer proximity to the port complex, increasing the accuracy and destructiveness of Russian air strikes.

Ironically enough, perhaps the most important factor was Ukraine’s own “40-day influence campaign” announced in late June, which included long- and medium-range drone strikes on energy infrastructure in Russia and merchant shipping in the Sea of Azov. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the campaign was aimed at “influencing the aggressor state in order to compel it to end the war.” President Trump described it more plainly as an “escalation that we hope will lead to peace.”

In practice, however, the escalation allowed Russia to deflect Global South criticism for violating terms of the Grain Deal by arguing it was Ukraine that had kicked off the recent cycle of shipping and port attacks.

The near-term effects have been disturbingly clear. Since July 22, the Russian military has effectively closed the Ukrainian port complex in and around Odessa to all shipping. The loss of its remaining deep-water ports is already having a devastating effect on Ukraine’s agricultural exports — the backbone of its economy — which officials warn may plummet by 50% in the coming months because alternative land, rail, and river routes have much less capacity and are much more costly.

The damage to Ukraine’s economy probably will be manageable in the near term so long as Europe steps up its flow of aid. But the impact of Odessa’s closure on Ukraine’s post-war prospects may prove to be much more profound.

It has long been assumed in both Washington and Europe that the main alternative to a compromise settlement of the Russia-Ukraine war is the transformation of Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” The concept envisions a heavily armed and fortified Ukraine that can serve as a barrier to further Russian aggression and allow the hot war to settle into a stable, frozen conflict.

Proponents of this vision dismiss prospective “land for peace” deals with Moscow and oppose any quantitative or qualitative limitations on Ukraine’s military — points that Russian officials say are essential to any peace deal — arguing that such concessions would “reward Russian aggression” and prevent Ukraine from becoming an Eastern European variant of Israel, a “Major Non-NATO Ally” that punches well above its weight-class in regional affairs and serves as a keystone of broader European defense plans.

However, if Russia can use air and missile attacks to deny Ukraine the use of its port facilities, it can also prevent Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and economic revitalization. Just as merchant ships will not risk Russian attacks to enter Odessa, construction firms are unlikely to risk Russian airstrikes in attempting to build or repair bridges, roads, factories, ports, and other vital infrastructure. Nor will investors risk hundreds of billions of dollars if Russian missiles and bombs can destroy any Ukrainian reconstruction project in a matter of hours.

Without large-scale economic reconstruction and the jobs and stability that would follow, few of the millions of Ukrainians who fled the war (most for Europe but many for Russia) will return. Absent mass repatriation, Ukraine is likely to enter a demographic death-spiral. By Ukrainian officials’ own admission, a population that approached 52 million people when the Soviet Union broke up now stands at between 22 and 25 million people, and nearly half of them are retirees.

According to one estimate, Ukraine’s working age population – the backbone of both its civilian economy and its military — could lose an additional third by 2040. The number of children, the embodiment of Ukraine’s future, could decline to half its pre-war level.

This raises an obvious but under-discussed question: How can an aging and dying Ukrainian population, lacking a strong economic base, serve as a “new Sparta” countering a nuclear-armed Russia that is seven times its size?

The closure of Odessa should highlight two salient points for Western leaders. First, neither Ukraine nor the West can eliminate the threat of Russian air and missile strikes through military means alone. Second, Russia will have strong reason to continue them, even after it eventually halts large-scale ground operations, if the Kremlin worries that the West will otherwise turn Ukraine into a safe haven for threatening Russian security.

As a result, the alternative to an uncomfortable compromise settlement of the war will not be a steel Ukrainian porcupine. It will be a weak and dysfunctional rump state that ill-serves Ukrainians and undermines Europe’s broader security.

George Beebe is the Director of Grand Strategy for the Quincy Institute. He spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. He is the author of “The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe” (2019).

August 11, 2026 Posted by | Economics | , | Comments Off on Russia’s lockdown of Odessa ports could be a grim turning point in war

Scott Bessent’s Delusional Oil Pipe Dream to Defeat Iran

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | August 10, 2026 

When U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer this weekend that the Strait of Hormuz would “become irrelevant” within two years — with more than half the energy now crossing it rerouted through underground pipelines — he was indulging a pipe dream. Bessent fails to grasp that Iran’s ability to use the Strait of Hormuz as geopolitical leverage is not going to vanish if the Gulf arabs quickly build oil pipelines. It is true that capital hates chokepoints, and Gulf producers are indeed racing to build around one. Saudi Arabia is expanding its East-West Petroline, the UAE has leaned harder on its Fujairah bypass, and Iraq is dusting off long-dormant overland export corridors. Chevron is even studying a revived Haditha–Baniyas line from Iraq to the Syrian Mediterranean.

Although Bessent ‘s oil pipeline proposal sounded like a nifty way to neuter Iran, he fails to grasp the true economic importance of the Persian Gulf and the leverage that Iran will continue to have for years to come. Bessent’s framing treats Hormuz as an oil problem, and a pipeline network — however ambitious — solves an oil problem. But Hormuz is not merely the world’s most important oil chokepoint. It is the sole maritime exit for a cluster of specialized commodities that cannot be pumped through a pipe, cannot be quickly re-sourced elsewhere, and whose disruption is already inflicting measurable economic damage across food, semiconductors, and heavy industry. Building a crude bypass and declaring the strait “irrelevant” mistakes one throughput for all of them.

The evidence for that is not hypothetical. It is the record of the past five months.

The oil bypass math is already the easy part — and it still doesn’t close

Start with the commodity the pipelines are meant to address. Even here the substitution is incomplete. Roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude, condensate, and products normally transit Hormuz — about a fifth of global petroleum consumption. Existing bypass capacity totals somewhere around 4.7 million barrels per day. Closing that gap requires not one flagship pipeline but an entire redundant network, built through active or recently active conflict zones, over a period of years. Bessent’s own two-year horizon is optimistic against that backdrop, and it is the most favorable case, because crude is the one Hormuz cargo that pipelines are actually designed to carry.

Everything else produced in the Gulf are not cargo that can be carried by a pipeline, and these are critically important to the global economy.

LNG: No pipe runs from Ras Laffan to Tokyo

About a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade moves through Hormuz, overwhelmingly from Qatar, the second-largest LNG exporter on earth. When Iranian strikes damaged Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex — the single largest LNG export facility in the world — and QatarEnergy declared force majeure in early March, roughly 10 billion cubic feet per day of supply, about 20% of globally traded LNG, went offline. Kpler tanker data showed no laden LNG vessel crossing the strait for nearly two months.

The consequences landed fast and far from the Gulf. The World Bank’s natural gas price index jumped 24% in a single month. Europe’s benchmark is now projected to climb roughly 25% across 2026, because LNG frequently sets the marginal price there; Asia, which takes the overwhelming majority of Qatari cargoes, was hit hardest as buyers scrambled to replace contracted deliveries on the spot market.

Here is the part a pipeline cannot fix: LNG has no overland route out of Qatar. Liquefied gas is a seaborne product by definition — you liquefy it precisely because you cannot pipe it across oceans to Japan, South Korea, or India. And the one producer large enough to plug the gap, the United States, cannot. New American liquefaction terminals take years and billions to build; the EIA expected U.S. exports to rise by only a small fraction of the missing Qatari volumes, with meaningful new capacity trickling in through late 2026 at best. A crude bypass does nothing for the LNG buyer in Osaka. There is no bypass to build.

Urea and ammonia: the fertilizer shock that reaches every farm

The Gulf is not just an energy hub. It is one of the planet’s great fertilizer factories, and Hormuz is how those fertilizers reach the fields that depend on them. The Middle East supplies close to a quarter of global urea exports; by some measures roughly a third of world seaborne fertilizer trade was put at risk when the strait closed. Iran halted ammonia production; Qatar suspended urea, ammonia, and sulphur output after the Ras Laffan damage.

The price response was violent. Urea climbed above $850 per metric ton in April — up around 80% from February and the highest level since 2022. World urea prices roughly doubled at the peak. Ammonia jumped nearly 40% in weeks, and about 24% of all global ammonia trade normally passes through Hormuz. Fitch raised its 2026 ammonia and urea forecasts by around a quarter and warned nitrogen fertilizers would be the hardest hit of any product category.

And unlike a price chart, the downstream damage compounds. India — which sources roughly 80% of its ammonia from the Gulf — saw ammonia-based domestic production stall and lost hundreds of thousands of tons of monthly urea output as industrial gas was rationed. American farmers absorbed the shock at the worst possible moment, entering spring planting with fertilizer costs spiking and diesel above $5 a gallon. Because natural gas is around 80% of the cost of nitrogen fertilizer, the LNG disruption and the fertilizer disruption feed each other — a second-order effect no crude pipeline touches. When fertilizer gets scarce and expensive, the eventual bill is measured in crop yields and food prices, in countries that never bought a barrel of Gulf oil.

Sulphur and DAP: the quiet input behind the phosphate chain

Sulphur rarely makes headlines, which is exactly why its disruption is instructive. It is a byproduct of Gulf gas processing and a critical input for phosphate fertilizers and countless industrial processes. With Qatari sulphur output suspended and regional supply choked, prices roughly doubled since the start of the year. That fed straight into diammonium phosphate (DAP): DAP prices rose more than 10% in April on tightening supply and higher sulphur costs, compounded by China moving to restrict its own exports — China relies on the Middle East for roughly half its sulphur imports.

This is the pattern worth noticing. Hormuz disruption does not produce one clean shortage; it produces a cascade through interlinked chemistry — gas into ammonia, ammonia and sulphur into finished fertilizer, export bans stacked on top of physical shortfalls. A pipeline that moves crude oil intersects none of these chains.

Helium: the commodity with no substitute and no alternative exit

Helium is the sharpest illustration of Bessent’s blind spot, because for helium the pipeline argument does not merely fall short — it is categorically inapplicable.

Qatar supplies roughly a third of the world’s helium, extracted as a byproduct co-located with LNG processing at Ras Laffan. The March strikes and the strait’s closure took an estimated 30% of global helium production offline, with damage assessments suggesting some infrastructure could take years — not weeks — to fully restore. US distributors invoked force majeure, began rationing, prioritized healthcare customers, and layered on surcharges; spot prices spiked.

Helium cannot be synthesized. It is a finite, non-renewable gas with no substitute in its critical uses: semiconductor fabrication, advanced chip packaging, MRI machines, and the sealed interior of every high-capacity hard drive at a moment when AI-driven data-center demand is surging. Seagate and Western Digital reported full-year allocations and 20–30% price increases; South Korean chipmakers were reported to be running on roughly six months of inventory.

And every gram of Qatari helium leaves the country the same way: by ship, through Hormuz. There is no pipeline alternative, no overland route, no bypass — helium’s only exit from the world’s second-largest production hub is that one 33-kilometer-wide waterway. A network of crude pipelines could be completed tomorrow and it would not move a single liter of helium to a chip fab in Taiwan.

Why the framing matters

None of this means the bypass pipelines are a bad idea. Reducing the world’s dependence on a single crude chokepoint is prudent, and market-driven redundancy is exactly what one would want. Bessent is right that capital routes around risk, and that Tehran has accelerated its own strategic marginalization by weaponizing the strait.

But the claim that “the Strait of Hormuz will become irrelevant” is grossly misleading. The waterway’s true strategic weight comes from its role as the shared export gate for a bundle of commodities — LNG, urea, ammonia, sulphur, helium — that are seaborne by physics, concentrated in a handful of Gulf facilities, and impossible to re-source at speed. Each has been disrupted in the real world over the past five months, and each disruption has produced price shocks and downstream damage that a crude pipeline is powerless to prevent.

The current market underlines the point. As of early August, Brent was trading in the mid-$80s and climbing on Hormuz headlines, with a war-risk premium that has refused to deflate through months of on-again, off-again negotiation — the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drawn down to its lowest level since the 1980s in the process. That premium reflects traders pricing the whole basket of what the strait carries, not just its barrels of crude. Until there is a plan for the LNG tanker, the ammonia cargo, the sulphur shipment, and the helium flask — none of which fits in a pipeline — Hormuz will remain very far from irrelevant.

A pipeline can carry crude. It cannot carry the rest of what Hormuz moves. And it is the rest that is quietly reshaping the global economy right now.

Video interviews

August 11, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on Scott Bessent’s Delusional Oil Pipe Dream to Defeat Iran

US military pressure forcing Hormuz closure – Iran

Washington must cease its strong-arm tactics before shipping can resume through the key waterway, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran has said

RT | August 10, 2026

The Strait of Hormuz cannot be reopened through diplomacy while Washington continues to use military pressure against Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has said.

Iran closed Hormuz in response to a US-Israeli military campaign launched in late February. Washington subsequently imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, escalating a standoff over a strategic waterway that has historically carried around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on Monday that diplomacy is “certainly” part of the “struggle to safeguard our national interests,” but added that “when dealing with a side that insists on the use of force, a maritime blockade is not a diplomatic action that we can lift through diplomacy.”

“Certainly, you have to use authority and military power, along with diplomacy, to prevent the United States’ aggression, and that is what is being done,” Baghaei told a press briefing.

Tehran has set out a series of conditions for reopening the strait, including compensation for war damage, the lifting of sanctions, and the release of frozen Iranian funds, as well as a permanent end to hostilities against Iran and its regional allies.

The IRGC has also said that reopening Hormuz will depend on Washington fully accepting Tehran’s conditions.

US President Donald Trump said that Washington was in no rush to reach an agreement, telling Axios that Washington was “low-keying” negotiations while allowing economic pressure on Tehran to build.

“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump said, adding “It’s like a chess game.”

The talks follow weeks of disagreement over a 14-point memorandum of understanding that established a temporary ceasefire and provided for the gradual lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the restoration of commercial traffic through Hormuz. Fighting resumed last month after the sides failed to agree on how the deal should be implemented.

Iran and Oman, meanwhile, are discussing arrangements for future shipping through the strait, although Tehran has stressed that any agreement with Muscat would not in itself mean the waterway would reopen.

The disruption to traffic through Hormuz has put sustained pressure on global energy markets. Oil prices rose nearly 3% on Monday amid uncertainty over negotiations, with international benchmark Brent reaching $85 a barrel and US WTI hitting $80.

August 10, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on US military pressure forcing Hormuz closure – Iran

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